the cultural logic of the remix

MAC351

robert.jewitt@sunderland.ac.uk

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Web 2.0 and ‘remix culture’ The origins of the remix Creativity or piracy? A war of words The ‘mash-up’ Legal threats

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harness/exploit the collective wisdom and effort of their users

trust and respect users; treat them as co–developers rather than consumers

are open to — and encourage — remixing, hacking and sharing, with permissive licensing, open standards and programming languages, freely available application programming interfaces (APIs) etc(O’Reilly cited in Allen, 2008)

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Democratising tools which throw the old rules into disarray(Lasica, 2005: 2)

Demographic born between 1977-1996 First to ‘grow up in a digital age …

bathed in bits’ (Tapsoctt & Williams, 2008: 47)

Driven by a desire ‘for choice, convenience, customization and control by designing, producing and distributing products themselves’ (ibid: 52)

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‘The ability to remix media, hack products, or otherwise tamper with consumer culture is their birthright, and they won't let outmoded intellectual property laws stand in their way’ (Tapscott & Williams, 2008: 52)

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19% of online teens 18% of online adults

remixed content gathered from other sources into a new creation (Lenhart and Madden, 2005)

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Film The Phantom Edit Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation Fan-made trailers?

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Fashion

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Art

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Nick Út Banksy

Video Games

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Pro-sumers (Toffler, 1980) User Generated Content

Mash-up/mix compilations?Blog posts?Presentations?Photos?Machinima?Video?

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See also Matt Mason, 2008, The Pirate’s Dilemma for details

‘All any prime minister had to do to gauge the winds was to listen closely to the week’s 45 rpm single releases; they were like political polls set to melody and riddim’ (Jeff Chang, 2005: 31).

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1962 – Jamaican independence 1964 – Reid built recording studio 1967 – The Paragons

Rudolph ‘Ruddy’ Redwood& Byron Smith

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1972 – Botel club, Fire Island, New York

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1967 – Clive Campbell arrives in the Bronx

AKA DJ Kool Herc

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjnc-X-Vfyg

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John Shiga, 2007, ‘Copy and Persist’

Good Copy, Bad Copy (2007, Denmark)http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/

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The ‘cult of the amateur’ (Carr, 2005) “mass culture provides the building

blocks for the stuff we create” (Lessig in Lasica, 2005)

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‘a culture of contempt for intellectual property’

IFPI (2007): cost to the US music industry = $12.6 billion

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lobbying for legislative changes court actions education and propaganda campaigns technological means

For more info see Allen (2008) and Lessig (2004)

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Copyright Term Extension Act

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlPkIS-uNMk

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Less than 2% of works have any continuing commercial value (Lessig, 2004)

CTEA = Mickey Mouse act? ‘Rent-seeking’? Stifling creativity?

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Is the remix a cultural norm and if so, is it under threat?

Is there any value or significance to the remix as a cultural practice?

Does existent copyright law restrict creativity?

Does copyright law go far enough?

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B. Alexander, 2006. “Web 2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and Learning?” EDUCAUSE Review, volume 41, number 2, pp. 32–44, http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0621.pdf

Peter J Allen, 2008, ‘Rip, mix, burn … sue … ad infinitum: The effects of deterrence vs voluntary cooperation on non-commercial online copyright infringing behaviour’, First Monday, Vol 13, No 9, http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/269

N. Carr, 2005. “The amorality of Web 2.0,” Rough Type, http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php

Jeff Chang, 2005, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, St. Martin's Press J. D. Lasica, 2005, Darknet: Hollywood’s war against the digital generation, Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley. Lawrence Lessig, 2004, Free Culture: The nature and future of creativity, London: Penguin,

http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf J. Litman, 2000. “The demonization of piracy,” Proceedings of CFP 2000: Challenging the

Assumptions. The Tenth Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy (6 April, Toronto, Canada), at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jdlitman/papers/demon.pdf

Matt Mason, 2008, The Pirates Dilemma: How hackers, punk capitalists and graffiti millionaires are remixing our culture and changing the world, London: Allen Lane, http://thepiratesdilemma.com/download-the-book

T. O’Reilly, 2005. “What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Simon Reynolds, 2006, Rip It Up & Start Again, London: Faber Barry Sandywell & David Beer, 2005, ‘Stylistic Morphing: Notes on the Digitisation of Contemporary

Music Culture’, Convergence, Vol 11, No 4. John Shiga, 2007, ‘Copy-and-Persist: The Logic of Mash-Up Culture’ in � Critical Studies in Media

Communication, Volume 24, Number 2, pp. 93-114 Don Tapscott & Anthony D Williams, 2008, Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changed everything,

London: Atlantic Books Alvin Toffler, 1980, The Third Wave, Morrow.

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