Shortly after the iPod came out, Kevin Kelly extolled to me the joys of shuffling your entire music collection, sitting back, and savoring a sequence of surprises. I was with Kevin again two nights ago, and he had a new media mash-up meme: “DVD video.” This means viewing TV shows, originally shown one episode per week, as a continuous movie: “24” marathons, in which people stay up for the 17 or so hours required to watch the complete season, constitutes extreme DVD TV.

Both of these make sense. Music albums, for the most part, are not constructed for continuity, so the shuffling with other albums is not destroying artist intent, but many TV shows build on continuity so watching the story as an elaborate movie can be rewarding (especially for Nicholas Nickleby fans) if you don’t mind seeing Elisha Cuthbert being abducted every 75 minutes.

Where else could re-juxtaposition be interesting? Looking at the year’s email from a single person can be informative. In what for me was one of the high points of the show Commander In Chief,  Geena Davis’s character, preparing to deliver her State of the Union Address, watches a series of clips of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Bush, and Clinton giving their own speeches. In about 90 seconds of TV, one was presented with a history of the political discourse of the U.S.

Digital media make signal processing easy, and in one sense that’s what all of these examples are, just as much as Danger Mouse’s Grey Album. But speaking of mash-ups, what if we combine Kevin’s two approaches: would Kevin watch a DVD TV shuffle, interleaving episodes of House, 24, Gilmore Girls, Project Runway, Law and Order: SVU, The Sopranos, and Lost?