The latest issue of Harper’s features an excellent roundtable discussion on how video games might be used to teach writing. Though most of it will be familiar to anyone who has followed recent debates about “serious games,” it is worth reading. Among the discussants, Raph Koster stood out as particularly insighful, and his comments about new forms of literacy really struck home:

What we mean by literacy is changing. If you look at books like The Da Vinci Code, a lot of what it does is appropriation–of a painting, or a historical text–and annotation, with this whole cottage industry of providing the footnotes: the TV specials, the books. … Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy.

Appropriation and annotation (or, to use the popular vernacular, remix and tagging) have been at the center of my interests for a while now, but it’s nice to see them being discussed in a high-profile forum like Harper’s.

Koster’s comments echo the views of my friend Dan Perkel, who has been investigating “copy and paste literacy” on MySpace. Many people focus on the “remix culture” of appropriation and annotation as if it is something new–but these practices have been around since the dawn of culture. What is new, as Koster and Dan indicate, is the general rise in people’s ability to recognize and engage in these practices: their literacy.

The discussion in Harper’s ends with a kind of lament that a population highly literate in appropriation and annotation will squeeze out the “great artist” by flooding our culture with lesser-quality niche productions. I agree with that conclusion but not the explanation. The era of the great artist will come to an end, not because of overcrowded cultural markets, but because a literate population will recognize appropriation and annotation at the heart of all creative production, and it will reject the myths of the solitary genius and the original creative act that have dominated for the last few centuries. The great artist will disappear, but there will continue to be great art.

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.

This week the 49th annual San Francisco International Film Festival starts, and I’m happy to report that the team of media hackers I work with at Yahoo! Research Berkeley was able to contribute to part of it. That contribution is International Remix, a web-based tool for re-editing selections from this year’s festival. 19 directors from Brazil, Canada, England, Macedonia, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, and the United States agreed to allow their films to be sliced and diced by the world’s remixers. From Indio Nacional to The Pretty Boy Project, these films are yours for the cutting. Read on for details, or go play with it now. If you have any problems or suggestions, shoot an email to remixer-feedback@yahoo-inc.com.

After logging in to the tool (a simple matter of choosing a username and password under which your work will be saved), you’ll see a selection of “Director’s Clips” in a list on the left side of the screen. These are the original selections from which you can choose. Click on clips to load them into the preview window for viewing and editing. You’ll see some details about the clip’s origins displayed below the clip list.

In the preview window you can watch clips, and then adjust the “Clip Begin” and “Clip End” points to select a segment you want to use in your remix. The buttons to either side of the central play/pause button allow you to move foward or backward 1/10 of a second. You can use the right and left arrows on your keyboard to do the same thing. This is especially handy for fine adjustments to the clip begin and end points: just select one of the yellow triangles by clicking on it, then use the frame advance buttons or arrow keys to move it. Once you’ve clipped the segment to your liking, press the “Add to My Clips” button to add it to your clip bin. Or you can drag it into your clip bin by clicking and dragging anywhere on the preview screen. Or just drag directly to the remix timeline.

On the right side of the screen is “My Clips,” a list of all the segments you’ve clipped. These clips are persistent across logins, so you can start working on a remix, log out, and come back later to pick up where you left off. You can rename your a clip by clicking on its title. You can also add special black and title clips for your transitions. To add a clip from your bin to your remix, just press the “Add to My Remix” button, or drag a clip to the timeline.

The timeline at the bottom of the screen is where you sequence the clips you’ve trimmed into your final production. Just click and drag clips around to re-order them. If you click on a clip in the timeline, it will load into the preview window, so you can tweak the endpoints until they are just right. You can add a soundtrack to your remix using the drop-down select list on the right side of the timeline–hover over the selections to hear a preview. You can also turn on and off the audio for individual clips by clicking the “Audio On/Off” buttons at the bottom of each clip in the timeline. When you’re ready to view your work, press the “Play My Remix” button.

After you’ve had a chance to see what you’ve wrought, you can go back and work on it some more, or declare it finished and submit it to the Remix Gallery. You’ll have the chance to give your remix a title and a description, and to select up to five “poster frames” or keyframes to represent your remix in the gallery. Drag the slider back and forth to get the frame you want. Press the orange button with a plus to add another frame. To get rid of a frame, slide it as far as you can to the right or left, and it will disappear. Once you’re happy with the presentation, press “Submit” and your remix will show up in the gallery, looking something like this.

That’s it! So go check it out. Submit your remixes. And definitely show up for the party we’re throwing at Edinburgh Castle on the 24th. Finally, if you have any ideas, complaints, or just want to chat about International Remix, you can email remixer-feedback@yahoo-inc.com, or join our Yahoo! Group. Or just leave your comments below.

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.