IWONA WOJNAROWICZ: Popular culture – everyone thinks they know perfectly well what it is, but the whole idea still seems to be unclear.

MIROSŁAW FILICIAK: There are many definitions of popular culture. I prefer the one based on British cultural studies, which perceives popular culture as all bottom-up, daily ‘uses’ of culture. Of course, even this perspective, just like all others, has its problems. In today’s world, what is bottom-up and what is top-down? The internet, especially Web 2.0, has complicated the scene. But there is no doubt that trying to draw a rigid line between high culture and popular culture makes no sense now. We need to understand that when speaking about culture in terms of its high and low variants we reinforce certain divisions, a certain distance. At the same time, now that the influence of postmodernism on the academia is dwindling, we are more and more often returning to judgements and we are slightly less afraid of saying that something is good or bad.

 

KATARZYNA WINCENCIAK: You are an advocate of popular culture. Is it because it has a bigger influence on our society than high culture?

I do not think that popular culture needs any advocate today. Also, there is no need to maintain the division between high and low. What we need is to change the judgement system. I think that artists can still play the role of a certain avant-garde, they can explore new areas and problems, sometimes introducing them into a wider debate. But I am more interested in popular, mass phenomena. I prefer to talk about the blurring of borders than to reverse the judgement system and claim that high culture has no meaning anymore while popular culture is the air we breathe. There are many contexts to be factored in. Art functions in a certain niche; it may be connected with other areas, but it is still a niche. This is why for me as a scholar it is less interesting, but I would not play down its role only for this reason.

 

IW: In many of your statements, you say that popular culture and the culture of participation are actually the same thing, even though before, the understanding popular culture was more often reduced to passive reception. This approach is currently changing. In your opinion, what does the culture of participation mean today?

The audience is always active, but this activity takes on various forms. Usually it just refers to creating meanings. Today, it is much easier to develop this activity by creating and publishing your own content. But the fact that this option exists does not yet mean that it is widely used. The culture of participation, we need to underline, is a Utopian concept, a certain fantasy that started with Henry Jenkins’s work. He concluded that networked digital media changed the relationships within culture. In other words, the culture of participation is a certain vision based on the appreciation of popular culture and connecting it with digital media to show that together they can assume an emancipative character. Consumers can now create, process and take action on the textual level, while later on this may translate into other activities, civil for instance. But to my mind the participants of culture are still for the most part consumers and technology will not be able to change this. Perhaps in order to trace the crucial elements of change we should look elsewhere, not just into creativity. This is what we wanted to learn by launching the Circulation of Culture project.

 

KW: You say that people do not use this opportunity, but on the other hand we are noticing a growing danger arising from the increasing clutter in cyberspace. Maybe introducing an expert institution to manage our activity on the web would be a good idea?

One of our biggest problems today springs from the culture of excess. It is easy to create, easy to distribute and easy to redistribute. The traditional filtering institutions have lost their power now that we are able to access certain contents on our own. On one hand, it helps enrich the offer, but on the other hand it complicates our ‘media hygiene’ and makes us succumb to ‘cultural ADHD’. I think that the canon has fallen apart and the role of experts has decreased. Filtering contents is the biggest challenge today. Therefore, expert institutions still have a role to play, subject to the condition though that their recommendations are based on some intellectual grounds and not just on institutional blessing.

 

KW: In order to avoid such a situation, you recommend introducing media education. What should it look like?

I think a shift in our way of thinking is fundamental. It is important to provide people with a certain cultural capital, aspirations, a sense that it is good to learn, grow and create. Not that we need to go crazy and succumb to the dictates of technology. Recently I went to a media education conference, where I learnt that a large percentage of teachers did not have  their own blogs. A gigantic proportion do not keep internet class registers. The general commentary was something like ‘there is still such a lot to do’. But it does not mean that I think that all teachers need to have their own blogs and use computers to be good teachers. Actually, computers and electronics are the least important. What is valuable is a critical attitude towards life in which we are not merely consumers; we want to see what hides underneath the surface, we want to explore, dismantle, process. We need to find a way to instil such skills and, more importantly, aspirations in people who do not find this critical attitude at home. We still do not know how to do this but we did try to tackle this problem by popularising the Media Lab in Poland.

 

IW: The Media Lab idea as such seems very inspiring, but without at least basic skills in critical thinking it is very hard to implement.

