Remix culture

Description

Lawrence Lessig described the Remix culture in his 2008 book Remix in comparison to the default media culture of the 20th century under usage of computer technology terminology as Read/Write culture (RW) vs. Read Only culture (RO).

In the usual Read Only media culture is the culture consumed more or less passively. The information or product is provided by a 'professional' source, the content industry, that possesses an authority on that particular product/information. There is a one-way flow only of creative content and ideas due to a clear role separation between content producer and content consumer. The emergence of Analog mass production and duplication technologies (pre-Digital revolution and internet like radio broad-casting) inherently enabled the RO culture's business model of production and distribution and limited the role of the consumer to consumption of media.

Digital technology does not have the 'natural' constraints of the analog that preceded it. RO culture had to be recoded in order to compete with the "free" distribution made possible by the Internet. This is primarily done in the form of Digital Rights Management (DRM), which imposes largely arbitrary restrictions on usage. Regardless, DRM has proven largely ineffective in enforcing the constraints of analog media.

As opposed to RO culture, Read/Write culture has a reciprocal relationship between the producer and the consumer. Taking works, such as songs, and appropriating them in private circles is exemplary of RW culture, which was considered to be the 'popular' culture before the advent of reproduction technologies. The technologies and copyright laws that soon followed, however, changed the dynamics of popular culture. As it became professionalized, people were taught to defer production to the professionals.

Digital technologies provide the tools for reviving RW culture and democratizing production, sometimes referred to as Web 2.0. Blogs explain the three layers of this democratization. Blogs have redefined our relationship to the content industry as they allowed access to non-professional, user-generated content. The 'comments' feature that soon followed provided a space for readers to have a dialogue with the amateur contributors. 'Tagging' of the blogs by users based on the content provided the necessary layer for users to filter the sea of content according to their interest. The third layer added bots that analyzed the relationship between various websites by counting the clicks between them and, thus, organizing a database of preferences. The three layers working together established an ecosystem of reputation that served to guide users through the blogosphere. While there is no doubt many amateur online publications cannot compete with the validity of professional sources, the democratization of digital RW culture and the ecosystem of reputation provides a space for many talented voices to be heard that was not available in the pre-digital RO model.

Intertwining of media cultures

For Remix culture to survive it must be shared and created or "remixed" by contributors. This is where Participatory culture comes into play, because consumers start participating by becoming contributors, especially the many teens growing up with these media cultures. A book was published in 2013 by Henry Jenkins called "Reading in a Participatory Culture" which focuses on his technique of remixing the original story Moby Dick to make it a new and fresh experience for students. This form of teaching enforces the correlation between participatory and remix culture while highlighting its importance in evolving literature. Since media culture consumers start to look at art and content as something that can be repurposed or recreated therefore making them the producer.

Effects of remix culture on artists

Remix culture has created an environment that is nearly impossible for artists to have or own "original work". Media and the internet has made art so public that it leaves the work up for other interpretation and in return, remixing. A major example of this in the 21st century is the idea of memes. Once one is put into cyberspace it is automatically assumed that someone else can come along and remix the picture. For example the 1974 self-portrait created by artist Rene Magritte, "Le Fils De L'Homm", was remixed and recreated by street artist Ron English in his piece "Stereo Magritte.

Folklore and vocal traditions

Graphics and images

Books and other information

Software and other digital goods

Software as digital good is well suited for adaption and remixing.

Music

Movies

In film, remixing is often done and happens in many forms.

GIFs

GIFs are another example of remix culture. They are illustrations and small clips from films used for personal expressions in online conversations. GIFs are commonly taken from an online video form such as film, T.V. or YouTube videos. Each clip lasts for 3 seconds and is "looped, extended and repeated." GIFs take a mass media sample and reimagines, or remixes, its meaning from the original context to use it as a form of personal expression in a different context. They are used throughout various media platforms but are most popular in Tumblr where they are used to articulate a punch line.

Remixing in religion

Throughout history remix culture has been truthful not only in exchange of oral stories but also through the bible. This is a book of stories and lessons that has been compiled and remixed over generations. Eugene H. Peterson reinterpreted bible stories in his 2002 book "The Message// Remix" which makes the bible more simple for readers to interpret. As another example, it is thought that the beliefs of Buddhism has influenced other religious practices and ways. An idea of remixing dated back to the Quakers who would interpret the scripture and create a biblical narrative by using their own voices, which went against the "read-only" practice that was more common.

History

Remixing was always a part of the human culture. For instance US media scholar Professor Henry Jenkins argued that “the story of American arts in the 19th century might be told in terms of the mixing, matching and merging of folk traditions taken from various indigenous and immigrant populations.” Another historical example of remixing is Cento, a literary genre popular in Medieval Europe consisting mainly of verses or extracts directly borrowed from the works of other authors and arranged in a new form or order.

The balance between creation and consumption shifted with the technological progress on media recording and reproduction. Notable events are the invention of book printing press and the analog Sound recording and reproduction leading to severe cultural and legal changes.

Analog era

In the begin of the 20th century on the dawn of the analog Sound recording and reproduction revolution John Philip Sousa, an American composer and conductor of the late Romantic era, warned in 1906 in a congressional hearing on a negative change of the musical culture by the now available "canned music".

