Andrew Valentino - Blog Post 2

Digital technology has essentially democratized culture. While at first it was used primarily as a means of disseminating products from manufacturers to consumers (as in films and music) in a generally unidirectional manner, the availability of file hosting services coupled with the reduced price of professional authoring tools has resulted in everyone sharing with each other. Following the rapidly decreasing prices of electronics, the ability to obtain access to the entire world of digital content is becoming more easily accessible, allowing the digital divide to be bridged naturally by economics. Authorship has also become somewhat muddled as an authoritative expression, at least in academic circles. In practice, however, authorship has still generally been relegated to the creator of a specific work, which includes remixes and open source software. In the case of remixes, the author of the remix is understood to be different from the author of the source material, and I have seen people react negatively when the perceive that their specific remix has been plagiarized by someone else - indicating a sense of authorship over the reorganization but not the raw material. In the case of open source projects or software, typically I have seen credits involved with new releases or specific patches. Many 3d models I have used in animations were accompanied by permission to freely use the file but to give credit to the artist who created it. The idea of authorship is not lost to the digital realm - it is just more easily confused by people who don't give credit where credit is due.