premix culture

Yesterday I sat looking at my blank browser, with its address bar favourites gleaming at me and my del.icio.us bookmarks sprawling themselves familiarly to my left when something strange happened. I didn't do anything. I didn't visit any sites. I was paralysed.

The reason? Google Reader.
I only began using it last week (late starter on this one) and it's had a huge impact on me. Most significantly, it has removed the need to actually visit any of my usual sites. Which I'm strangely a bit sad about.

It hit me hard that re-appropriating content has entered a new age where the re-presented precedes the presented. Finding things, playing round with them and re-releasing them is old news. The new game is intercepting content and re-presenting it before it reaches the eyes and ears of its audience in the first place. Obviously Google Reader does this for efficiency, not to recontextualize the contents' meaning, but the principals are the same. This isn't remixing, it's premixing.

This is a stark commentary on the evolution of our cultural playground. We are reducing things even more acutely to the moment. Narratives are not merely being fragmented, they are being dismantled in terms of space and time. Emphasis will increasingly be on what any one person is doing with a bit of content or an idea at that moment and where it fits into their other pieces, not so much where it came from, what its original meaning was etc. Everything is a building block or a sub-widget in a universe of individual, momentary expression and regrouping.

Bit of a brain dump. Probably a few contradictions. I'm going to stew this a bit more and see if I can say anything more useful...