Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture (Science/Technology/Culture)
The greatest strength of this book is the broad, interdisciplinary range of its appeal: audiences interested in musicology, digital rights, street culture, and many other subjects will find it interesting, and it is written in a style that members of the general public would also appreciate. It is a book that could be assigned to undergraduates who are music majors and for courses in which intellectual property is a theme.(Elizabeth Losh, author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes)Young people who make new music by sampling existing work, who 'mash up' existing cultural materials to convey entirely new messages, have been portrayed as thieves and copyright violators. Yet, as Aram Sinnreich eloquently teaches, what they are actually doing is pioneering new forms of cultural creation.(Howard Rheingold, author of Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier)Aram Sinnreich is a sage guide to the emerging, perplexing, and downright vital world of configurable culture. He brings together a potent combination of deep academic learning, leading industry analyst credentials, and performing artist street cred. No one knows better than Sinnreich how music and technology are co-evolving.(Michael Heller, author of The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives)Mashed Up is an intellectual / emotional romp, filled with insights into the pleasures and paradoxes of our high-tech musical universe. Aram Sinnreich is an original thinker, a brilliant brother, and a bad mammajamma.(David Ritz, author of Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye)A passionate and informed assessment of a transitional moment in the popular music industry, couched within a larger scholarly dialogue about the changing distinctions between cultural producers and consumers in an era of new technological and expressive possibilities.... Mashed Up provides a necessary addition to emerging concerns within Cultural Studies regarding issues of intellectual property.... The book is a significant contribution to studies of the reproduction of cultural objects in the digital age.(Cultural Studies1900-01-00)Mashed Up is a sustained and concrete examination of one particular kind of contribution practice: the work of mashup artists and its effect on the social and aesthetic assumptions of modernity.(Criticism)In Mashed Up, Sinnreich uses music as the lens to study the increasingly relevant gray area between media production and consumption.... I have always found Sinnreich and colleagues' 2009 study on configurable technologies to be an indispensable framework for my research. I am pleased to see that work has now been extended into a book.(Journal of Communication2012-01-00)Sinnreich's book would appeal to a variety of audiences: from scholars interested in studying music culture, intellectual property and technologically mediated subcultures, to use in a graduate seminar in media studies, rhetoric and technology, or cultural studies.(Journal of Popular Culture)Mashed Up does an excellent job of bringing to the fore and making sense of the epochal shift signaled by configurable music.... Although musicians and commentators have, for decades, viewed jazz and other improvised musics as potential harbingers of social change, surprisingly it is the 'configurable' culture detailed by Sinnreich that might actually offer the blossoming of a new era of socially integrated musics that induce more democratic, participatory futures.(Critical Studies in Improvisation)