On May 26, Research Director Mark Latonero and Professor Aram Sinnreich (Rutgers University) presented “Nowadays It’s Like Remix World”: The Hidden Demography of New Media Ethics at the International Communication Association conference in Phoenix, AZ. The paper was a part of the panel “Participatory, Promotional Cultures: ‘Sharing’ and Self-Representation in the Contemporary Media Moment.” CCLP funded this project as a part of its Technology & Social Change initiative.
The paper examines the explosion of new “configurable” cultural forms and practices, such as mashups, remixes and machinima, enabled by rapidly changing global digital network technologies. While these new cultural forms, which blur the distinctions between traditional production and consumption, have come increasingly into contrast with copyright law, people around the globe have been developing their own ethical criteria to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate practices. Latonero and Sinnreich analyze longitudinal data from surveys fielded in 2006 and 2010, showing that not only have these practices become more prevalent, the ethical frameworks people employ to make sense of these practices have also become more complex. The analysis includes the demographic profiles of respondents employing each ethical framework, revealing hidden national, class and ethnic distinctions between communities.
The manuscript is currently under review by the journal Information, Communication & Society.
A related CCLP report will be available this summer.