bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Thursday, August 04, 2005 ::

Cut, paste, link, repeat
Author, blogger and cyberspace coiner William Gibson writes about the art of the bricoleur -- gawd, it feels good to toss a French word into the blog every now and then, and to italicize it to draw even more attention to the snootiness of it all. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. William Gibson writes about the art of cutting and pasting in "God's Little Toys", a piece he wrote for Wired magazine's July issue, Remix Planet. The entire issue is a look, in Wired's words, at how "pop culture has been digitized, resequenced, and reassembled. ... From Kill Bill to Gorillaz, from custom Nikes to Pimp My Ride, this is the age of the remix."

Gibson examines the roots of remix culture, tracing it back to William S. Burroughs, who borrowed ideas and references from other writers and built them into his novel Naked Lunch. But Burroughs wasn't the inventor of the cut-and-paste method. This approach to art "had also worked for Picasso, Duchamp, and Godard," and "were built into the technology through which I now composed my own narratives. Everything I wrote, I believed instinctively, was to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, seemed a matter of adjacent data."
Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.
Blogging, too, is part of this cut-and-paste culture. Our communication, our citizen journalism, the rise of Creative Commons publishing -- all of our small pieces loosely joined by this network of networks -- all of it is more participatory, more democratic and more cross-referential and multi-referential than any other communications medium ever devised.

This blog post is a prime example of the sampling Gibson writes about. Clicking along my blogroll, I zapped over to Tim Samoff's site (I discovered Tim months ago, via a comment he once posted here, about this little blog project). Tim had posted an excerpt from Gibson's essay, along with a link to it and a link to the site from which he discovered the essay. And now I'm linking to it, adding yet another layer to this work, participating in the story along with Gibson, Tim Samoff, Rebecca Blood and lots of other folks. In fact, I'm kinda late to this mashup. But I'm here, and now you are too.

Don't you feel at one with the blogosphere now?

William Gibson, sampling, blogging, creative commons

:: Andrew 18:24 + ::
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