“This is the Remix:” Perspectives on Configurable Culture

In the November 3 session of American University's School of Communication Faculty Forum Dr. Aram Sinnreich discussed the idea of Configurable Culture in his presentation “Ethics Evolved: An International Perspective on Copying in the Networked Age”. Configurable Culture, a term coined by Dr. Sinnreich, is a set of cultural forms and practices that allow people to manipulate cultural information in a new way.

Examples include mashups, memes, and machinima. Each time people enjoy memes featuring Lipton Tea and Kermit the Frog or listen to The Grey Album, they are consuming configurable culture. 

A recent addition to the American University faculty, Dr. Sinnreich is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and a Research Fellow for the Center for Media and Social Impact. He previously served as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University's School of Communication and Information, the Director of the at Media Innovation Lab at OMD Ignition Factory, and Managing Partner of Media/Tech Consultancy at Radar Research.  His research heavily focuses on the intersection of culture, law, and technology with emphasis on subjects such as emerging media and music. Dr. Sinnreich is the author of two pivotal books in the communication field, Mashed Up (2010) and The Piracy Crusade (2013). He has written for The New York Times, Billboard, and Wired.

Dr. Sinnreich first became fascinated with studying configurable culture during the early 2000s after encountering a mashup of Destiny Child’s “Bootylicious” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, comically titled, “Smells Like Booty”. After hearing the mashup, Dr. Sinnreich started researching and interviewing various mashup artists. He noticed that the traditional notions of consumption and production were breaking down and that the foundations of cultural understanding no longer apply to the set of modern cultural practices. According to Dr. Sinnreich, “Culture is always the leader of new social imaginaries. We get our understanding of who we are, how we relate to one another, how we fit together, what kinds of social organizations we should produce, what kinds of social institutions should have legitimacy from culture.” New cultural forms suggest new kinds of social organizations such as Anonymous, the Black Lives Matter movement, Occupy Wall Street, and Kopimism.

Using music as an entry point to the concept of Configurable Culture, Dr. Sinnreich explained that there are two sides in relation to music: consumption (consumers who listen to the music) and production (professionals who produce and record in studios). In old models, the consumer and producer were connected only through currency exchange. With new digital technology, new versions of pseudo-consumption and pseudo-production emerge. Dr. Sinnreich uses customizing a Pandora radio station and the software Garage Band as examples. Pandora customizing, curating a subset of cultural information (music) and customizing it to personal needs, is not considered traditional consuming rather “consumption adjacent”. The idea of “production adjacent” is displayed in Garage Band, where the consumer creates a musical production based on provided samples. 

In his study of configurable culture, Dr. Sinnreich performed longitudinal studies on thousands of online, English-speaking adults from various countries to assess their awareness, consumption, and engagement in Photoshop, music mashups, mods, anime music videos, video remixes, and machinima. The results indicate enormous growth in widespread awareness of all cultural practices over the past 5 years. While from 2006 to 2010, there was significant but fairly feeble growth in awareness, from 2010 to 2014 awareness nearly doubled. Respondents who claimed no awareness decreased close to zero, implying that every online adult is aware of some form of configurable culture. An age gap is present with younger respondents more likely to claim awareness compared to the older respondents. Dr. Sinnreich suggested there will be a saturation point emerging in the near future, where the older generation will rank closer to the younger generation in awareness. The U.S. has displayed the fastest growth in awareness, rising from 31% to 77% of the overall population. Other surveyed countries reveal a less significant rise over time.