People are calling the “Digg riot” unprecedented. Unprecedented? I remember seeing this movie before, with DeCSS as The Information That Wanted To Be Free and the Slashdot crowd as the pitchfork-wielding mob of “passionate activists.” Where did that absurdly reductive equation of code with speech get us? Nowhere. Seven years later, the same battles are being fought. If the Slashdotters and Diggers of the world spent their time engaged in real activism, instead of getting their kicks being part of a mob, maybe we’d have seen some progress on DRM issues by now. But that would involve doing more than just clicking on posts while you’re in your parents’ basement waiting for torrents to download.

I’m often asked to provide a business justification for pursuing the tools and rights frameworks to enable remix culture. I have various stock answers for this, usually focusing on the potential for improved search or cheaper ways of achieving mass customization of media. This evening, while reading the introduction to David Hesmondhalgh’s The Cultural Industries, I came across another concept that I think gets at why media companies ought to embrace the remixing of their content. Hesmondhalgh, citing Garnham, points out that the media and entertainment industry is very high risk. To manage that risk, media companies attempt to build a diverse “cultural repertoire” or range of cultural products. Any given single production is likely to fail, but given a broad catalog of productions, at least one is likely to hit it big.

Allowing and encouraging remix is a way that media companies can expand their cultural repertoires not just at the level of individual works, but also at the level of the possible expressions of those works. Any given single production is likely to fail, but given a broad set of variants of that production, at least one is likely to hit it big. Electronic music producers caught on to this a long time ago–witness the number of remixes (for the street, for the club, for headphones) that hot hip-hop or dance singles receive. But even they are only scratching the surface of what could be achieved by relinquishing control over the creation of derivative works to radically expand their cultural repertoires.

I’ve updated my MSMDX diagram, which illustrates how media and metadata flow to and from different activities around media on the web. The old diagram (on the left), which Chris Anderson called “one of the more cogent graphics illustrating the new architecture of participation in a remix culture,” and Howard Rheingold described as “a kind of mandala of technologies of cooperation in many-to-many cultural production,” was nice, but it had a few serious problems:

1. It didn’t include any metadata flows from casual consumption to the other activities. This was a serious oversight, as this “attention metadata” is one of the most important and useful sources of information about the meaning of media. I strongly believe that “consumers” need to be viewed as active cultural participants and producers, not just passive receivers of “content.”
2. It didn’t show that each kind of metadata is potentially useful for each of the other activities. This is mostly because of the way I designed the graphic: the arrows were too big to show too many of them.
3. It wasn’t sufficiently Powerpoint-friendly.

So I attempted to correct these deficencies in the new diagram, which isn’t quite as aesthetically pleasing but is, I think, more useful. Comments and criticism welcome.

Mimi Ito has updated her “Media Mixes” paper for inclusion in an upcoming book entitled Structures of Participation in Digital Culture (which doesn’t have much web presence yet, but sounds right on). Anyway, it’s well worth checking out if you want to understand what the pervasive media ecology of the future (and for kids, the present) looks like. (Here’s hoping Dr. L. Ron Reacharoundasaurus will drop some science on us in the comments regarding whether she has her facts straight on the card gaming culture.)

I think she’s a little too easy on the corporations currently engineering the media mix; it’s pretty clear they could care less about empowering people and are all about the cold, hard cash. And let’s face it, they’re doing their best to keep this kind of thing illegal and marginal. But part of what we need to do is convince the media corporations that by loosening their grip and allowing peer-to-peer cultural production to move from the margins to the mainstream, they can solve some currently intractable problems. If we fail, we need to burn the whole thing down and start over.