Nicholas Carr's article, "Is Google Making Us Stupider", explores many notions that I have toyed with in the company of my Tech-Savvy friends; his reference to HAL, the creepy AI, being all too prudent.  Maybe I am of a generation too young to notice the mental shift that Carr cites among many including himself, but I am of the opinion that technology is merely an aid to our imperfection.  Of course this ease of access to information will cause our thought process to change, but as the author notes, so too did written language and the printing press.  So what's wrong with accepting that our imperfect, ever-changing brains can be the beneficiaries of a "more perfect" system?  After all, humans have striven for perfection since we first came to understand our own shortcomings.  I see this ability to quickly gather and analyze information as by far one of the greatest achievements of the net, though it is scary to think that WE are the anomaly in the system.

Authoriship: a Problem of Pride

As the title implies, I would like to theorize authorship as a problem of pride, that is the individual's need for recognition.  Manovich compiles a nice list of alternative types of authorship which he implores the reader to consider, all of which he derives from New Media and rely on collaboration as their key tenet.  His analysis of these new forms is where this problem can be identified as one of pride, noting how in many of them the "originator" of a bit of art or "creator" of a game per say there seems to be primacy given to one individual or group over another based largely on whoever was "first".  Perhaps this holds some weight, after all, you can't have a Warhol without a photograph.  I contest this by claiming that, every image is a recreation, every song a remix, every sentence plagiarism, for there is ne'er a truly unique idea.  Even the inventor of the wheel must have simply observed stones rolling by to comprehend it's benefits.

Being a DJ and Producer of House music, Manovich's seeming fascination of DJ Culture and the idea of the remix and the sample amuses me.  In fact, he, in a way, describes it's nature and terminology as a sort of pinnacle for discussing New Media as a whole.  I believe he is scratching the surface of a broad concept that few fields outside Electronic music understand and that I have read about in some depth: everything is a remix.  Variation on an "original" work in the EDM (Electronic Dance Music) genre is no less valid than said original because the genre itself relies on sampling and there is an understanding among DJ's and Producers that virtually anything you can find a clip of is fair game.  Not only that, but the nature of DJing is such that one does not (save a few exceptions that I can think of) play exclusively their own music.  That is the beauty of the genre, the openness to interpretation.  In a way it's almost a Lockean sense of ownership: If I mix my labor with the earth (or in this case the art) then what I have created from it is undoubtedly mine, everyone who contributed before just needs to swallow their pride and accept that their idea has, or optimistically speaking, deserves, the potential billions of permutations derived from it.