Mashups

"Nothing like the sun."  Those words were written in the 17th century by William Shakespeare, and in 1987 they were sampled by Sting when he released an album by the same name. The album was critically acclaimed by the music industry and the public in general still rates this as probably his best album.

In 1989, an unknown white boy rap artist Robert van Winkle, better known as Vanilla Ice, sampled a baseline (even more diffuse than lyrics) from a song called "Under Pressure" by Queen and David Bowie.  He released it as a mashup called "Ice Ice Baby". If you really are pretentious, you might deny the infectiousness of the melody. Van Winkle was derided as a hack and was promptly booted of his label. I guess the reason that the industry came down so hard on Van Winkle was that rap at that stage was still not seen as an art form, and Van Winkle's campy emulation of ghetto style was embarrassing.  The drug-infused grittiness of Eminem's mashups later in the decade seemed to hit home with the public (says something about the public I think).

The reason for this rant is that a colleague of mine mentioned the other day that I am quite cynical about Web 2.0 business ideas. But the fact is that I believe the tacit knowledge floating around in the digital brain is mostly made up of mashups. Just like artists rip each other off, so do web artists.

There are a couple of constants that have remained very important for developing anything through the history of humankind. The most important of the important factors is that any idea created needs to address a discernable need. There needs to be something that gets satisfied in the end. We are also living in the times of Moore's Law which basically means that that the times of (re)inventing and creativity have also shortened dramatically. It is as if time itself is becoming shorter and we are refining and tweaking ideas faster and faster.

Science fiction authors (the imaginers of new ideas about the future) used to postulate about a future far far distant from now, but more and more science fiction has become close future-orientated.  Science fiction has become acceptable, and even mainstream, because the ideas that the genre proposes address issues that modern people actually have to deal with on a daily basis. For instance, most modern office workers have felt that they are trapped in a machine not unlike Neo in The Matrix.  This kind of means that we are living in the future of mankind and that our idea box, instead of being defined, is instead being updated and refined on a constant basis.

If I look at the fantastic Web 2.0 businesses out there, each one of them can be drawn back to web historic times. Take a little step through the looking glass and one can come up with a veritable treasure trove of fantastic Web 2.o ideas. Or you can just look at a list of companies that went bust during the dot com heyday.  One which is really interesting is PointCast, which once received an offer of over 450 million dollars from Newscorp. PointCast eventually went bankrupt, but is being reborn these days in many different guises with features in Apple's AppStore and YouTube to mention a few.

As reported by Gizmodo, there is also speculation that Jonathan Ives, chief designer for Apple, is also a design licenser who has emulated the Braun design language of the 60s.  Another sparkling example of an idea starting to re-emerge onto the market is that of the Nokia Media Terminal, which was launched in 2001.  At that stage, it was the world's first Linux-operated digital video recorder directed at the nascent "digital home". It died a quiet death, way ahead of its time. Its children can be seen everywhere in the world though—from the PS3 design to Cross onscreen navigation that Nokia dubbed Navibar.

But rehashing ideas is not unique to the digital domain. Philosophy also tends to get a good work over, tweaked for the times. In 1926, Eugene Marais wrote his opus, "The Soul of the White Ant".  Lately, because of the web, the idea of the human/web hive mind has become a buzz topic at any event worth its salt. Yet the idea is older than our grandparents. What the web is also inevitably doing is making its users come to the same conclusions, generally in unison. So if you have an idea, you should check your sources a bit because it's quite likely that someone (more possibly some many) has come to the same conclusion as you at round about the same time as you.

So the question is, if we are using and regurgitating, does it mean that there are no true artists? I have never met a jaw-dropping genius. Maybe I overestimate myself completely, but I do believe that true successful soft-science and hard science artists are the ones who can repack that which exists and make it easier to use and enjoy.

P.S. Some other web users have come to a similiar conclusion as I. Erich Nielsen writes here in his blog (Norwegian) about the Google model celebrating 173 years.