Engaging Media - Week Six

Readings for this week...
Recovering Fair Use - Steve Collins
Boulevard of Broken Songs - Em McEvan

Well I’ve been discovering the world of mash-ups since reading the Boulevard of Broken Songs and can see how people get sucked into spending large amounts of time cruising YouTube.

I would agree with the comment that “mash-up artists take a common popular culture and appropriate it for their own desires and creative impulses” and this really appeals to me. I would also highlight how mash-ups are quite often used for satirical purposes or as a social commentary tool. My brother-in-law drew my attention to the enormous number of mash-ups on YouTube based around the 2004 German film Downfall, a film about Adolf Hitler’s last days. There are a number of mash-ups that take this film as their basis and apply modern-day political events and characters including British PM Gordon Brown, US President Barack Obama and the European Elections. I particularly like one that takes a terrific scene from Downfall and re-writes the subtitles to portray Gordon Brown’s reaction to a disastrous election result in Glasgow - my brother-in-law is from Glasgow so he was very keen to show me this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4n--IXg6HY - Not for kids. Very bad language in this one.

I just really like the creative practice of combining different elements to produce something unexpected or something with a deeper commentary. I guess mash-ups are a perfect example of Web 2.0 technologies at work and the essential Web 2.0 philosophy of enhanced creativity and collaboration and the development of web-based communities and social networking tools.

I quite liked this blog that I found when I was doing a little more reading on the subject -
The Synthetic Librarian -http://syntheticlibrarian.com/2009/07/30/mashup-sharing-little-mashups-have-big-value-when-you-share-them-like-social-media

Obviously the subject ties in well with our other reading for the week Recovering Fair Use. Mash-ups are clearly a great example of prosumerism at work. Copyright and the concept of fair use have always been difficult areas but the rise of Web 2.0 and associated technologies are obviously taking the issue to a completely new level. The laws involving this sort of user-generated content must be complex and undoubtedly need to evolve to keep pace with the popularity of the technology. There has to be some protection but I tend to agree with the idea that Collins puts forward “that an overly strict copyright regime unbalanced by an equally prevalent fair use doctrine is dangerous to creativity, innovation, culture and democracy”.