The age of remixes, mash-ups

Maybe we parents start to understand a little of what's behind cut-'n'-paste plagiarism and the link between it and music mash-ups when we read "cyber-punk/sci-fi" author William Gibson's "God's Little Toys" in Wired magazine. Gibson talks about what a revelation it was for him at 13 in 1961 to run across the work of William S. Burroughs, who "incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism." But Gibson called it Burroughs's "interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot" and proceeded to do something like it with his Apple IIc. "Everything I wrote, I believed instinctively, was to some extent collage."

But I really zoomed in on this in his essay: "Our culture no longer bothers to use words like *appropriation* or *borrowing* [emphasis his] 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 remix is the very nature of the digital." A perfect example of this need to participate, to mash stuff up together, was cited by CNET this week: "What do you get if you cross Google Maps with an online gas-price tracker? A shift in the way the Web works," CNET reports, referring to "Cheap Gas." "Now, clever programming tricks that use data from public Web sites are letting developers mix up that information to suit consumers' particular needs.