“A new cultural economy” was the title of the symposium curated by Joichi Ito at Ars Electronica a week ago. I enjoyed a lot the brillant speakers most of them from the US and Jonah did write a good abstract on the presentations for Rhizome.

Buzz word collection: Intellectual property, copyright, creative commons, sience commons, GPL, open source, closed, amateur, creativity, remixing, sharing, crowd sourcing/computing, citizen journalism, lost authority, chaos, noise, truth, fear ….. and again and again the big examples: Music, Film and Wikipedia.

Sure we are talking about cultural economy and the example of the music economy development in last decade or the success of Wikipedia shows very well what’s going on. But in retrospective I ‘ve been missing some crucial questions:

– How will/can this whole development affect economy in general?
– What is the role of DIY (Do it yourself) and the free instructions culture development?
– In wich way will physical objcts/products be involved? (Just think of the upcoming rapid prototyping era.)
– Are we only talking about cultural/intellectual property?
– Is there a reason to wait for companies to come up with great new products like a green car, alternative energy sources or just day to day life simplicity?
– Where is the DIY mobile medicin prototyping lab kit for the 3rd world? And will medical industry do the same faults like spoiled music people?

Podcasts of all talks
Unfortunately there are no videos, but I can recommend the talk of Yochai Benkler.

Picture:
Watering cans on a graveyard in Berlin. Instead of having a few public cans everybody has its own one looked to a stand. A very good symbol on a current mindset of property in society. (with a maybe typical german twist.)