"These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape."

Specialized, expensive creation devices ("read-write") and specialized cheap consumption ("read-only") devices allowed a centralized production by few and decentralized consumption by many. Analog devices for consumers for low prices, lacking the capability of writing and creating, spread out fast: Newspapers, Jukebox, radio, television. This new business model, an Industrial information economy, demanded and resulted in the strengthening of the exclusive copyright and a weakening of the remix culture and the Public domain in throughout the 19th and 20th century.

Analog creation devices were expensive and also limited in their editing and rearranging capability. An analog copy of a work (e.g. an audio tape) cannot be edited, copied and worked on infinite often as the quality continuously worsens. Despite that, a creative remixing culture survived to some limited degree. For instance composer John Oswald coined in 1985 the Plunderphonics term in his essay Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative for sound collages based on existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition.

Remixing as digital age phenomena

The technological situation changed fundamentally with the digital revolution, digital information could be reproduced and edited infinite often without quality loss. Still, in the 1960s the first digital general computing devices with such capabilities were meant only for specialists and professionals and were extremely expensive; first consumer oriented devices like video game consoles inherently lacked again the RW capability. But the arrival in the 1980s of the home computer and especially the IBM personal computer brought a digital prosumer device, a device usable for production and consumption at the same time, to the masses for an affordable price. Similarly for software, in the 1990s the free and open source software movement implemented a software ecosystem based on the idea of edit-ability by anyone.

Internet and web 2.0

The arrival of the Internet on end 1990s/begin 2000s in all domains of art, technology and society created a highly effective way to re-implement a "remix culture" again. Unlike earlier TV and radio, with an unidirectional information transport (producer to consumer), the Internet is inherently bidirectional, enabling a peer-to-peer dynamic. This accelerated with the Web 2.0 and more user-generated content due to Commons-based peer production possibilities. Remixes of songs, videos, and photos are easily distributed and created. There is a constant revision to what is being created, which is done on both a professional and amateur scale. The availability of various end-user oriented software such as GarageBand and Adobe Photoshop make it easy to remix. The Internet allows distribution of remixes to the masses. Internet memes are an Internet-specific creative content which got created, filtered and transformed by the viral spreading process made possible by the web and its users.

Foundation of the Creative Commons

As response to a more restrictive becoming copyright system (Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension, DMCA), which started to limit the blooming sharing and remixing activities of the web, in 2001 Lawrence Lessig founded the Creative Commons. In 2002 the Creative Commons released a set of Licenses as tools to enable remix culture, by allowing a balanced, fair enabling release of creative works, "some rights reserved" instead of the usual "all rights reserved". Several companies and governmental organizations adapted this approach and licenses in the following years, for instance flickr, DeviantART and Europeana using or offering CC license options which allow remixing. There are several webpages addressing this remix culture, for instance ccMixter founded 2004.

The 2008 open-source film by Brett Gaylor RiP!: A Remix Manifesto documents "the changing concept of copyright".

In 2012 Canada's Copyright Modernization Act explicitly added a new exemption which allows non-commercial remixing. In 2013 the US court ruling Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. acknowledged that amateur remixing might fall under fair use and copyright holders are requested to check and respect fair use before doing DMCA take down notices.

Copyright

Under copyright laws of many countries, anyone with the intent to remix an existing work is liable for lawsuit because the laws protect the intellectual property of the work. However, current copyright laws are proving to be ineffective at preventing sampling of content. On the other hand, fair-use does not address a wide enough range of use-cases and its borders are not well established and defined, making usage under "fair use" legally risky. Lessig argues that there needs to be a change in the current state of copyright laws to legalize remix culture, especially for fair-use cases. He states that "outdated copyright laws have turned our children into criminals." One proposition is to adopt the system of citation used with book references. The artist would cite the intellectual property she sampled which would give the original creator the credit, as is common with literature references. As tools for doing so Lawrence Lessig proposed the Creative Commons licenses which demand for instance Attribution without restricting the general use of a creative work. One step further is the Free content movement, which proposes that creative content should be released under free licenses. The Copyright reform movement tries to tackle the problem by cutting for instance the excessive long copyright terms, as it was debated by scholar Rufus Pollock.

Other (copyright) scholars, such as Yochai Benkler and Erez Reuveni, promulgate ideas that are closely related to remix culture in 2007. Some scholars argue that the academic and legal institutions must change with the culture towards one that is remix based.

Reception and impact

In his 2006 book Cult of the Amateur.", Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen criticizes Free and Read-Write Culture.

In February 2010 Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez praised the remix activities for its social value, "for performing social realities" and remarked that copyright should be evaluated regarding the "level of control permitted to be exercised over our social realities".

According to Kirby Ferguson in 2011 and his popular TED talk series, everything is a remix, and that all original material builds off of and remixes previously existing material. He argues if all intellectual property is influenced by other pieces of work, copyright laws would be unnecessary.

In June 2015 a WIPO article named "Remix Culture and Amateur Creativity: A Copyright Dilemma" acknowledged the "age of remixing" and the need for a copyright reform.

Critics like UC Davis professor Thomas W. Joo criticized remix culture for romanticizing free culture.