I found myself in the awkward position of agreeing with two opposing views at once, and I’m trying to work through the implications in advance of my thesis on copyright and the literary canon.

The work I’m reading now is Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig.  Lessig argues for the value of remix, both in the social and economic realms; in doing so, he praises Steven Johnson’s book on mass media, Everything Bad is Good for You.  This citation sent my mind back to Susan Jacoby’s polemic against anti-intellectualism, The Age of American Unreason.  Lessig summarizes Johnson’s argument as follows:

Aiming to rebut the view that television has become “brain dead,” Johnson argues that TV has in fact become more rich and complex over time, not less.  The reason relates in part to technology.  As people collect not only television sets but DVD players, producers of television programming to give their audience an interest in after-broadcast sales.  A show maximizes its revenue when there’s a postbroadcast demand for DVDs or for reruns.

So how do you create that demand?  One way is through complexity.  As Johnson demonstrates, the most successful television shows have multiplied the number of plot lines running through them.  And though thte shows are always understandable at one viewing, few viewers would understand everything going on in every show.  The fan thus has a reason to watch it again–which means, buy the DVD or tune in to reruns.  Complexity thus drives follow-on consumption. (94)

The point Lessig tries to make is that much of the professional mass media are oriented toward response and community for market reasons–I’ve certainly seen this in my lifelong devotion to various science fiction communities.  The rise of the serial drama in recent years underscores this trend.  Remix of this culture is not only inherent to its form but a valid cultural response.

I don’t have Jacoby’s book at hand, so I can’t specifically account for her rejection of Johnson’s argument.  I can say with confidence, however, that it fit into a larger rejection of the idea that the mass media are intellectually neutral or even beneficial.  Much of The Age of American Unreason is concerned with examining the deleterious effects of video culture concomitant with the death of print culture.  Television not only promotes passivity, Jacoby argues, but it encourages us toward anti-intellectualism and “unreason.”

I agree with much of this argument, particularly because I’ve seen it in my own life.  TV and internet video often makes me intellectually and physically lazy.  I do not approve of myself spending an entire Saturday on Hulu any more than I would approve of someone else watching VH-1 reruns for the same amount of time (and, to be honest, I’ve done the VH-1 marathon thing too).

But I also agree with Lessig’s point–some mass media are good for us, and response and criticism of said media are essential to the advancement of our society.  We need to reexamine the culture of professionalism that legally and culturally limits us in our remix and (dare I say it?) deconstruction of our culture.

Lessig and Jacoby are addressing completely separate subjects, and I suspect they would agree on many fundamentals–and what I derive from the two is an ethics of remix.  Lessig touches on this somewhat by detailing how remix is good for education and personal development, but he never addresses the issue of quality.  Jacoby addresses quality at length, lamenting the rise of academic units devoted to popular culture and fat studies, lambasting literary criticism that takes seriously the ludicrous notion that Bob Dylan and Paul Simon are true poets.  She focuses on what we consume and how it affects our engagement with society and cultural debates, but she never offers a method by which we can intellectually engage the mass media environment we live in.  Both authors describe in horrific detail the decay that a read only–as opposed to a read/write–culture engenders: passivity, laziness, blind consumerism.  Hence the ethics of remix–not remix for its own sake, but a cultural response or even a celebration of the mass media.  And from there, we can develop a means by which we assess quality and even canonicity.

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Jacoby, Susan. The Age of American Unreason. New York: Pantheon, 2008.

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2008.