In Lawrence Lessig’s work, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, he contrasts “‘Read/Only’ cultures with ‘Read/Write’ cultures” (Lessig 28). In the former, is a culture that is “less practiced in performance, or amateur creativity, and more comfortable… with simple consumption” (Lessig 28). However, in the later, “ordinary citizens ‘read’ their culture by listening to it or by reading representations… this reading, however, is not enough. Instead, they… add to the culture they read by creating and re-creating the culture around them” (Lessig 28). While the former is obviously preferable, Lessig shows appropriate caution and reminds us that nobody’s fear of losing “nonprofessional creativity” is absolute, but the concern is that “its significance and place within ordinary society would change” (Lessig 28-9).
I see a connection here between Lessig’s RO and RW cultures, and Bolter and Grusin’s terms “immediacy” and “hypermediacy,” in their work Remediation. Immediacy can be seen in transparent representations that take advantage of “linear perspective, erasure, and automaticity” (Bolter and Grusin 33). On the other hand, Hypermediacy “makes us aware of the medium or media (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) and reminds us of our desire for immediacy” (Bolter and Grusin 35). So I think that in a RW culture, hypermediacy would be encouraged, in that, the people of this culture would want to see the inner workings of the medium, in order to learn how to create on their own. The RO culture appears to be more in line with immediacy, taking the medium at face value and not trying to understand how the medium is functioning.
A big part of understanding how a medium functions (in a RW culture practicing hypermediacy), is by remixing the representations it presents. The term remix (also the title of the piece) is an important concept: “whether text or beyond text, remix is collage; it comes from combining elements of RO culture; it succeeds by leveraging the meaning created by the reference to build something new” (Lessig 77). This concept of remix is an important part of RW cultures, because it “invites a wider community to participate; it makes participation more compelling” (Lessig 82). However, Lessig reminds us that there is, “nothing essentially new in remix” because it is just “the same sort of stuff we’ve always done with words… it is how we talk all the time” (Lessig 82). I especially like the way in which Lessig judges remixed media: they succeed when they “show others something new; they fail when they are trite or derivative” (Lessig 82). To me, revealing something new to an audience, can be used to help them become better at listening to themselves and the world around them.
As an academic writer, what I have just done in the previous paragraph is not only acceptable, but one of the main ways in which our discourse functions: through quoting others. Lessig brings up an very important point that “the freedom to quote, and to build upon, the words of others is taken for granted by everyone who writes” yet we cannot do the same for a “remixed” piece of music or video clip, used for the same purpose: “whether justified or not, the norms governing these forms of expression are far more restrictive then the norms governing text” (Lessig 54). I think this just shows the significant gap between two very different worlds in America today. Unfortunately it is making more and more sense to divide America by: those who get it and those who don’t, those who don’t make the laws and those that do, those that understand where technology and entertainment are going and those that cling to esoteric corporate structures. As much as I disagree with dividing people into groups, I think it is even more problematic to ignore the ever-widening gap in America today.
