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:
Posts
