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the cultural literacy of the digital remix

January 15th, 2009 • posts i've written

Without an advanced literacy, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land seems incredibly esoteric. You can still enjoy how Eliot strings words together, but you will not catch on to his downright brilliant thievery without years of study.

Like Eliot, Girl Talk remixes the work of his predecessors to create something new. But he does so within the digital world; and this world operates on one crucial principle. Everything can be connected.

Culture has always been recombinant; but now we’ve created a medium in which that recombinance can be transparent. We can splay open a piece of art or idea and follow its relationship to what came before. This new adaptation is challenging our notions of originality: in thought, creation, and even translation. But it’s also allowing us to create incredibly complex things that are simultaneously more accessible to explore. We’re enabling cultural literacy.

This was just a quick thought I wanted to share.

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7 Responses (add your comment)

faris January 15, 2009
at 12:44 pm

ahhhh

in the republished form Elliot was asked to write footnotes for the wasteland – and so he did – but they simply added in new layers of allusion

with recombinant audio visual, in a way you don’t need the footnotes?

or maybe you do – just different kinds of footnotes…part of the fun is rewarding those who know where you stole from, and leading those that don’t into new cultural artifacts…

maybe multimedia comms technologies allow the remixing of many different kinds of symbols, which is even more complex, but easier to parse….
Bud Caddell January 15, 2009
at 1:26 pm

Tools like Shazam will soon make those artifacts 100% accessible to 100% of people.

And I can talk about recombinance and link directly to your post. I’m just stealing from you, but now I’ve admitted to it and made the concept that much more accessible to your next thief.
faris January 16, 2009
at 8:12 am

ah yes! link trails – this is the very nature of hypertextuality – endless connections outwards – texts are infinitely connected. so when everything has meta data, every steal is sourced. infinite web of connected culture.

yes. yes indeed.
Joshua Dumas January 16, 2009
at 10:26 am

Hmm, this is precisely why I am not very pumped about hypertext, or at least our current hypertext technology. In the hands of our best poets, a borrowed phrase placed in a new context expands meaning. Parsing the referent is a part of that meaning making. But how language is: its ambiguities, its sonics, and how our minds imagine, fill gaps, and misunderstand it — that is what is most exciting and fruitful about reading the WasteLand.

The problem is a link can only go to one place, while our best verses create whole universes. And knowing the name of each star in that universe doesn’t mean you grasp its enormity and riches.

I worry that we are training our minds to scuttle about, parsing minutia, and congratulating ourselves that we ‘get it’, and never noticing the lovely web of possible meaningfullnesses any word might have, ‘cos our technology is designed in simplistic one-to-one relationships…

I think tagging, sourcing, etc is totally exciting and love to nerd out chasing connections but I think it is super important to keep in mind that having access to data does necessarily mean we understand it.
josh January 16, 2009
at 10:29 am

oh also — I dunno if WordPress can do this, but it’d be great to be able to preview comments before posting them…

And also — happy new year Bud, hope all is great!
Bud Caddell January 16, 2009
at 11:00 am

Thanks for the comments, Josh.

I’d certainly never say that The Waste Land is the sum of its stolen parts. Clearly Eliot has created something new, with far more meaning than simple theft. And I loved breaking it down.

Technology isn’t important; it’s what we do with it and how it influences our behavior. You see artists like Girl Talk that are enabled by technology, but their work and their point of view is more important than Pro Tools or a sampler. Like painting, yes, we can stand back and admire the vision of the artist, but ultimately, we stand closer and admire each minuscule stroke and pigment as we attempt to understand them and the art better.

Museums are built to bring art to larger audiences; because we feel that there is some societal benefit from the masses being exposed to art. I’m only saying that digital creation lends to this, not that it should strip away the intangible quality of art.
Joshua Dumas January 16, 2009
at 11:54 am

Yeah, I don’t think we are disagreeing very much about this and I definitely think talking about Eliot and Girl Talk in parallel is brilliant. But I do think the issue is with technology. I think am (with very limited understanding) wanting to make a case against hypertext, favoring its replacement with a more semantic web.

(I have a bunch of meetings today, so my web use is gonna be limited. Sorry if this conversation proceeds glacially…)