Michael F. Brown a couple of years ago asked the question: who owns native culture. The conflict he described centered around the place of native American artifacts in US public museums, and the right of Native Americans for self-determination over their representation as well as the material fate of artifacts that once belonged to them, as a cultural group.

I now want to raise a similar question: who owns digital native culture? If the local audiovisual heritage is accessible only thorugh YouTube, if local digital identities and social connections are stored by Facebook, if local tastes are better known by Amazon and last.fm than by anyone else, and if all of these critical infrastructures are beyond the reach of not  only individuals but for groups, nations as well, that what happens to the digital self-determination?

Everyone now is preoccupied with the privacy scandals of Facebook. That conflict is between a company and the individual. I would like to reframe that conflict by putting the group in focus, and ask: what happens to local cultures if the infrastructures they use to create, reproduce, maintain, archive their individual and group identities are not owned and/or controlled by them, in fact they have no say in the fate of the data, digital being is all about.

Bodó Balázs (1975), economist, assistant lecturer, researcher at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Department of Sociology and Communications, Center for Media Research and Education.