Downlod. Edit. Upload.

Download, tanggalin ang konteksto.

Edit, ibahin ang konsepto.

Upload, iba na ang konteksto.

That’s what I did (or tried to do) with my video mash-up.

Actually this video was my project in an editing class last semester (yeah, please disregard the inconsistencies in quality and lighting, my professor already said his piece about that). This is a musical interpretation of Toplader’s Dancing in the Moonlight. I used nine different videos to create this mash-up. My aim was to show fight scenes not as brutal act but orchestrated performance in the form of dancing. As what Marybeth Peters said in Remix, what I did is “taking something that was and turning it to something it wasn’t.” Download, edit, upload. Many people are doing this online, not only me or Girltalk.

Download, tanggalin ang konteksto.

“Culture emerges from constant interaction and negotiation between people.” This interaction happens online through sharing of ideas and creative content. Interaction in the internet starts with clicking on the links and discourse happens not only in the chat room but in modifying other people’s works as well. Most of the time, our mindset is that the author is dead; we make our personal interpretations of texts or creative products we see online.

Downloading gives us a sense of ownership or right to a property. Then we will have control over it. We can reconstruct what we have downloaded by influencing it with our personal experiences. We adapt it to our daily lives. For example, we download photos of beautiful beaches in the Philippines from a Flicker account of a tourist. We then make one of the photos our desktop wallpaper. Thus, in a way we remove the original context of the material and make it a part of our daily lives. The context is no longer the happy memories of a vacation but an inspiration or a dream summer destination. The context is no longer that of the uploader’s but it has become our own.

Edit, ibahin ang konsepto.

Robbins (1995) supposed “virtual world may be seen as constituting a protective container within all wishes are gratified.” In the virtual or online world, we can be the producer/director/writer/editor of our ‘own’ productions. This is particularly true with who Henry Jenkins calls “textual poachers”—the fans. According to Jenkins, “Fans actively assert their mastery over the mass-produced texts which provide the raw materials for their own cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions”(1992). They ‘edit’ the materials available online (most of the times files they share) and create their own world out of it. Subsequently it becomes the “cultural product” of the fandom. That is why they have fanvids, fancams, fanzines, fanart, fanfics, etc.

Atton is right when he said “we are seeing an erasing of the boundaries between amateur and professional creative practices.” A lot of editing softwares are accessible online. Most of it is user-friendly. Anyone now can do magic with images without the guidance of an expert. Going back to the example I gave, anyone can create a collage of the photos and make it their wallpaper. Anyone can produce a video presentation of his/her dream vacation from the downloaded photos.

Upload, iba na ang konteksto.

Atton (2004) argues that “the creative work is developed socially—through collaborative creation, circulation, commentary and consumption. The Internet has facilitated collaborative creation to a great degree.” This is the idea behind ProdUser. Content online became a collaboration: “social authorship is concerned with the creative collisions between the author as a contemporary creator, as a historical component within cultural production and previous authors; all combine in the field of cultural production.”

Again, my example about the photo-collage, we can upload and make it our profile picture in social networking sites. That way, we have changed the context of the photos. Of course there would be a lot more examples better than what I have given but my point here is that in the process of downloading, editing, and uploading we make creative contents our own.

Download, edit, upload. We do it everyday. 

Downloading happens when we create a mental image of other people's works and store it in our memories. For example, when we look at a painting in a museum and remember how it looks like, how we felt, and what we experienced while staring at it. By subjecting other people's creation on the context of our own experience, we are downloading and editing their work. Uploading happens when we write a reaction paper or a blog post about the trip to the museum including out encounter with the painting. 

Download, edit, upload  is a routine we do in our daily lives. The question now is, is it bad?

Based on the copyright laws, yes. But as far as Lawrence Lessig is concerned, it is not bad. Culture is crafted when ideas are created and recreated. It works like a cycle. 

We should (re)live in a free culture where it is filled with property but the property is not be feudal. We make the past the foundation of the future but we must not allow the past to control the future.

References:

Atton, C. (2004). An Alternative Internet: Radical Media, Politics and Creativity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. London: Routledge, p.23-24.

Lessig, L. (2004). Free Culture. New York: The Penguin Press.

Robbins, K. (1995) “Cyberspace and the World We Live.” In Cyberspace, Cyberbodies Cyberpunk: Cultures of the Technological Embodiment, edited by Featherstone, M. and Burrows, R. London: Sage, p. 143.

RiP: A Remix Manifesto.

Chryl