William Gibson has an article on how user's interact with music. (link from World Changing) He makes the point that people are no longer listening to music, they are interacting and making their own music from it.
Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.While in the article he is talking about music, I can't help but thinking about RSS.
Today, there is a page for the RSS feeds from the New York Times. I never thought that would happen. RSS allows the reader to make the news site that they want, taking bits and pieces from every other site on the net. It is tailored for what they're interested in, and it happens automatically, without intervention besides the initial configuration. Wow, remixed information feeds.
It seems to me that people just want the ability to control what is given to them. After just celebrating Independence Day in the US this could really be thought of as people wanting Freedom, Freedom of Choice. Whether it be government, music or news people don't want to take what they are given by a despot. Are we talking about blogging as "the new media" when it is just a incarnation of the same movements that people had hundreds of years ago?
posted Jul 6, 2005 | permanent link
