DJ Spooky Reaction

The first thing that really caught my attention when I was watching was DJ Spooky's comment about how we're all so used to looking at all sorts of things at once these days (multiple screens/windows/etc), mainly because it made me realize just how much :stuff: I have open all the time on my desktop:



Another thing that intrigued me was how he was talking about the "democratizing" element of the open source and creative commons movements. The thing that really struck me about it was how these things are always presented as terribly new or innovative concepts, because the thing is, they're really not. The internet was founded on these ideas, they just didn't have names at the time and there wasn't really any other way of doing things. Admittedly, I'm not old enough to have been around at the beginning, but my father was and one of the things he always tells me about the beginnings of the internet was that everyone online back in the early days produced and released things (mainly code--some of which is still in use to this day) without any sense of ownership or credit. They made things because they was a need and they had the skills to fill it and if someone could distribute it to more people or improve upon it they did. There wasn't really even a question of licensing or making sure all parties involved are credited or sticking it to the man by making free clones of existing products--instead it was all about helping the community at large. I think for the most part, even considering creative commons and open source, the original "spirit" of the internet is almost dead these days. Most people don't produce things for the betterment of the community anymore so much as gaining attention (whether they're immediately aware of this motive or not--look, I just did up there^ when I posted my desktop: Look at me! I have two monitors! Too bad you can't tell one of them is actually a Cintiq...--oh look, I did it again).

I guess for my last bit I just want to make some general comments. Maybe it's just because it's not my scene, but I watching the video I felt like there was an inflated sense of self-importance re: the whole DJ/music thing. I guess it's natural to center a presentation around what you know, but I dunno, the whole DJ thing seem so 90s to me (in other words, outdated and marginally relevant, and his efforts to link it to "remix culture" as a whole were weak at best). Not to mention a good chunk of the video seemed more like flagrant self-promotion than anything. Maybe I'm just being negative and judgmental, but pretentious art BS just gets on my nerves and the latter half of the presentation was just that. And I'm going to stop myself here before I go off a tangent and offend people.