Recycled Content and the Death of Original

It is rare to see completely new content in today’s abysmal cultural wasteland saturated with recycled references, reboots and remixes.  Opening any of the internet’s major content aggregators, facebook, reddit or tumblr for example, yields an absurd amount of reused jokes and reposted images.  Often these sites are monetized as well, plastered with advertisements and other garbage.  While it’s very rare to see someone in Utah’s amazing photo of their view outside their house or a high schooler’s watercolor illustration, it’s almost impossible to avoid encountering old worn out jokes or captioned images of random things.

What caused this phenomenon to be happen to an unprecedented degree in today’s age?  It seems like a paradox that an age in which communication and media sharing is easier than in any age before that would have an astonishing amount low amount of new content being shared on the most popular websites.  What causes this confusing trend is both how easy it is redistribute content as well as how easy it is to monetize said content.  To try to explain this to you, I’ll create a hypothetical chain of events that plays out far too often on the internet.  Let’s say, for example, someone takes an album of photographs and wants to share them with the internet.  They decide to create a photo blog in which they upload all of the photos they took, one by one.  Now, let’s say someone finds a photo on your blog that really stands out to them as spectacular, and decides to share this image with more of the net to hope to give the artist the recognition they deserve.  They post a link to the album featured on the original artist’s blog, and attract a few dozen more views to the author.  One of the new viewers decides to download one of the images and rehost it on a completely different hosting site and submit a link to the image that they thought was particularly noteworthy.  Why bother rehosting?  The person probably knows that loading times on rehosting sites are much quicker, increasing the chance that the content consumers would give the image a few of their seconds, the maximum amount of time something can take to enjoy to achieve success.  The image goes viral, attracting thousands of views and therefore generating a noteworthy amount of profit through advertising revenue.  Unfortunately, none of the money generated or even any of the attention will actually reach the content’s creator who will more than likely remain oblivious to the fact that any of these events took place.  In the past, it was much more difficult and time consuming to profit of other’s art; attempting to paint copies of the Mona Lisa or completely recreate a symphony based off the ideas of other composers without contribution was much more time consuming and less likely to be profitable.  Now, in the age of instant commincation and dupilcation, all it takes in a right click and a submit button to set sail to e-fame and profit.  As one would imagine, in this type of ecosystem new content becomes both essential to the success of the system and unrewarded by it.  So, as you could guess, what eventually happens to this type of system is that the demand of easily available already processed “funny” and “cool” content rapidly exceeds the supply.  How does this system persists if those putting in hours of work to create content get discouraged?  One of the ways that the system persists is by finding methods to create “funny” and “cool” content without having to actually put in more than a few minutes, even seconds, of effort.  In particular, images with captioned text flourish perhaps even more than any other type of content in this environment, since instances literally take only a few seconds to create.  The ecosystem of images on the internet sure is a complex one.

So, my take on the matter is pretty simple, I blame the consumers of the media, not the rehosters, reposters and reporters.  Put simply, if no one supported sites that take advantage of new content so viciously, they would shut down fade away and eventually shut down, and instead be replaced by other methods of transmission.  If consumers of the media fled sites that profited off of other’s work instead of frequenting them, the concept would seem foreign and impossible.  Imagine an internet in which music was shared between people using unlabeled files and people frequently claimed songs to be their own.  Instead, our culture seems to have an obsession with giving an artist credit for their work when it comes to music, people often grow to like artists based off just a few of their songs.  Some may argue that remixes and mashups are an instance of the phenomenon I described earlier, however I disagree partially.  While some opportunistic producers try and gain money and fame by tweaking other’s work and rebranding it as their own in a way very similar to the ways in which images are stolen, others use remixes as a way to expand and build on other’s work.  Like I said, music as a whole is much more “civilized” when it comes to artist recognition and compensation, and serves as a good example as to where other forms of media should head.  It would be both bizarre and outrageous to see your music being sold exactly as you released it by another party separate from you, yet with images it’s almost expected.  In the future, I hope that this transition takes place naturally as people begin to realize what exactly is going on and agree that a change needs to be made.  Sure, this sounds idealistic and unrealistic, but it’s possible that a shift might occur even without a change in user ethics.  Sites like Youtube and iTunes enjoy immense popularity because the content creators on those sites have the possibility of being directly compensated, so creators looking to make money may shift to sites that pay posters, most likely dragging their fans with them.  Perhaps both will occur together and we’ll shift to a more enjoyable, fair web.