Posts Tagged ‘girl talk’
the cultural literacy of the digital remix
15 Jan, 2009 • posts i've written • 7 comments
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.
