Remixing: From Consumers to Producers

The recent Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego revealed “an increasingly commonplace process: people using cheap and accessible digital tools to ‘remix’ the world around them,” said a Newsweek reporter. “It used to be that when you wanted something, you went and made it. Then we turned into a bunch of consumers.”

But now, the technologies are available for people to mix and remix their browser bookmarks and their digital photo albums with other people’s, their music (downloading individual songs online instead of buying albums on disk), their TV viewing (through TiVo), and their news (through personalized newsfeeds and blogs.)

The common or garden couch potato, passively taking whatever content producers threw at her or (more often than not) him (and more often than I care to admit, me), is mutating to a new species that performs “once unthinkable acts every day — like adding soundtracks and special effects to their home movies, or searching through a billion documents for an obscure fact, or publishing [their] thoughts worldwide with a mouseclick.”

This is not to mention the likelihood that ordinary people will one day be manufacturing their own (or replicating others’) sophisticated products in “replicators,” also known as “rapid prototype machines” or “3-D printers.” Already used to produce plastic components such as vehicle parts for industry, these devices could easily be adapted to make many household items on demand in the home. A British researcher plans to make a replicator that can replicate itself, and the copies can therefore replicate themselves, and so on in an exponential explosion. Let’s hope he remembers to build an Off button into the original.

This is just some of the stuff of societal revolution, but as we see in this (as in every other month’s) issue of Health Futures Digest, not only is there much more, but also the effects of this stuff — from a rapid erosion of US dominance in science and technology to a deeper understanding of the fundamental processes of life — are fast becoming apparent.

Trends; New Theory of Cognition; Degrees in Nanotech; DNA Sequencing; Globalization — Offshoring Trend Grows; China Prowess; India Advances; US Dominance Receding; Human Cancer Genome Project