Cloud Culture: The future of global cultural relations

As cloud computing has caught its attention, the implications and the ideas around the emerging concept of distributed, virtual, powerful means to share and publish, has been examined further by the British Council commissioned Charles Leadbeater in his report Cloud Culture: the future of global cultural relations. He shed light on the cultural implications of "cloud computing"- the network of global relations.

He summarizes the report accordingly:

The internet, our relationship with it, and our culture is about to undergo a change as profound and unsettling as the development of Web 2.0 in the last decade, which saw Google and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter become mass, world-wide phenomena. Over the next ten years, the rise of cloud computing will not only accelerate the global battle for control of the digital landscape, but will almost certainly recast the very ways in which we exercise our creativity and forge relationships across the world’s cultures. Yet even in its infancy, the extraordinary potential of cloud culture is threatened on all sides – by vested interests, new monopolists and governments, all intent on reasserting their authority over the web.
In this ground-breaking report, Charles Leadbeater argues that we are faced with the greatest challenge of our time: the clash of cloud culture and cloud capitalism. Who will own the cloud? How can we keep it open and reap its vast benefits? And how can it empower the world’s poorest people?

The distributed powerful tool enacts across roles and normative power frames, and are shaping and will continue to shape a the culture of how we see the world and how we relate. This will shape the way we organise and exercice power. The more we see that the Internet is influencing our way of life, the more concerns and threats are seen to emerge with it. Leadbeater put forward the Governmental concerns of the cloud computing and its influence (rather comic to see how the stereotypic nationality shines through;) seeing them as threats to national culture (the French response); threats to security (the Chinese response) or threats to competition (the response of the US department of justice).