The evolution of authorship in a remix society (original) (raw)
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Authorship in Remix Culture: The Creative Reuse of Found Material
St Cyril and St Meethodius University Press, 2024
A substantial proportion of contemporary cinematographic production involves the reworking of prior plots, reinterpretation of familiar themes, or remaking earlier releases. This necessitates a critical examination of the reasons and implications of such a creative approach. However, this analysis should not be grounded in the now obsolete construct of the romantic genius author. Instead, it should adopt an approach that acknowledges the closure of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, understanding that in the Digital Age, the concepts of 'creativity,' 'literacy,' and 'writing' have taken on new meanings encapsulated in the concept of 'Remix culture.' Digital technology and global interconnectedness have facilitated a freedom of expression, both creatively and socially, previously inconceivable. In the twenty-first century, anyone can be an author, reaching substantial audiences without the mediation of publishers, free from significant budgets and unburdened by the constraints of various censorship models. This era witnesses the emergence of a culture where the distinction between author and audience, critic and creator, high and low, becomes increasingly blurred. This culture is made possible by the almost immediate accessibility of previously published works, enabling the identification of connections, influences, and sources in both new and old creations. In this culture, remixing has become the predominant mode of creativity. However, it can no longer be dismissed as 'plagiarism,' nor can its author be labelled as 'lacking in originality.' In the twenty-first century, illuminated by intertextuality and liberated by the multiplicity of truths in postmodern thought, we must acknowledge that various forms of borrowing have consistently formed the backbone of authorship. Rather than disparaging collaborative efforts in the arts, we need to reconsider our understanding of 'originality.' This text explores the contemporary perception of the author, authorship, and the typical mode of production of new works in a cultural environment increasingly influenced by digital media and computer-based creative tools. The central argument posits that in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the concept of authorship differs significantly from that in the second half of the twentieth century, bearing notable similarities to authorship in the periods preceding the conception of the romantic image of the genius author. These differences and similarities suggest that authorship is a dynamic construct shaped by social, economic, philosophical, legal, and practical developments.
Who is the Author? Models of Authorship in New Media. Sampling / Remixing / Open Source
2002
New media culture brings with it a number of new models of authorship which all involve different forms of collaboration. Of course, collaborative authorship is not unique to new media: think of medieval cathedrals, traditional painting studios which consisted from a master and assistants, music orchestras, or contemporary film productions which, like medieval cathedrals, involve thousands of people collaborating over a substantial period of time. In fact, in we think about this historically, we will see collaborative authorship represents a norm rather than exception. In contrast, romantic model of a solitary single author occupies a very small place in the history of human culture. New media, however, offers some new variations on the previous forms of collaborative authorship. In this essay I will look at some of these variations. I will try to consider them not in isolation but in a larger context of contemporary cultural economies. As we will see, new media industries and cultures systematically pioneer new types of authorship, new relationships between producers and consumers, and new distribution models, thus acting as a the avant-garde of the culture industry.
When Users are Authors: Authorship in the Age of Digital Media
Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, 2010
This Article explores what authorship and creative production mean in the digital age. Notions of the author as the creator of the work have, since the passage of the Statute of Anne in 1 710, provided a point of reference for recognizing ownership rights in literary and artistic works in conventional copyright jurisprudence. The role of the author as both the creator and the producer of a work has been seen as distinct and separate from that of the publisher and user. Copyright laws and customary norms protect the author's rights in his creation, and provide the incentive to create. They also allow him to appropriate the social value that his creativity generates as recognition of his contribution towards society. By initially protecting the rights of authors in literary and artistic works as a property right, copyright laws have facilitated market transfers of private rights and directed use of these works toward the most socially beneficial uses. This Article proposes that in the digital age, when users of literary and artistic works are increasingly becoming authors themselves, the notion of authorship provides a mark of identification to connect the original author with the work in a market characterized by an abundance of derivative works and remixes of original content. The notion of authorship in the digital age attributes individual and collaborative contributions to the collective pool of information back to their respective authors. This Article proposes that the networked economy
Authorship vs. Assemblage in Digital Media
The Ethos of Digital Environments: Technology, Literature and Philosophy, 2021
This chapter outlines an approach to complement current analyses on agencies of storytelling in digital environments. As our everyday life and meaning-making are increasingly embedded in digital platforms such as the ones of social media services, ways to critically analyze digital media as an environment are urgently neededsomething that the existing analyses on storytelling have mostly ignored. The particular point of contention in this chapter is the concept of authorship along with the understanding of singular updates, tweets, and the like as stories or reports of personal experience, as they fail to acknowledge the ways in which human agency is intertwined with more-than-human actors within digital environments. The chapter therefore explores assemblage as an alternative to that of authorship for conceptualizing agencies of storytelling in digital media. It is argued that assemblage enables the analysis of the platforms as affective environments based on a feedback loop of a kind: they are not only affected by our actions but, in turn, shape and guide our agency.
What Does it Matter Who is Speaking? Authorship, Authority and the Mashup
This essay investigates the figure of the author and the concept of authorship in audio mashups and remixing. The analysis traces the development and functional aspects of this particular authority figure, entertains the recent crisis in authorship that has led to claims of the “death of the author,” and investigates the way both aspects shape our understanding of and responses to the mashup. The objective of the investigation is not to provide an authoritative account that will decide things once and for all. Instead, it concludes with a more sophisticated understanding of how the question concerning authorship needs to be situated and deployed.
Travels in Intertextuality: the autopoetic identity of remix culture
Travels in Intertextuality aims for what John Berger would call “ways of seeing” digital media artifacts and interacting cultural texts. Using Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media, these “new media objects” are seen through the metaphorical “coordinated set of lenses” of Michael Cole’s Cultural Psychology. In addressing issues of “writing” and identity in the digital age at the intersection of technology, art, and commerce, this highly exploratory work looks for ways to perceive “value” in remix culture through ecological models of sociocultural systems. The thesis “follows the problem” of remix through “pioneering research”, “reflective practice”, and shifting contexts for expansive learning. Emerging from significant pools of digital media, “remix value” is analysed through cultural-historical perspectives, as well as through the autopoietic perspectives of “self-making” biological and sociolinguistic systems.
Multifaceted Autoethnography: Theoretical Advancements, Practical Considerations and Field Illustrations, 2018
The aim of this chapter is to analyze the nature and concept of authorship in the context of digital fiction and how they have changed in the context of the affordances of twenty-first century . The fieldwork of the chapter will show that is an effective tool in underscoring the changes in roles the author on the run must play as she/he is immersed in the project of writing a digital novel. The social dynamics of a digital collaborative platform affect the creation of the novel itself. The autoethnography will furthermore prove valuable in showing how these effects are based on the nature of collaboration itself and/or are merely reflections of how the Internet really works, how writing by the twenty-first century author has evolved while being perpetually digitally connected, and how the contemporary author engages in role- and identity-play while in a constant state of movement and engagement of Internet culture.