I just taught Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay _The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction_ in my Remix Culture class. We talked about the role of communication technologies that enable reproduction of cultural content. This technological shift is democratizing in a way in that it enables people to access reproductions of cultural content they otherwise may not be able to engage in. As a result, seeing the controlled original isn’t so important – all those schmoes who can only see the reproduction have to make something special out of that “experience of the copy” since they cannot access the “experience of the original aura,” rather they can only access the reproduction. Some feared that this would lead people to become passive consumers of cultural heritage – that if cultural artifacts can be reproduced for us to access, we’d have no motivation to make our own and add to the heritage. On the other hand, some industries built themselves on the idea of few cultural producers and many many passive consumers.

Fast forward to the Internet and new media, and it isn’t only the reproductions we have more access to, it is also the technologies themselves that we have more access to. Now there is a tension as those who built controlled heritage industries struggle to deal with the fact that their controlled means of reproduction and distribution are no longer inaccessible, no longer closed controlled systems. So, a new meme develops that describes uncontrolled access, production, and consumption of cultural objects as “illegitimate.”

I am amazed at how many times we relive this pattern – in publishing alone!