Remix Culture in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Creative participation is the negotiations and positions of the consumer towards the producer or the spectator towards the participant. This case study highlights on the entertainment and artistic aspects, more specifically on the remix culture of the amateur or creative participant. The digital age has given room for creativity and participatory ways of creations and re-creations or appropriation. The era of passive consumers are over, web 2.0 has made room for creative participation, emergence of a whole new culture and art form or genre called the remix culture, a collage, a recombination, appropriation, and mash-up of online materials, content and elements such as videos, images, music, and art pieces to create new meanings or new products. It is a participatory way of putting together old, new, different cultural and digital contents to create something new which allow for the public to freely influence change and interact with their culture.
Remix culture is mostly associated with amateurs, the objective being that, they take the works of professionals and create their own content around it, it is quite common to see a remix of a remix of an amateur who has recreated another amateurs work, there is a very complex interactive negotiations within the remix culture and creative participation in general. There are various reasons why people remix media contents among other things, one reason that dominates all is the creativity aspect, it’s a major contributing factor, the urge to create something new, though there are some that do these remix for its cheaper ways of passing information across or make a video or music clip at no cost at all, others do it for school projects or assignments, some actually do it out of curiosity of which they get a very creative content as end product. In this age children as young as two years old are using technology, it is the tool that come handy to them, they are surrounded by it, so naturally people in this age develop their creativity around these technologies, in their playful ways with the technology their creativity come to lights which has given room for all these new cultures we see around us today, the remix culture is no exception to that.
The remix culture is a widespread phenomenon in today’s world, it has given rise to ingenuity and ways of expression through various digital media forms, within this culture they are all producers as well as consumers. This culture has great social benefits in our society today, aside giving room for creativity it also give room for democratization of media content, inventions and gives Optimistic perspective and brilliant ideas to products. Remix culture as a read write culture has deep roots in the world’s history more specifically in American history. The famous Walter Disney himself build upon and mixed other people's content which gave him his breakthrough and fame in the media industry, his creativity flourished through other people’s content such as already exiting books and stories, he created his contents out of these already existing once by making them into screen plays, movies and cartoon characters alike. The tolerance towards the use of other people content to express read write culture give rise to opportunity and creativity especially in this technological age where technology is our tool of inspiration.
Innovation and creativity comes with free ideology, allowing for our amateurs today to freely operate within the digital medium without restrictions will lead to great inventions and innovations, it is in this respect that Larry Lessig in his speech for creative participation argued that restricting the amateurs today of the usage of content will lead to us “making pirates of our children” whether legal or illegal they will make use of the content available to them. In order to not make them insensitive to the law its deem necessary to revise rigid laws that has outdated its time and are unrealistic, ways must be paved for new laws that better adapts to the generation of today and allow for the freedom of usage of content to a reasonable degree. Allowing for remix culture or creative participation at this point means living life against the law, this is a generation that rejects copyright laws because the world today romanticis digital culture into young people and through digital culture they realize their inventiveness and potentials.
The study revealed loopholes in the copyright law system of the digital age that might need new and less rigid laws in order to safeguard the creativity of users-generators.
References
Lessig freeculture chpt 1
Remix video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLKk00OYKhU
Remix video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY
Remix video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhlHUTBgAMw
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