roundtable: Nonprofit Culture

roundtable: Nonprofit Culture

Nonprofit Culture

Gary O. Larson (glarson@tmn.com)
Tue, 22 Mar 94 01:56:57 EST 

Date: Tue, 22 Mar 94 01:56:57 EST
From: glarson@tmn.com (Gary O. Larson)
Message-Id: <9403220656.AA21165@tmn.com>
To: roundtable@cni.org
Subject: Nonprofit Culture


Jane Sebby, on 3/17/94:
 >
 >I too like the idea of setting aside space for "non-profits" but
 >there are a couple of big problems:  1) who is going to pay for the
 >establishment of these bands, channels, widths, etc. and 2) where's
 >the programming, info, etc. coming from?

Jane Sebby raises two key questions concerning the prospects for a
noncommercial renaissance on the information superhighway:  (1) Who's 
going to pay the piper?  and (2) Where are we going to find all those 
pipers, anyway??  These questions assume, of course, that we've managed 
to answer affirmatively the more basic question that I originally 
attempted to pose in this thread: will there even be a place for 
nonprofit culture in the NII sweepstakes?  I think the jury--or maybe 
it's the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation--is 
still out on that one, but Sebby's questions are important ones 
nevertheless.

One of the problems we have in attempting to imagine the ultimate 
shape of the NII is our vocabulary, which often has more to do with 
the past than with the future.  Thus we envision an expanded cable 
system (and figure that with 500 channels, there must be _something_ 
on).  Or we call for a noncommercial set-aside (resurrecting the FCC's 
belated response to the Communications Act of 1934, when it reserved 
20% of the FM spectrum for noncommercial, educational broadcast 
purposes in 1945).  Alternatively, we view the future through 
UNIX-tinted lenses, imagining that middle America will one day come 
to embrace a system as complicated as the Internet, which, even with 
all of its riches, is scarcely going to make a run at Bevis and Larry 
King.

Anyway, it's easy for me to find fault with such visions; I don't
understand the _present_ well enough even to begin to predict the
technological future.  I simply sense that some of our forecasts 
might be a little off-kilter.

And so it is with our efforts to figure out ways to pay the piper: 
the past just might not be prologue after all.  Certainly we cannot 
hope to continue the pace we've enjoyed in the arts (if "enjoyed" is 
the right word), either in terms of institutionalizing the pipers or 
financing those institutions. Consider the former:  Over the past three 
decades, the number of professional, nonprofit dance companies has grown 
from 37 to over 250, major orchestras (i.e., with budgets in excess of 
$280,000) from 58 to 230, theater companies from 56 to over 400, opera 
companies from 27 to over 100.  I don't have similar figures for small 
presses and literary magazines, media arts centers, or museums, but it's 
safe to assume that they've experienced a similar growth pattern--thanks 
largely to a phenomenal expansion of philanthropic support, which grew 
nearly tenfold between 1970 and 1987, from $660 million to $6.41 billion.

It's also safe to assume that this growth rate cannot continue, that 
arts organizations (partially in response to the increased competition 
for funds, partially in response to changing demographics, and partially 
in response to the changing communications landscape around them) will 
operate in a fundamentally different manner in the next century.  Many 
of these organizations, it seems likely, will turn to electronic means of 
distribution, if not of their actual "product" (in the case of dance 
companies, orchestras, and museums, for example), then surely in terms 
of information about that product (as CalPerformances now does on the 
UCBerkeley gopher) or ancillary documentation (as the Smithsonian is 
attempting to do on AOL).  From Jane Stebby's public television 
perspective, it's true, a lot of the material won't resemble "Live from 
Lincoln Center" (it'll be a lot closer to "Alive from Off Center," in 
fact), but the feared shortage of programming might be another artifact 
of our time-bound perspective:  because the arts generally don't show up 
on little TV today, there won't be nearly enough to supply big TV 
tomorrow. But in the absence of the broadcast network gatekeepers and 
the cable TV bottlenecks, there might, in fact, turn out to be an 
abundance of new alternative material.  I'm sure our friends from the 
nonprofit media community (the National Alliance for Media Arts and 
Culture or the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers) could 
speak volumes about the vast archives their constituents have compiled 
over the years, lacking only an outlet like a properly designed and 
regulated NII might one day provide.

And how will we pay for all of these cultural riches?  Federal arts 
funding has been static (and generally unimaginatively doled out) for 
years now, but private arts patronage (often equally unimaginative, 
it's true) remains near $7 billion.  And it's only a matter of time 
before the largest of these funders (ever on the lookout for 
overarching themes to fund into submission) discover the democratic 
potential of the new digital delivery system.  But even that might 
not be enough.  We might also have to cross that _other_ bridge, not 
nearly so democratic, but a potential windfall neveretheless--taxing 
the commercial programmers to pay for the nonprofit providers.

Gary O. Larson
Arts Wire
glarson@tmn.com

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