process.arts - Comments for " Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy"

It’s this brilliant

cfollows — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:10:04 +0000

It’s this brilliant architecture where everybody puts up their own Web site for their own reasons, links to other people for their own reasons, and yet, there is a creation of shared value. O’Reilly points to YouTube as an example. YouTube’s success, he argues (agreeing again with Chen), came not from the rah- rah of the community activism.

Its success came instead from great code: YouTube’s success, O’Reilly explained to me, wasn’t because [people] thought it was cool. It was because YouTube figured out better how to make it viral. Viral is about making it serve the people’s own interest, so that they’re participating without think- ing that they’re participating. Google said, “Upload your video here and we’ll host it,” and YouTube with their Flash player said, “Either put this video on your site or we’ll host it anyway.” So you get to share the video without any of the costs and with no- muss- no- fuss.

REMIX 224

“People aren’t thinking,” he continued, “that they are donating to YouTube. They’re actually thinking, ‘Wow! I’m getting a free ser- vice from YouTube.’ ”

O’Reilly’s point is a good one. It builds directly on Bricklin’s. You create value by giving people what they want; you create good by designing what you’re offering so that people getting what they want also give something back to the community.

Williams summarize the lesson

cfollows — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:00:00 +0000

Williams summarize the lesson for companies building a hybrid consistent with the principles of “wikinomics” (openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally): 59

What was the difference [between successful business and not]?

The losers launched Web sites. The winners launched vibrant communities. The losers built walled gardens. The winners built public squares. The losers innovated internally. The winners inno- vated with their users. The losers jealously guarded their data and software interface. The winners shared them with everyone. 60 Hybrids are also a model for getting others to innovate in ways that benefit the company.

PAGE 21

Social and Economic benefits

cfollows — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:24:00 +0000

Social and Economic benefits . P.223 - “The goal is to make people feel like there are real social benefi ts and economic benefi ts for them to invest in this platform.”

The limits on sharing are

cfollows — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 18:47:00 +0000

The limits on sharing are therefore not technical. They are "cultural" p170

All the category of “sharing economy” requires is that the terms upon which people participate in the economy are terms not centered on cash. In each, the work that others might share is never shared for the money. p172

We can all understand people in the commercial economy who hate what they do but do it anyway (“he’s just doing it for the money”). That dynamic is very difficult to imagine in the sharing economy. p176

Gifts in particular, and the

cfollows — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 09:36:00 +0000

Gifts in particular, and the sharing economy p 148

Me and thee motivations are not related P 151 participating for Me or Thee- regarding reasons.

Me regarding - because I enjoy doing it, I do it for fun, I like to, I want to do it.

Thee regarding - Help a project, cause, helping others, want it to be part of a mission e.g. support the sharing resources. ideas and practice.

Thin sharing economies (Skype, learning English) people join because it gives something they want. P 154

Wikipedia is my paradigm sharing economy. It's contributions are motivated not by money, but by the fun or joy in what they do. P 162

One reason is structural: - disciplined in your coding.
Comments must be frequent. Code must be made more modular.
But there’s a third reason that is frequently ignored. Free and open- source software takes advantage of the returns from diversity in a way that proprietary software hasn’t. As economist Scott Page has demonstrated in a foundational study about the efficiency of diversity, the success of an enterprise in solving a difficult problem depends not just upon the ability of the people solving the problem. Using mathematical economics, Page shows that the success also depends upon the diversity of the people solving the problem. What’s needed is not just, or even necessarily, racial diversity, but a diversity in experience and worldviews, so as to help a project fi ll in the blind spots inherent in any particular view. Page 165

Digital literacy & the RW Culture

cfollows — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 13:06:00 +0000

For most of human history, text was the only democratic literacy. For most of human history, words were the only form of expression that everyone had access to. The twentieth century gave us an extraordinary range of new types of “writing.” But until the last years of that century, none of that “writing” was ever democratized in the way that text had been. Only a few could go to film school. Only a relatively few had the resources to learn how to record or edit. The single most important effect of the “digital revolution” was that it exploded these historical barriers to teaching. Every important form of writing has now been democratized. Practically anyone can learn to write in a wide range of forms. The challenge now is to enable this learning, not only by building the technologies it requires, but by assuring the freedom that it requires.

So again, as I encouraged in chapter 2, think a bit about that freedom. Remember when you learned to write. Remember the act of quoting. Or incorporating. Or referring. Or criticizing. What freedoms did you take for granted when you did all of this? Did you ask permission to quote? Did you notify the target of your criticism that you were criticizing him? Did you think twice about your right to dis a movie you saw in a letter to a friend? Were you ever troubled by quoting Bob Dylan in an essay about war?

