"Copy, Transform, Combine"

Remember back to high school English for a moment. Recall the terms such as allusion, or intertextuality - these terms are attached to literary works that reference other texts to create meaning, whether it is direct or implied. And these are commonly accepted scholarly concepts that have been engrained in our minds from a very young age. It is culturally acceptable to allude to another person’s writing, and it is recognized and supported by literary communities. Literature is a remix!

So why does the distribution and remix of cultural products online pose so many issues? We've been doing it for hundreds of years through published literature!

Kirby Ferguson`s videos (Everything's a Remix) raises the key point of market economics. This is in my opinion the dominant cause of all sample and patent lawsuits. In short, it all comes down to greed. Jenkins also focuses largely on the market economics of online cultural content distribution, although his is a less “greed” themed argument and takes a “struggling” tone, empathizing with both producers and consumers.
Jenkins is justified and balances his arguments in favour of both sides of the producer consumer spectrum, and I think that this is important. In order to have “freely accessible cultural commons,” we need to understand how we are consuming, and how material is being given to us.

In order for fully accessible cultural commons, I think that producers of cultural products need to redefine the monetary value placed on them. It is widely known by consumers that movies, for example, have extremely high production costs, and therefore consumers justify their purchase of movie theatre admissions or DVD purchases this way. Conversely, an internet blogger wishing to use a photo that is relevant to their writing would not value the photo in the same way one values a movie. Therefore, I argue that low production cost material or no production cost material SHOULD be made culturally common. Because without the building blocks for cultural production, such as photos, sound bytes, short video clips, fan fiction, etc. etc. etc., there is no way for culture to evolve. It’s just what Kirby Ferguson stated in his system failure video: “Copy, transform, combine.”

 References:

Everything is a Remix Part 4 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Jenkins, H. (2004) The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence  International Journal of Cultural Studies March 2004 7: 33-43