Saturday, October 08, 2011

The end of originality?

Jorge Luis Borges wrote (where exactly I can't recall; am getting old!) that all stories are mere retelling of the first original one, Don Quixote. 

In the contemporary world, it seems increasingly so.  Music and movies often tend to generate a sense of I have heard/seen this before, and often it is not wholly imagined.

In the research in the humanities and the social sciences, rare is any original insight, and forever we are echoing ideas and arguments sometimes even from centuries ago.  The internet has further facilitated this process of all of us becoming DJs of sorts--all we appear to do is nothing but remixing in so many ways.  This blog post, and the blog itself, is evidence of the remixing that happens every single day. 

The following video (ht) conveys the point so well through images and sound from the world of cinema.


Everything Is A Remix: THE MATRIX from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

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