Pop Culture, Our Newest Lexicon

How Pop Culture Is a Lexicon

In my last post I wrote about Larry Lessig's assertion that an outdated legal approach to Internet share/remix culture is hurting the children raised in that culture. According to Lessig, we can't stop kids from using using digital tools to run wild, create derivations, and express themselves. Since we can't beat them  (and maybe we don't want to squelch such humanity anyway) and the demand is only going to increase, we might as well redesign our creative infrastructure to accomodate this new way of communicating.

Here's what the debate between copyright holders and renegade remixers boils down to: What kind of media use is communication-based and what kind is for personal consumption. Lessig refers to Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute for a summary of how remixing content is often a fundamentally social activity:

And it's not just that it yields a different kind of product at the end, it's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other. All of our normal social interactions become a kind of invitation to this sort of collective expression. It's our real social lives themselves that are transmuted into art. 

The coup-de-gras of his argument is that remixing is "about individuals using our shared culture as a kind of language to communicate something to an audience."

When a person creates something, they necessarily present it to the world as a contribution to our culture. It seems counter-intuitive to have a lot of restrictions about how content can be reused because all art is subject to reinterpretation. If you're going to say something about the human experience, others must be allowed to build on what you say--that's one thing that sharing a culture is all about.

Not Your Grandparent's Mass-Communication

I guess the difference is approaching modern culture as a forum instead of a bulletin board. Mass communication used to be one-way--writing was printed and sold, programs were broadcast via radio or television, and the audience had few opportunities to talk back to the content creators. (Thus, the bulletin board analogy: a privileged few would post messages and art to the community board for all to ponder.) But the tools of content creation have been democratized, and we now have a medium (the Internet) that allows for two-way communication.

We inherited a legal structure that was appropriate for the technology and mass communication methods of the past. But it was not designed (nor could it have been) with an understanding of the fundamental ways in which mass communication would change, becoming two-way, a conversation, content as a language among our shared culture.

While it is important that we respect legal precedent, there is nothing stopping our society from changing law for the future. The amendment process was built into the U.S. Constitution because Congress understood that they didn't have an eternally perfect document on their hands, they have a pretty good beta. Also must have known that future eras would present changes in society that were impossible to anticipate. So the Constitution, the kernel of law in this country, was designed to have a degree of flexibility.

There is question about how accessible the modern Congress is, and whether they would pass legislation that is against the financial interests of their special-interest supporters, but that is a question for another time.