Am I being objectified or thingified by using this medium?

Question 1: A dominant theme among the writers in Sound Unbound seems to be the emphasis of taking something everyday and making it new or recontextualizing it. I think this is all fabulous and necessary for us to avoid slipping so far into familiarity and product hyper-recognition that we're suddenly living out 1984 (which, oddly enough, was essentially a reworking of Zamyaten's book We). But Dick Hebdige brought up the fact that we're returning to the necessity of the "unimaginable," particularly in this post-9/11 time. So my question is: just how "revolutionary" or "avante-garde" or, in fact, NEW can anything really be? Lethem spends his entire essay talking about how nothing's really new, but it can have what he calls a "second use." Isn't the experimental, then, just a perpetuation of the cycle of capitalism? When we get overprogrammed, we suddenly need to reprogram ourselves. In turn, that reprogramming becomes the "second use" overprogramming until someone else comes along and tries to reprogram us. It's the Kurt Cobain Dychotomy: how can you be counter-culture and make an impact when your ideas have grown to the point of being culture itself?

I have no answer to that one. In fact, I'm not even sure there is an answer to that one.

Question 2: Why are sampling, public commons, P2P, etc., considered so "bad"? A number of the writers in this book have various answers, but most of them seem to want to boil it down to the evils of big business. I just don't see how it can be that easy, though. It seems to me that a big part of the "bad"ness behind sampling and "plagiarism" is the modern anxiety of uselessness and inadequacy. Anthony Giddens talks a lot about this in his book Modernity and Self-Identity in relationship to shame. Apparently, we develop shame in response to feelings of social inadequacy (65). Because of this, we're driven to "make something of ourselves" or "leave our mark on the world." We want to be original and important and, most of all, USEFUL. Lethem inadvertently points this out when he quotes Thomas Jefferson's writing of copyright law: "The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but 'to promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts.' To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work" (42). Notice, though, the word USEFUL in that quote. No matter what, art has to have a use value, whether it's commodified in the capitalist way or some other way. The trouble is that we live in a consumer culture where literally everything is bound up with commodification. Lethem talks about various "values" that can't be commodified. But the word used to describe them is "value." So they have worth. And we wouldn't believe in those values as a mediated culture if it weren't for the fact that all of our pop culture media establishes and reinforces those values. But the media isn't a gift; it's a commodity. So in order to maintain our "free" values, we two things: 1. the media that reinforces the values; and 2. the feelings of inadequacy in relationship to these values that drive us to maintain them in our everyday lives. Now, at this point, it sounds like I'm saying that the media is ruining us. But I"m not. I like pop culture and mass media. A lot. What I'm saying is that tearing down the corporate consumer culture we live in isn't going to help the fear of file sharing. We're still going to feel the need to be useful, something which Thomas Jefferson apparently thought the arts needed, even before arts were as technology-driven as they are now. What would have to change, then, in order for sampling and such to stop being "bad" is the entire way we perceive usefulness. Sure, art could be useful to just one person, who happened to have received said art as a "gift," and in turn, that one person could put that art to a "second use," but if that were to happen, how would art be able to develop in the first place? I'm getting unorganized and sketchy now as this whole thing breaks down, but I think I'm right back where I started in question 1: if we don't commodify things, how will things ever become objects in order to become things again?