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The Future of Ideas


thank you, Lawrence Lessig

Remix Culture @ American University

thank you, American University

Social Transformation

The public sphere is an area in social life where people can get together and freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is "a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment."[1] The public sphere can be seen as "a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk"[2] and "a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed".[3] Follow on Wikipedia ->

The emergence of the internet as a public sphere is recent, and the causes for its emergence have not been fully explored. According to Jurgen Habermas, civic society don't emerge ad hoc, but in particular historical circumstances. One of Habermas' ideas about why a public sphere would emerge is common concern. According to Wiki, "Domain of common concern: "... discussion within such a public presupposed the problematization of areas that until then had not been questioned. The domain of ‘common concern’ which was the object of public critical attention remained a preserve in which church and state authorities had the monopoly of interpretation. [...] The private people for whom the cultural product became available as a commodity profaned it inasmuch as they had to determine its meaning on their own (by way of rational communication with one another), verbalize it, and thus state explicitly what precisely in its implicitness for so long could assert its authority."




Luckily for us, more and more websites are being dedicated to the analysis of social networks, or in technical talk, SNA. These types of sites use complex sociological techniques to research how the public sphere is being redefined as new technology opens new public spaces. These websites provide a good backbone to discussions of how technology is changing our public interactions.

These types of websites look at things from a macro level. Think some about the micro level, you. How have social networking sites changed the scope of your public sphere? What concerns or issues are most prevalent in the public sphere of online interaction?

Reading (Real) Public Space

Reading Public Space and Its Structures: Should the Architect be "Author"?

From open2.net

For Peter and Alison Smithson, this gentle populism and watered-down design was not what Modernism was all about. They demanded a return to a more rigid, formal architecture and put their ideas to work with their Secondary School in Hunstanton, Norfolk, completed in 1954.

At Hunstanton, the Smithsons made a virtue of the construction process of the building: structural and service elements were left exposed and the austere steel and glass frame gave the building a skeletal appearance.

This "truth to materials" approach was anti-aesthetic, but, the Smithsons believed, more honest and true to Modernism's basic principles. Reynar Banham dubbed the school 'the New Brutalism', a movement which aimed, in his words, to "make the whole conception of the building plain and comprehensible. No mystery, no romanticism, no obscurities about function and circulation."

But the honesty in the Brutalist treatment of materials means that these buildings are often considered to be simply ugly, and what's more, have not proved immune to the crippling social problems which spread in the 1970s in particular.

With many Brutalist buildings, the feeling exists that the needs of expressing an architectural ideal comes before the needs of the human beings who have to use them. By the time the backlash against Modernism was in full swing in the 1970s, Brutalist buildings often bore the brunt of the criticism.

Shake ur money maker

A bridge between public space and the private imagination: remix culture. In public space we interact, we pursue interaction that we would not have otherwise, and where there is interaction, there is possibility, possibility for growth, for further interaction and the continuation of those interactions in the private space of the imagination. Such a remix culture is still forking and evolving and finding new interactions that will redefine how we share and copywright and "own" public interactions, the manifestations of the sharing of the private imagination. But one remix culture that has been evolving and diverging for some 40 years is hip-hop culture, where the remix is a viable form for personal expression, where the borrowed (arranged thoughtfully and respectfully) is just as artful and the invented, where recycling is an act of creation that takes a completed action and explores its further potentialities. Hip-hop is public space, and hip-hop is remix culture.

Wikipedia entry for "Remix Culture":
Remix culture is a term employed by Lawrence Lessig[when?] and other copyright activists[who?] to describe a society which allows and encourages derivative works. Such a culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright holders. Lessig presents this as a desirable ideal and argues, among other things, that the health, progress, and wealth creation of a culture is fundamentally tied to this participatory remix process.
Sampling in musicmaking is a prime example of reuse, and hip-hop culture's implicit acceptance of the practice makes it a remix culture.



Hip-hop is remix culture because it knows that it must look back and dig through the structures that have shaped it, the songs that have led to its evolution, in order to create meaningful interactions that will continue to define the genre. Almost every song includes at least one line or loop from a past creation. Thus hip-hoppers of all spheres, dancers, rappers, and painters, all make public discourse of the private elocutions made by their peers. This embodies the meaning of remix culture, and illustrates how the private mind is bridged to public space.

Private or Public?

Are online profiles a new forum of "public space"? There's a good chance that hirers are tapping into such social networks in order to gather background information on employees, information that would not be public material prior to the advent of the web. Are private lives becoming public domain? A resource website for recent college graduates addresses this:

CollegeGrad.com

Certainly social networking sites like Facebook are opening pathways between diverse and disparate people, flooding the marketplace of ideas with new remixes, collaborations, and possibilities. We can think of it as akin to the introduction of the novel, another historical turning point that had the masses interested in the movements of strangers. At the turn of the century, people were able and willing to use novels to move private information into the public realm, and now, a decade removed from the turn of the millennium, we are eager to draw the blanket of public space over our entire private lives. Judging by wall comments and status updates, we are interested in the most grotesque and the painfully mundane, in knowing when our acquaintances are are at the urologist and when they are brushing their teeth.

Put simply, there are many things average people are willing to put into online public space that they are uncomfortable broadcasting in live public space. Pictures, messages, and replies that would go too far or be too mean to shout in a public square, are commonplace on the web. Where does the shift from "private" to "public" cease? Or on the other hand, will we as humans continue to welcome technological advances that further the public broadcast of our private lives?