Week 5: Trajectories of Remixing

I have to be honest in stating that this course in digital literacies is taking me significantly outside of my area of knowledge. Every week I feel saturated with more new information than I can process. Many of the tools, web sites, and ideas are foreign to me and while I would love to explore them all, I have to satisfy myself with attempting to synthesize the readings themselves into my current knowledge stores.

Having said that, each new week elicits in me a compulsion to read further - to gain greater clarity regarding one or other topic or idea presented in the course texts. This week it was the notion of copyright. I looked into Lawrence Lessig's 2008 publication "Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy". I didn't purchase it, but practised a little of my own "piracy" by downloading the available pages from Amazon.com.

I enjoyed Lessig's (2005) argument that "culture as a whole can be construed as remix" since it echoes the fashion in which oral cultures are propagated. The telling of a story is retold in an ever-expanding narrative by each successive teller; and each time that story is retold, new layers of meaning, new ideas, new experiences, new angles are incorporated to reflect the meaning-making of the individual telling the tale.

In the introduction to Remix; Lessig describes the laments of Sousa that the evolution of "machines" to perpetuate music was going to dumb down culture by making us consumers of culture rather than producers. He saw a sad decline in the perceived value of learning to play musical instruments as a way to celebrate good music, and culture, in favour of listening to "infernal machines".

In today's culture however, it is thanks to these infernal machines and more specifically, thanks to the explosion in digital technologies that our children are becoming experts in the creation of new expressions of meaning. Not only do young people create "mash-ups" of music, using software like GarageBand and Cakewalk as a form of entertainment, but, like Greg Gillis, some dedicate their artistic selves to the production of "remix" music as a way of life (Lessig, 2005, p. 11).

Link to: Girl Talk creating a mash-up

Uploaded on Mar 28, 2007

Girl Talk creating a mashup from Elvis Costello's Radio

Link to: Girl Talk: Bounce That 

Published on Dec 6, 2007

Professor Matthew Soar at Concordia University in Montréal, as a contribution to the Open Source Cinema Project, teamed with his students and spent what he describes as "three very intensive weeks rotoscoping a concert video" of Girl Talk. They were, he says, inspired by Bob Sabiston's digital rotoscoping (Snack and Drink, Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly), and by Christine Harold's OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture, a textbook used for his communications course.

Indeed, remix is not restricted to music. It has helped to extend multimodal literacies via the combination of different media elements into a new textual expression to create something new (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, p. 186).  Lankshear & Knobel define remixing as

“selecting, cutting, pasting and combining semiotic resources into new digital and multi-modal texts (bricolage), which is achieved by downloading and uploading files from different sources (internet, iPod, DV-camera, digital camera or sound recording devices)” (Erstad, Gilje, & de Lange, 2007, no page)."

There is no doubt in my mind that the affordances of multi-modalities in the art and science of remixing is not only engaging for young people but allows them opportunities to demonstrate that they are more than capable of critical engagement and creative production (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008). So what's the problem here - why don't we see the employment of multi modalities and remixing deployed on a large scale in integrated curricular instruction in schools across North America?

That's a very big question and one to which there are many answers, including but certainly not limited to:

• educational reform and the challenge of the traditional conception of school (students have little control over their learning processes and creativity is thus often constrained). See also Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, p. 199 "The Idea of Schooling"
• the role of the teacher (who is not uncommonly digitally incompetent) 
• the non-standardization of the role and usefulness of Project Based Learning as a conducive pedagogy for digital literacy and thereby opportunities for remixing 
• the traditional definitions of reading and writing or text ("a text is rather a ‘tissue of citations’ born of a multitude of sources in culture (Barthes, 1978). In this light, the author is simply a collaborator with other writers, citing them and reworking their ideas” (Diakopoulos, 2005, no page). Also, "for young people writing today means something much more using images, sound and video to express ideas (ibid., p. 177–178)" (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, p. 188).  
• the mainstream understanding of what literacy is, "literacy is not a static term but relates to technological innovations, and cultural and political strategies and developments." (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, p. 182) and that literacy equates to "Socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses (or, as members of Discourses)." (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006, p. 64).

Another issue however, going back to my starting point in this post, is that of copyright. Before the vast expansion of digital technologies, our conception of writing meant text via alphabetization, print on a page, black and white. Today, youth understanding of writing usually involves digital technologies and encompasses images, or sound, or video, as well as traditional text, and often all of these modes at the same time, remixed to express something new - and adding to our culture. The problem with this, legally speaking, is that pre-digital age copyright laws remain in effect. In a board of education, one can only imagine how emphatic would be the desire of bureaucrats, principals and teachers to steer clear of legal entanglements and how fearful they might be that students would put them in delicate situations should remixing projects become widely accepted practice in schools. The fact of the matter is however that most of our children are already criminals according to copyright law. What teenager does not habitually download "free" music from YouTube, or have an enviable library of torrent downloaded movies from sites such as PirateBay? 

(Lessig, 2008)

Criminalizing those (mostly young people) who embrace our "read-write" digital culture (Lessig, 2008), is utterly pointless as well as potentially culturally crippling. However, until the law makers develop a way out of it, I have to assume that school boards will continue to be wary of allowing students to "plagiarize" even while these same students develop healthy online followings as creative digital remixers outside of school. That's kind of messed up - as my sons would say.

"Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms our children and other intrepid creative users of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the post-war world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded." (retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594201722/ref=rdr_ext_tmb)