The answer to all these questions is of course “no.” We grew up taking for granted the freedoms we needed to practice our form of writing. We created, and we shared our creativity with whoever would read it (our parents and teachers, if we were lucky). We never questioned the right to create in this way, freely.

page 107

http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/Remix_9781849662505/chapter-ba-9781849662505-chapter-0006.xml;jsessionid=B58A409EBC5B6E50EDEF3D21634E7AF7

UAL DIAL project is addressing these issues http://dial.myblog.arts.ac.uk/about-dial/

The Cult of the Amateur and appropriation in art

cfollows — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 12:42:24 +0000

The section of the book below looks at the notion of originality, examples are given of use and originality in the creation of works. The author rightly supports the remix culture and gives reference to others who support totally originality. The argument could be easily aligned with art history and historical attempts to create truly original piece of work, which in itself is impossible, as all forms of expression are derivative works.

There's is an interesting debate here that reinforces this argument through debating appropriation in art. - The Case for Appropriation: Rob - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/case-appropriation-rob-storr Cultures Compared http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/Remix_9781849662505/chapter-ba-9781849662505-chapter-0006.xml;jsessionid=B58A409EBC5B6E50EDEF3D21634E7AF7

Page 90 - 95 In June 2007, the backlash against RW culture was born. In a short and cleverly written book titled The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, a writer and failed Internet entrepreneur, launched a full-scale attack on precisely the culture that I am praising. The core of his attack was that “amateur culture” is killing “our culture.” The growth of this kind of creativity will eventually destroy much that we think of as “good” in society. “Not a day goes by without some new revelation that calls into question the reliability, accuracy, and truth of the information we get from the Internet,” Keen writes.4 And in response to all the free stuff the Internet offers, Keen is quite worried: “What is free,” he warns, “is actually costing us a fortune.”5 Wikipedia, for example, “is almost single-handedly killing the traditional information business.”6 And the “democratization” that I praise “is,” he argues, “undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent.” My first exposure to this skepticism was at a conference at New York University about “fair use.” The Comedies of Fair U$e conference was filled with artists and creators demonstrating precisely the creativity I’ve been praising. But in the middle of this conference, Charles Sims, a lawyer with the firm of Proskauer Rose, pleaded with the young creators to turn away from their “derivative” form of creativity. They should focus, Sims argued, on something really challenging—“original creativity.” Sims said: I can’t say strongly enough that I think what Larry is really fundamentally focused on… [—] this parasitic reuse [—] is such a terrible diversion of young people’s talent.… I think that if you have young film people you should be encouraging them to make their films and not to simply spend all of their time diddling around with footage that other people have made at great expense, to create stuff that’s not very interesting. There’s a fundamental failure of imagination.… I’m saying, that as members of the academy, to encourage young people to think that instead of creating out of their own souls and their own talents to simply reuse what’s available off the streets to them, is underselling the talents that young people have.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

cfollows — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 10:04:00 +0000

"But why should anyone care about whether remix flourishes, or even exists? What does anyone gain, beyond a cheap laugh? What does a society gain, beyond angry famous people?

There are two goods that remix creates, at least for us, or for our kids, at least now. One is the good of community. The other is education. "

Page; 76-77 , http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/Remix_9781849662505/chapter-ba-9781849662505-chapter-0005.xml?print

Community

Remixes happen within a community of remixers. In the digital age, that community can be spread around the world. Members of that community create in part for one another. They are showing one another how they can create, as kids on a skateboard are showing their friends how they can create. That showing is valuable, even when the stuff produced is not.

Page 80: http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/Remix_9781849662505/chapter-ba-9781849662505-chapter-0005.xml?print

Ito’s results are not complete, but certain patterns are clear. “A very high proportion of kids who engage in remix culture,” for example, “have had experience with interactive gaming formats.” “The AMV scene is dominated by middle-class white men”—in contrast to the most famous remixers in recent Japanese history, the “working-class girls” who produced doujinshi. Most “have a day job or are full-time students but… have an incredibly active amateur life.… [They] see themselves as producers and participants in a culture and not just recipients of it.” That participation happens with others. They form the community. That community supports itself.

Page 81: http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/Remix_9781849662505/chapter-ba-9781849662505-chapter-0005.xml?print

This is not to say, of course, that however they do this remix, they’re doing something good. There’s good and bad remix, as there’s good and bad writing. But just as bad writing is not an argument against writing, bad remix is not an argument against remix. Instead, in both cases, poor work is an argument for better education. As Hosler put it to me:

Every high school in America needs to have a course in media literacy. We’re buried in this stuff. We’re breathing it. We’re drinking it constantly. It’s 24/7 news and information and pop culture.… If you’re trying to educate kids to think critically about history and society and culture, you’ve got to be encouraging them to be thoughtful and critical about media and information and advertising.

Doing something with the culture, remixing it, is one way to learn.

Page 89

This is a point that has been made for some time, perhaps never better than in Andrew Odlyzko’s essay “Content Is Not King”:2despite the rhetoric of the content industry, the most valuable contribution to our economy comes from connectivity, not content. Content is the ginger in gingerbread—important, no doubt, but nothing like the most valuable component in the mix.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

Lawrence Lessig

Page; 76-77 , http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/Remix_9781849662505/chapter-ba-9781849662505-chapter-0005.xml?print

Download here - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/remix-making-art-and-commerce-thrive-hybrid-economy