Over at mybrilliantmistakes, Cynthia Closkey has a post about the decline and fall of the oral tradition:
If I post a story on my blog, it’s captured in words. That’s nice if I want it to be captured. But what if I want for others to take it and run with it, add their own twists? [...] rarely does anyone take a post and reimagine or re-present it in a new light. In fact, I think if someone did, they might be slammed for stealing the originator’s idea.
[...]
I think the Web is a little too good at preserving things, so we can’t experience the beauty and surprise of mutation.
(I’m aware of the irony of dumping all that in a block quote. Whatever, man, whatever.)
I remember a person In The Know telling me that jazz is essentially about two things: collaboration and improvisation. That doesn’t really jive – so to speak – with the modern way of doing things, where bands, authors and so on are seen as monolithic entities with a distinctive style and personality. A lot of effort goes into building and maintaining this kind of image, and recognition and personal glory are seen as rightful rewards.
The upshot is that there’s very little tendency to play around with creative output. That’s why I love projects like Desert Sessions and Goon Moon: it’s a bunch of guys playing around. There’s also a (slowly) rising trend of musicians making master tracks available for their fans to remix and share, which is of course opening the collaborative playing field. What about writing, though? Back in the day, stories were cannibalised left right and centre, with the emphasis on what the writer could build around that. Nowadays that just feels like cheating.
That’s a shame, to be honest. It’s fair point about the level of preservation on the internet – I wonder if we’re approaching a kind of recording saturation – but it’s also an ideal medium for collaboration and/or riffing on other people’s ideas (*cough*), and it’s exciting and fun to be involved in something like that. Cynthia wonders whether the spirit of the oral tradition is “part of the human experience”; yes, I do believe it is.
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