Remix by Lawrence Lessig speaks about the fear that culture is becoming less democratized due to the innovations of today. John Philip Sousa, a famous American composer in the early nineteen hundreds, took a stand against the violation of copyright law that put his music production at risk. He called the reproduction of his music by others a form of “piracy” due to the products he created were only his and he was to be supported by the copyright rule. However, things turned when technological advances created machines that facilitated the recording and reproduction of such musical productions like that of Sousa’s and created its own market through that. People like Sousa were outraged, not only because he was losing part of his income due to these innovations, but because he believed that mechanical music would create cultural emptiness. Cultural emptiness according to Sousa:
“These ‘machines,’ Sousa feared, would lead us
away from what elsewhere he praised as “amateur” culture.We would become just consumers of culture, not also producers.”
Culture itself would cease to exist due to the lack of participation in creating it. Creating music would involve utilizing the machines of today that would replace actual instruments and thus, leave the creation of music culture to those part of the elite group that would be able to afford such instruments.
With the advances in technology, it became even easier and quicker to mainstream music throughout different mediums and reach several audiences. That in my opinion is the positive aspect that technology has brought to us. Millions of jobs were created to help maintain this widespread distribution of culture in music and although it has benefited us all, I do believe that Sousa did have a point in the magic of creating culture was going to cease to exist. Today we can all just create music with pre-recorded sounds of instruments that we can all utilize without needing to actually learn to play the instrument physically and then produce music out of that. It has become easier for anyone to create music do to how far we have advanced in technology and the creation of these machines, but when you step back and look at our current relationship with these machines, one realizes that we have lost the interest in actually learning to appreciate the creation of music since it is so easy to create it. No effort is needed in learning how to read notes and play an instrument physically when one actually has a machine that by pressing a button or two, you get instantaneous music.
In today’s culture, we are so dependent on technology and how it facilitates our daily life that we no longer stop and smell the roses, unfortunately.
Your comments about the loss of the physical aspect of playing music are interesting but need to be related to the main subject of the book, which is copyright law. You also need to provide some background on Lessig and link to the book.
I agree that a lot of creativity will be lost, but at the same time, some new form of creativity will be gained. In order to remix something, some new aspect needs to be introduced into the item being remixed. Perhaps it will simply make creativity more lethargic. Instead of creating something entirely new, only one aspect gets changed, so the effort between remixing and actually creating grows ever larger