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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Alex Brun on a mash-up culture « Previous | |Next »
July 14, 2010

Alex Brun in his Distributed Creativity: Filesharing and Produsage--a chapter in the Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss (ed) collection Mashup Cultures edited by Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, argues that bootleg filesharers play an important role in creating and co-curating a worldwide cultural archive which is too valuable to leave to that cesspool of fraud and corruption which we know as the music industry.

The music and movie industries, amongst others, see their established positions threatened by the rise of user‐generated content. The internet, he says, affords podusers:

an equal chance to have their message heard – has simply amplified the existing cultural activities of independent fans and artists to an extent that they now stand side by side (and sometimes overshadow) the cultural output sanctioned by conventional publishers. Artful, clever, or simply funny mashups, news about which is spread by word of mouth, may now attract as much or even more attention as the original source material which they draw from, comment on, or send up. This is a trend that is by no means limited to artistic pursuits, of course – the rise of citizen journalism has been built on its ability on occasion to provide more insightful commentary and more fruitful discussion than conventional news publications...; open source software is seen to be more stable and reliable – and much cheaper – than many commercial products; the Wikipedia has become the world’s preferred source for encyclopaedic information in less than a decade ....

The technological support for such independent activities in the form of Web 2.0 and social media has enabled these activities to no longer take place in isolation, but can be aggregated – that groups of participants can pool their resources, coordinate their efforts, and develop central platforms from which their outcomes can be disseminated to the wider world.

He adds:

Collaborative efforts to engage in creative, artistic mashups can be described as a form of distributed creativity: they are projects which harness the creativity of a large range of participants to build on and extend an existing pool of artistic materials. Such projects include ccMixter, the music sharing site operated by the Creative Commons group: here, individual musicians (more recently also including a few of the more progressive artists in the mainstream, from Nine Inch Nails to Radiohead) are able to upload their own recordings under an appropriate Creative Commons licence which allows other members of the community to build on their work by adding further instrumental or vocal tracks, remixing the material, or using it in other ways in their own compositions (Stone, 2009). The site provides the functionality to track such re‐use, making it possible for users to trace the artistic genesis of the complete song from a single violin solo to a fully‐ featured ensemble piece, for example – performed and produced quite possible by musicians who have never met in person.

These community efforts at collaborative content creation form part of the wider phenomenon of audiences becoming more visibly and more thoroughly active in creating and sharing their own content than ever before.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:29 AM |