On the cover of indie-rock band Bon Iver's recent Top 20 record Blood Bank is a striking photograph of a snow-encrusted, rusted car door. The record label didn't commission the image, or find it an art gallery or stock photography bank; instead, it licensed the shot from amateur photographer Lauren Hudgins, who had posted it to her Flickr feed last year when she was teaching English in Japan.
She hadn't expected anything much to come of the photo. "I was hoping for Flickr recognition — people viewing it, faving it, making comments about it,” she says.Hudgins' picture is a success story of the new open source culture, in which anyone with an internet connection can make their creations available to the public, unmediated by the old gatekeepers of mass media. The result has been an unprecedented outpouring of creative works. As of early June, for instance, more than3.6 billion photographs had been uploaded to Flickr alone. As the best of those works are now making their way into the broader cultural landscape, they're breaking mass media's stranglehold on the ownership of meaningful content.
No comments:
Post a Comment