![]() But a technological gap in cultural production has always existed. L essig implies that technology makes cultural remix possible, and that remix is a deadly challenge to legacy mass media companies. What we lacked was an Internet on which to cheaply publish or work collaboratively with distant fellow fans or fellow amateur musicians, artists and storytellers. We used techniques available to Hollywood for the prior 50 years. My closest friends and I recorded and rearranged Star Trek episodes on a reel tape deck, and later created and remixed music in garage bands, reinvented comic book heroes in pencil and traded exquisite-corpse prose. I wrote fan fiction, drew doodles on class notebooks, acted in homemade plays with siblings and friends, and eventually made audio recordings and 8mm films. However, like most 20th-century mass-consumption children I took the tales fed by Hollywood and the highly filtered book publishers and reimagined and extended those stories in play. He implies that because professional media became so well distributed, amateur culture virtually ceased. It is now anybody with access to a $1,500 computer who can take sounds and images from the culture around us and use them to say things differently.”īut Lessig is looking only at economics when determining that read-write culture became dormant. The importance is that that technique has been democratized. “The importance of this is not the technique you’ve seen here,” he notes about the work, “because every technique you’ve seen here is something that television and film producers have been able to do for the last 50 years. In making his point that digital technology has moved culture back to a read-write existence, he shows amateur remix videos that became viral phenomena. ![]() “Culture moved from a read-write to a read-only existence,” he said in a 2007 TED conference. Legal scholar and copyright activist Lawrence Lessig argues that the one-to-many mass media model of the 20th century was a stifling of culture and creativity. The many-to-many form media has taken due to the reduced cost of publishing has also caused conflicts over copyright, visions of what culture should be. They made a practice of all the storytelling techniques of human history, but only very rarely with the economic means to spread those extensions to the wider world. Every mid-20th-century boy with a Davy Crocket coonskin cap, young Zorro with a stick for a sword or little Nancy Drew with an imaginary blue roadster immersed him- or herself into a mythology, extended a story beyond the bounds of its published and copy-protected source through backyard games, handwritten tales, and scrap-paper drawings. The high cost of production and publication kept the imaginative public out of the professional process, but mass media stories never stopped being explored and reimagined by the public. The one-way, exclusive media channels of the 20th century were a creation of economics. Single-medium communication, of the kind seen through the 19th and 20th centuries, is perhaps an anomaly. ![]() Mythic stories have always found new life, new form and reinvention through the play of children, the imagination of artists and the personal interpretation of listeners and readers. Origin stories and morality tales express and extend themselves in the costumes of celebration and the talismans of belief. Visits to traditional churches, mosques and temples around the world demonstrate this in their passionate and storytelling art works, sculptures and nonverbal symbols. As Henry Jenkins notes, before the age of public literacy, when sacred texts were only readable by a privileged few, religions employed every means available to spread their message. From memorized sagas transferred orally from one storyteller to another, to cave paintings and art, the tales told through human history have found multiple channels to their publics. “Transmedia storytelling” is not a new phenomenon, and is perhaps the oldest technique we have for spreading information. “Once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it.” - Socrates Origin Stories ![]()
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