Blog 2 -- Kathleen Welter

Question #2 – Remix and Open Source Culture – What impact has digital technology had on issues of authorship, access to technology and means of cultural production?

According to Lev Manovich’s article Remixability and Modularity, our digital technology has had a dramatic increase in accessing information. He explained this concept by using geography features. Think technology as a mountain top and mountains usually have streams running down them. As the water or streams increase their speed, they are able to find different paths. This is applied to our technology today because when you think about it, technology and information keep growing and as they keep growing, they find different paths that all connected similar to streams on a mountain. These paths can go into different directions and can be manipulated or remixed. These paths of information go through a transformative process that can be organized, shared, or combine new forms of information therefore, increases our means of accessing different types of technology.

Also in Remixabilty and Modularity, Manovich compared issues of cultural production to mass production. He explained that we’re still living in a mass production era. Actually, we’re already on our way out. But it has been our way of life since 1913 when Ford distributed his first factory car. Because one lives in an industrial society, does that mean that modularity in contemporary culture lags behind industrial modularity, responsible for mass production? According to Manovich, no. Simply, that cultural modularity or production seems to be governed by a different logic. Meaning it has different standards and not everything is “built in.”

Authorship is a difficult subject with digital technology because there is now a thing called intellectual property. An example of this can be the origin of Facebook. Mark Zukerberg, the designer used his own software to design Facebook, however it wasn’t his idea. So how can one put authorship on an idea? This is where intellectual property comes into play and was used against Zukerberg. Because digital technology has been expanded upon, so does the means of authorship.