What If: Mashups

What if mashups became a common tool used to express complex ideas?  Could they replace genres like books, newspaper articles, and/ or videos?  Mashups are a new and possibly upcoming way of making a claim or observation using multiple sources.  Mashups can take multiple forms, like video, written paper, etc.  I believe that mashups have the potential to become something commonplace in the future.

Why would mashups need to replace the genres like novels, music, etc?  In other words, what do mashups do that our current genres can not do?  First, mashups provide multiple viewpoints.  The mashups we are working out contain around eight to fifteen sources.  That means that fifteen different perspectives on one issue form one whole idea.  This postmodern idea that fragments form the whole shows us that mashups could possibly be the next big thing. 

Also, mashups go further than the current genres because it requires more research.  For example, Khaled Hosseni's Kite Runner most likely required little research.  The most i could imagine him doing, is making visits to Kabul, San Francisco, and also doing research on the human neurological responses like regret.  On the other hand, the mashups that we are doing now demand that we use at least a dozen, maybe even two dozen sources.  This means obviously that we need to find the sources, then peruse them for proper mashup material.

Mashups go further than the current genres because they are more complex, and therefore produce more complex claims or ideas.  Using Khaled Hosseni as an example again, his memoir inside a fiction was about as complex a narrative scheme that an author has ever implemented.  However, with mashups a memoir within a fiction is combined with other novels, songs, videos, or articles.  These sources are all working together within one mashup (in whatever form the creator chooses). 

I truly believe that mashups have the potential to overcome the genres we see today for the reasons i mentioned above.  I also hope that mashups pass the genres because of its ability to communicate complex ideas.