Why do so many people use the internet to harass and threaten people, and stretch the freedom of speech to its limits? Director Kyrre Lien meets a group of strongly opinionated individuals all across the world, who spend their time debating online on the subjects they care most strongly about. They feel like warriors for their own personal causes, often feeling left behind by offline society, feeling like they are the ones who have all the right answers. Online platforms are their favourite tools to express the opinions that others might find objectionable in language that often offends. Do they behave in the same way when they come offline?
London’s Institute of Contemporary Art adopted the new .Art suffix last week, a sign that the art and culture business may at last be starting to come to terms with its future in the digital realm. The hip arts organisation ditched its fusty ica.org.uk web domain for the more streamlined and descriptive ica.art. The move may soon be followed at other prestigious art institutions around the world, the ICA says, including the Tate in London, Guggenheim in New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and Lacma in Los Angeles.
The ICA director, Stefan Kalmár, said the change of web address was not only logical but underlined the ICA’s position as an institution “that has always thought globally and opposes the current re-emerging of nationalism in the UK and elsewhere”.
Five years ago, the body in charge of names on the internet, ICANN, swept away regulations and opened up a new world of additional web address suffixes, or top-level domains, including .art.
For more than three thousand years, the Iñupiat people of Alaska have passed on stories to their children. Like all enduring fiction, the stories deliver truths that transcend cultural shifts. They act as seeds of moral instruction and help to define and preserve the community’s identity. The story of Kunuuksaayuka, for example, is a simple tale of how our actions affect others: a boy named Kunuuksaayuka goes on a journey to identify the source of a savage blizzard. In the calm eye of the storm, he finds a man heaving shovelfuls of snow into the air, oblivious that they gather and grow into the squalls battering Kunuuksaayuka’s home downstream.
The Iñupiat’s oral tradition, however, is at risk. Over the past few decades, advances in technology and communication have opened up the community to a flood of other stories delivered in new ways. “As is common for indigenous peoples who are also part of a modern nation, it’s been increasingly difficult to maintain our traditions and cultural heritage,” Amy Fredeen, the C.F.O. of E-Line Media, a publisher of educational video games, and of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council (C.I.T.C.), a nonprofit group that serves the Iñupiat and other Alaska Natives, said. “Our people have passed down knowledge and wisdom through stories for thousands of years—almost all of this orally—and storytellers are incredibly respected members of society. But as our society modernizes it’s become harder to keep these traditions alive.”
For the C.I.T.C., the challenge was to find a way to preserve the community’s stories in a way that could withstand modernity. As the team pondered the problem over lunch a few years ago, the council’s C.E.O., Gloria O’Neill, suggested a video game. O’Neill had been looking at examples of indigenous communities expressing their heritage through modern forms—such as the film “Whale Rider,” which explores gender roles in Maori culture—and was considering whether the medium could help to preserve the Iñupiat’s cultural heritage. “We all agreed that, if done well, a video game had the best chance of connecting Native youth with their cultural heritage,” Fredeen said.
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