I recently viewed a presentation by The Alchemists (here’s their blog) which included a mashup they made from a Brazilian film. I’ve never seen the film, but having watched the mashup – a hilarious sendup in which the characters are searching for the mysterious “Henry Jenkins” – I have a definite perspective about the original film.
We all approach new media with a unique set of filters, preconditions, and beliefs. These are predominantly the accumulation of a lifetime of our personal experiences, but they also include direct/referential input about the media in question: critical reviews, recommendations from friends, trailers, commercials, etc.
Up to now, it’s practically a given that you experience a new piece of media first through the original/source version, even as you bring your unique perspective to it. Later, you may view a mashup, a satire, a commentary, or some other derivative/referential version (a new media in it’s own right but whose message is framed by the source material it references).
The experience I had, however, was reversed: I saw the mashup first. In fact, I still haven’t seen the movie.
And it’s not the first time this has happened. The World War II film, Downfall, sparked a series of seemingly never-ending mashups, showing Hitler going ballistic over everything from the Watchmen movie to BluRay’s success over HD. I’ve seen and enjoyed several instances of this Internet meme, but I still haven’t seen the original film.
No doubt, my viewing of the original will be affected by this. Instead of watching the bunker scene with tense anticipation, I’ll be trying to recall the exact lines from the mashups.
While experiencing original source media will likely continue to be the norm, first exposure to new media through derivative versions will grow. I believe this will encourage an already frenetic culture of content remixing, even if that means the remixer is creating a derivative work from a derivative work (and on), never using or experiecing the original/source material.
This is, from a very big picture view, nothing new.
Several people (Lessig, Boyle, etc.) have pointed to the current copyright climate as a stranglehold on innovation, a freezing of cultural growth, and a perverse interpretation of physical property rights through the lens of intellectual property. A common refrain is that – until the last century – all culture was derivative in some form.
Changes in copyright law have extended the protection of material well beyond the death of the creator, and the current lack of an effective system for cataloging who owns what rights to what content essentially sentences almost all content to an unending, unprofitable purgatory. Even if you wanted to pay a rights owner for the use of their content, finding them is challenging at best. It’s easier to just move on to another piece of content.
With the advent of technology, people are easily able to remix and share content. And they will continue to do so, even if it’s illegal (even if they don’t commercially profit from it).
No matter what side of the legal fence you find yourself on, the reality is that people are experiencing media in ways content creators no longer control.
