I'll start with the second one first. It's obviously, as you know, a hot international debate around the world.
One of the interesting dynamics, though, and I do want to emphasize this a bit, is what's called the open access movement. This has become very important, and it changes a whole lot of the dynamics. Just thinking about it in the economic sense, for example, we have found that making research open access as much as possible can really help the creators of that research. Why? Because it gets them known.
It's interesting that in our fields, it used to be the case that in order for a researcher to really advance their career, they would publish in scholarly journals and monographs and so on; but now, if they are not also very active in tweeting and using podcasts, their reputations and the value of their work will not get known, and in fact their careers will be hurt. So that's a fascinating change in terms of how the new media is really switching things around.
We see this on the music side. For example, artists now know that if their music does not get out and get heard, no one is going to go to their concerts to see them. The role of the concert, the physical concert, for example, has become much more important now in terms of revenue generation, and so on, and the digital side is used to promote that.
So it's a very interesting dynamic in which the policy assumptions, it seems to me, of the past don't play in the same ways. At SSHRC, we're trying to deal with that, because in the past we had, for example, funded scholars to put their research findings in printed ways, and now we have to find new policies to really enable open access and the new media in terms of the dissemination and exchange of information.
My sense is that on the music side and so on, there's no doubt that those industries—what we call the creative industries—are growing rapidly, and it's partly because there are just so many more people easily able to contribute. You know, Marshall McLuhan said in the 1960s, when photocopiers came out, that now everyone would be an author. Well, if photocopiers could make everyone an author, obviously the new technologies are enabling that, but the key point, it seems to me, is that people want to be authors.
That's such an interesting phenomenon. People don't just want to consume, they want to be authors. They don't just want to watch something, they want to engage in it.
That's what the new technologies are really enabling. They're enabling a kind of active side. We're trying to embrace this in terms of schools. We're trying to embrace this in terms of building communities, advancing the economy, and so on.
It's a very different notion of consumers, of products, of services. It is a very different notion. It turns out that people want to create. It's not just a very tiny, select group.
So I think it is changing dramatically now and redefining what we mean by artists, what we mean by consumers, what we mean by spectators, and so on.