The optimal solution, implemented for instance in media education classes in the UK, is to actively create media content. Media Labs are interesting as an institution or an idea for an institution situated at the intersection of educational, activist and artistic projects. Media Labs can be exciting, you can also say that as an institution they will help create innovations that will then be picked up and acquired by companies that trade in such solutions. On the other hand, there are some Media Labs, mostly Spanish, that take it as their basic principle to reject business support and only use public funding or try to keep their costs at a minimum level by working with local communities. Media Labs in Barcelona try to adapt network co-operation models, for instance partner-based production, to the requirements of the reality outside digital media.

However, when we organised media lab camps, we often had to struggle with a certain gap in education. We still function between two different cultures: the humanist culture and the computer culture. To a certain extent, the Media Lab focuses on both of these levels, on learning from both perspective and neutralising this rigid division that, in today’s world, is extremely toxic and restraining. Of course there were other complicated issues, such as, for instance, how to change Media Labs into something more than an exclusive organisations geared towards young people with a good education.

 

KW: Does Media Lab have to be an institution or could it be a completely ephemeral, virtual space, without any defined status?

You could say that the Media Lab is an institution because it is one of the possible answers to the crisis of traditional cultural institutions. The web has put all rigidly formalised entities in a very difficult position. In order to survive, they need to open up towards the new. In Poland there are no institutionalised Media Labs. We have several media-lab circles and several non-virtual places where we meet. We are in between stages; it is good to have some institutional background to be able to function, but on the other hand too much formality can curb the creative energy. There is no definitive answer to this problem; you just need to try. Media labs should be set up by cultural institutions, there should be media labs financed by business ventures, some media labs could spring from grassroots initiatives of hackerspaces. Just because one formula succeeded in a certain context does not mean that everyone now has to follow suit.

 

IW: One of the biggest challenges faced by traditional cultural institutions is the need to establish new, risky relationships with entities whose importance has so far been underappreciated. Now, their role is increasing and will certainly increase even more. Open GLAM is a perfect example of this process.

The GLAM-WIKI project meets the contemporary expectations of cultural institutions and audiences. The British Museum’s co-operation with Wikipedia was one of its pilot initiatives. The idea was simple: museums came to the conclusion that since web users mostly read about their collections on Wikipedia, than instead of desperately trying to attract them to the gallery it may be more reasonable to look after the quality of Wikipedia articles. GLAM-WIKI was born when Wikipedia writers and representatives of free culture started co-operating with institutions. This project if foolproof if we look at it from the perspective of one of the basic duties of any cultural institutions, which consists in promoting culture. Unfortunately however, the picture is less simple when we interpret culture as an economic resource, and this is the way in which any publicly financed institution needs to approach its activity. The whole issue lies in proving that even today, in the neocapitalist universe, you can build models that will bring results and that institutions that make their collections available online do not need to lose revenues. Who knows, they may even gain profits. I think there is no alternative. If cultural institutions want to avoid complete marginalisation, they should start looking for new models and, for instance, make at least a part of their collections available under Creative Commons licenses, the less strict, the better. The best way would be to use a Wikipedia-compatible formula. And then they should try to monitor the results.

 

IW: Contrary to what some may think, institutions that publish digital images of selected works do not incur any financial losses.

Actually it depends. We know for sure that such actions may increase profits. More importantly, they usually do not cause any losses. The key lies in our assessment criteria. As a perfect business plan and idea for financial independence, it will not work. What counts is that we initiate certain social processes and improve the quality of our collections. For instance when we publish certain materials under the Creative Commons license, Wikipedia writers can access them and create their own content for the benefit of the institution. And they will do it free of charge. I know some institutions that opened their collections and got them described in several languages by Wikipedia writers.

IW: However, publishing such contents can prove problematic. Is not the whole Creative Commons idea, ingenious and legitimate as it may be, a little Utopian?

It is Utopian if thinking about culture as more than a commodity is also Utopian. I do understand the heads of cultural institutions that are afraid to open their collections. They operate in a system that usually tries to look for ways to reduce financing and is not that interested in how many people the institution was able to involve in cataloguing the collections for instance. But there are numerous proofs that free licenses function well. Sometimes they are even criticised for not being radical enough and adjusting to the system, while they should be fighting against it.

 

Miroslaw Filiciak (born 1976) – media scholar, works at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. Studies the ways in which networked digital technologies affect culture. Editor of ‘Kultura Popularna’, a quarterly, and co-founder of the Culture 2.0 project. Research manager in ‘The Young and the Media’ and ‘Circulation of Culture’ projects.