matt:littlemore

We made mix tapes, they remix music – We watched TV, they make TV
Lawrence Lessig is perhaps the most important voice for artists, authors and coders of the digital age who wish to remix existing media assets without fear of recrimination. He is a founding board member of Creative Commons and a strong supporter of legislation to free up the restrictions on copyright and trademark in the context of technology applications.
Most Vidders and Remixers, if considering copyrights at all, tend to see no problem with using ‘found’ media assets to reconstruct and ‘mash up’ and as their work is generally created for fun and not for profit, simply see their role as one of adding content (and value) to sites such as YouTube. The role of Youtube has become a kind of interactive public access TV – viewers watch, critique, imitate and parody at an incredible rate, media which can itself become (although somewhat short-lived) a popular cultural style in it’s own right.

Lessig says ‘We live in an age of prohibition, where in many areas of life ordinary people live against the law. The kids live life knowing they live it against the law – which is extremely corrosive and corrupting.’

Copyright law has a very unclear role in the digital age – every visual reference is itself a ‘copy’, where many of these copies are used to the benefit of the originator. Is it fair to allow copies which work for the good of the copyright holder and criminalise the copies which don’t? And is it possible that by creating a culture of illegal creativity in the world of new media this may have a detrimental effect on society as a whole?

Anybody involved or interested in Remix Culture should check out his speech on how the law is strangling creativity

As we enter the increasingly global, mobile and interactive digital age, so the social impact of new media becomes ever more important. Becoming part of everyday activity much earlier in life than print literacy of previous generations, parents of the first generation of ‘Digital Natives’ (John Palfrey & Urs Gasser) will probably struggle to keep up with the ever changing face of social media while those kids ‘Born Digital’ will continue to shape the future of our culture, economy, politics and social roles in the global digital world. Media literacy is essential to promote the analysis and production of various texts & media through greater access to information and the tools required to produce them. Whilst it is important to teach the foundations of new media within education systems, it is out of the classroom where students will produce, distribute and critique the cultural pieces they create through global open source networks. The freedom of expression that has been unlocked is not without its potential pitfalls and brings along new concerns of safety & legality but as is already evident will feed the tidal wave of inventive creativity which will change the way we experience art, music & life.
In ‘On Photography’ Susan Sontag describes the transformation of the photograph through industrialization -

“That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption – the toy of the clever, the wealthy and the obsessed – seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was gratuitous, that is an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. as industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.”

Parallels can be drawn with the domestication of digital media – no longer the specialized knowledge of the academic or wealthy and increasingly open source resulting in the snowball effect of creativity and skill of the ‘amateur’. Interactive social communities and Web 2.0 sites allow content to evolve to that which the users want to experience. This in turn changes social consciousness as the consumer becomes more than a viewer – producer, critic and collectively, content editor.

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