Class discussion of Read
Write Culture and Remix-
· RO (Read Only)- Devices that
distribute content so you passively consume what the audience is putting out
there.
· RW (Read Write)- Assemblage
occurs, takes a borrowed work and makes it new. Remix culture is not designed
to compete with profit culture like remixing The Beatles. Instead, it is
remixed for the love of the music. Favors amateur (not for profit) and
democracy.
· Ex. People creating an anime music
video spend 50-400 hours taking anime cartoons and putting them into the song
for the love of anime itself.
· Remix happens within communities
of practice and making and participating in the culture (democracy).
In class example: A not for profit text done out of
the love for Pokémon and Miley Cyrus.
Three
levels of a blog:
1.
Link
to the blog
2.
Tags
3.
Content
·
Now
that we live in a read write culture, it is up to the content makers to do all
the jobs producers used to do in a read only culture such as titling,
describing, tagging, and categorizing YouTube videos.
·
Why
is this idea of Remix valuable? What does it add to our current understanding?
-
The
freedom of Remix is valuable. It gives
life and more avenues for participation that opens up to a new audience that
wasn’t originally familiar with the work.
John Phillip Sousa-
·
Sousa
was an American composer back when you had to have someone play music for you
if you wanted it copied. He believed culture would develop into read only.
However, when Sousa was confronted with recorders and piano strips he attempted
to make a law to regulate the copies and see a profit from this.
·
Even
though he was trying to protect RW culture through copyright laws, he did the
opposite by making it really difficult to participate in RW culture.
·
The
price of borrowing a text is a citation. Now it is legal to quote written text
but illegal to quote a song in a video.
Kirby Ferguson: Everything is a Remix-
Part 2: https://vimeo.com/19447662
·
Hollywood
transforms old into new. Genre movies stick to templates and break up into
subgenre films. To Ferguson, everything is considered a remix. He uses Star
Wars as an example, since it is known as being original but it’s components
come from Joseph Campbell and outlines The Monomyth, along with Flash Gordon,
Hidden Fortress, and many other movies. George Lucas collected, combined and
transformed materials. To him creation requires influence.
Part 3: https://vimeo.com/25380454
·
Creativity
happens by applying ordinary schools of thought to existing materials. Copying
is how we learn; we can’t introduce anything new until we are fluent in the
language of our domain. We need copying to build a foundation of knowledge and
understanding. It is possible to create something new through transformations (taking
something and creating variations). For
example, Thomas Edison didn’t create the light bulb but he created the first
commercially liable light bulb. By connecting ideas, creative leaps can be made
such as when the Star and the Alto served as a foundation for Macintosh.
Class comments-
·
The
most important activities for an inventor, writer, and designer is to locate
and arrange things that are used through copying, transforming, and collecting.
Not everything is a remix, however most things are built off of each
other. For example, designers still have
their original design but recreate colors and patterns from existing material. Also,
every musical note has been used and recorded so there are no more original sounds
but when you remix them it makes it transforms into original content. The original
goal simply develops when the design is enhanced.
Lawrence Lessig Page 73-
·
When
asked why the remixer simply doesn’t make their own content Lessig responded, "Their
meaning comes not from the content of what they say; it comes from the
reference, which is expressible only if it is the original that gets
used."
Reminder: Rough drafts due on Thursday
and main project due on March 3rd !
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