DIGITAL L.A. : CAN CULTURES SURVIVE IN OUR WIRED WORLD?

Byline: David Bloom 

One hundred years ago, the dealers who sold Edison phonographs gathered to talk about how to sell more record players. Their customers were businesses, they thought, who would send the wax recording cylinders back and forth in the first-ever voice mail.

Little did those dealers realize how radically differently their machines would ultimately come to be used. Rather than compete with the typewriter, their machine transformed popular music into an international business.

And with that transformation came other unexpected transformations.

The local tenor, for instance, suddenly had to compete against recordings of the great Enrico Caruso. For the local boy, it became an overwhelming challenge. For Caruso, it made him more famous, rich and marketable than ever.

In just such unexpected ways, the Internet and related communications technologies may turn culture on its head once again, warned William J. Ivey, National Endowment for the Arts chairman, and others speaking at the Getty Center's recent ``Communicating Culture'' conference.

Business people, artists, bureaucrats and the media chewed on the future of culture in a networked age as part of the Getty's latest all-star attempt to think about technology's impacts on museums, culture and society.

The big question: How do you preserve what makes us different - distinctive regional cultures, for instance - when the world is increasingly woven together by technology that could make us all the same?

Will technology boil down the flavors of regional culture to an artistic Big Mac, a globalized monoculture that makes for an unsatisfying steady diet?

Or will the Internet's endless depths and globe-girdling reach provide a way to preserve and even amplify endangered cultures that might otherwise disappear?

``It does make the world smaller in one sense, but in the process it's also making the world larger, more complex and difficult,'' said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future.

``Instead of a single, global village, it's a world of multiple global villages bumping against each other in multifingered ways,'' said Saffo. ``I think digital technology will be an accelerant for diversity.''

The coming big technology change, Saffo predicted, will be cheap, ubiquitous sensors on machines.

``We are hanging eyes, ears and sensory organs off our computers,'' Saffo said. ``Now that we've begun making computers aware of the environment, it will change everything.''

George MacDonald, head of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, said 3-D technologies will allow indigenous cultures to preserve their crafts in ways never before possible.

``It's going to be enormously enriching for peoples' lives,'' said MacDonald. ``We can get to the flotsam and jetsam of cultures that are warehoused in museums now.''

But that also means cultural misappropriation will be easier than ever, creating ever sharper debates about who ``owns'' a culture's distinctive products, MacDonald said.

Andrew Blau, the Markle Foundation's program director, said the ``Caruso effect'' will wallop weaker and less vibrant cultures, just as it did those small-time tenors a century ago.

``In the early recording days, there was a sense of possibility,'' Blau said. ``People thought anyone could do their own recording, but they didn't realize they were now competing for attention with Enrico Caruso. Benefits don't necessarily accrue to the producers of small, independent cultures.''

Author and publisher Stewart Brand, now with the Global Business Network, said the Burning Man celebration is an example of what technology may do to culture in the long term.

Burning Man's ``no spectators'' motto feeds a crazily kaleidoscopic explosion of self-created art for a week in the scalding Nevada desert every year, he said.

``Probably the existence of the Internet freed up a whole generation of artists in their 20s to create their own institutions, given the evanescence of all this,'' Brand said.

It pulls control away from the kinds of cultural institutions that were represented at the conference, and even from artists themselves, speakers said. ``Using Moore's Law (Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's prognostication that the computing speed of microprocessors doubles every 18 months), I can predict with reasonable certainty how many transistors we'll have on a chip in the next 20 years,'' said William Wulf, head of the National Academy of Engineers. ``But we've been horrible about predicting the social and economic consequences of that technology.''

Point your Web browser to www.gii.getty.org/c98/ to see highlights of the conference.

A queen of mysteries

Like to live dangerously? Well, if that head of yours isn't good enough to solve the interactive mystery game at the Web site for the upcoming movie ``Elizabeth'' (at www.elizabeth-themovie.com), it'll be a toasted marshmallow.

The mystery game explores the bloody, religion-fueled intrigues surrounding Queen Elizabeth I not long after her ascension to the throne almost exactly 440 years ago.

An assassin stalks the queen, and you have to investigate, question suspects, gather clues then tab the likely suspect (in real life, there were at least three major plots against the queen).

Guess wrong in your investigation and burn at the stake (well, virtually, unless they've figured out a way to make the ``execute'' command a literal one on your computer). Guess right and the bad guys become crispy critters.

Much noise about music

If the Daily News' occasional series about music on the Internet has whet your appetite for more, the online newsletter WebNoize is sponsoring a conference Monday through Wednesday at the Sheraton Hotel in Universal City.

It's not cheap, at $995 for the full WebNoize '98 conference, but it features 100 speakers covering about every aspect of music and the Net, with most of the big players slated to speak in a location a few miles from just about all the major labels. The conference also will feature more than 35 exhibitors of various Net-related technologies. Surf over to www.98.webnoize.com for more information.