McLuhan Shirky Mashup

Watch my video!

I assembled the video downloadable here from a 2008 lecture hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society by Clay Shirky (released under Creative Commons 3.0), a 1967 question and answer session with Marshall McLuhan from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation via YouTube, plus audio taken from the K-OS song Crabbuckit from the album Joyful Rebellion, and the MIA song XR2 from the album Kala from Compact Discs.  My copyright rationale is that the Shirky speech is released for remixing, and all four sources are being used for educational purposes..

McLuhan says artists can anticipate and describe the changes wrought by new media, and teach their viewers how to ride with the punch of those changes, instead of taking it on the chin.  Several people in class have mentioned popular movies about the internet (The Net, Enemy of the State), but I'm not sure those are "art," in the sense that McLuhan means.

One form of the art being produced to anticipate the psychological impact of the tools of the internet could be digital mashups and remixes that have been produced by musicians, video artists, and visual artists in growing numbers over the last two decades.  This art could be seen as a preparation for a world where copyright breaks down, and where people share information more promiscuously.  In a world of ones and zeroes, that information can just as easily be a sample from a song (which was likely very personal to the original artist) as photos of your kids, blog posts, or a video you shot with your friends shared through a social networking site.

My video is itself a mashup, with McLuhan, Shirky, and the effects of the media and digital culture as its topic.  In some way, this video may be an example of the medium being the message.  Although there may be some lighthearted meaning created by the juxtaposition of pieces of video from 40 years apart, the finished piece is at least as much about my ability to create the work, as it is about creating a new message out of what these two scholars have said.