Originality is a difficult concept to wrestle with. The Miriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘originality’ as: “The quality or state of being original; freshness of aspect, design or style; the power of independent thought or constructive imagination.” We may infer from this that originality is an entirely subjective term, as ‘freshness’ may differ from person to person. If I am intimately familiar with a novel by a particular author, it is no longer fresh to me, but if I gave it to someone who had neither hear of the book or even the author before, it may seem ‘fresh’ to them. Lived experience certainly plays a significant role in how relatively fresh something is. However, in this context, freshness may be a comparison against all that has gone before, or at least the canonical works in a particular field. In such an instance, the degree of freshness may be determined by how different or novel a piece of work may be when compared to all of the known works in its specific genre or field. The same dictionary defines ‘original’ as “1: The source or cause from which something arises; 2: that from which a copy, reproduction or translation is made; a work composed first-hand; 3. A person of fresh initiative or inventive capacity; a unique or eccentric person.”
Again we see the use of the subjective term ‘fresh’ – which is defined as “having its original qualities unimpaired; free from taint, pure, just recently.” The notion of time is introduced and interestingly in the context of cultural works or ‘media content’, the idea of purity. The myth that somehow when an author writes a book, a musician a song or a filmmaker a movie that it is pure – the finished work is fresh and original – in reality, every ‘new’ work is largely inspired by if not directly contains references to or elements of previous works. Claiming that a new work is pure and original is ludicrous. I suppose we could consider this in the context of a newborn baby – a metaphor I find appropriate on multiple symbolic levels. A newborn baby is certainly ‘pure’, ‘original’ and unique in many ways, but it is also composed of elements of both the father and mother of the child and indirectly, their grandparents and great-grandparents on both sides all the way back through their biological ancestry as far as the family tree will go. Is it possible that there was once an ‘original’ human being – such as Adam, from whom Eve was allegedly created and they then procreated to create the next generation of himans who must have bred amongst themselves to generate more and more families until we reach the unique, original newborn baby, who contains elements of every human being that came before them in their family. We may never know the answer to this question, but it is useful to think of the creation of content in the same way. Far from being truly ‘original’, each new work is the product of elements of works that came before it, whether consumed by the creator of the work or subconsciously ingested intellectually, it is problematic and difficult to call it ‘original.’
CriticalRemix.com
Dr. Owen Gallagher, SFHEA
