Remixing

This week I thought it might be relevant to write my blog on the concept of remix culture: how the technology and the internet is making remixing a growing trend and how its actually really neat. Firstly, I think technology has created this concept of remixing because of the vast amount of tools it gives us that allows people to create a remixed version of a cool book, movie, song, or other art form into something even more unique and creative- a collaboration of ideas. It allows for the consumers to become creators themselves, and take something made by someone else and add their own ideas to it. Since the internet is able to connect people from all over the world, it allows the concept of remix to really grow, because it gives people a place to share remixed works. Someone in the United States could create a song, and someone over in Japan could take that song (when without the internet they wouldn’t have as easily been able to) and put their own spin to it--ultimately creating something else potentially really creative and cool. The allowance of collaboration that remixing brings I think is really going to widen peoples creativity and produce some really neat stuff that copyright laws would have otherwise hindered. 

In an english class I took last year (Writing in New Media) we focused the end of spring quarter on this book Little Brother written by Cory Doctorow. The book is unique in that it is under the Creative Commons License (meaning producers waive some of the rights that come with copyright laws in order for other people to creatively build upon the produced material). This allows for people to remix the book-- which is exactly what we did in my English class. We had two different remix projects (which we then posted on our individual class webpages)

1. We wrote an alternative ending to the book and turned it into a screenplay that we would film in groups on Second Life, and turn into a movie. (click here to watch the movie)
2. Create another remix piece based off of the themes in the book (click here to see my remix project)

**Disclaimer on the movie-- haha its pretty bad. It was really hard to make the filming in Second Life work, so the movie kind of sucks. But you get the point that it's a remix (regardless of how good it turned out)

Having personally remixed something, I can say that it’s actually really fun (at least if you have a creative side to you). Because you can take something that already exists and turn it into something unique that you are the producer of. It gives you the freedom to use your imagination while at the same time using something created by someone else and fuse it into a cool new thing. Without the benefits of technology however, it would have been a lot harder to remix the book. Sure we could have written out a screen play by hand, and acted it as a presentation to the class. But the array of media tools we had made it so much better than if they weren’t available to us. We could use iMovie, Second Life (an online virtual world), Microsoft Word, different music-creating tools, etc... Technology made it possible for us to remix Little Brother. 

I honestly had never heard of remixing before my English class last year, and I think there are a vast majority of people out there that have no idea what it is. But with technology increasing, it’s becoming a really cool thing and something that will be likely to become more and more popular as it gains recognition.