"Look around you. Look at the posters on your wall. Look at your computer. Look at your clothes. Look at your hair. Everything we are surrounded by is remix. We are living within a whirlwind of reinvention, reinterpretation, and repurposing. Remix is a part of the way we speak, the way we think, the way we live and it has redefined pop culture in ways unimaginable. But is remix a powerful tool of innovation or has it stifled creativity and discouraged new, original ideas from thriving?"- dividingnights on Tumblr
This post pretty much speaks for itself. I found this great little blurb by someone on Tumblr, and I thought that I would share it with you all and see what you thought. I definitely think that "dividingnights" has a point, and I never really thought of my hair or my computer as a form of remix. In relation to his last statement, I think that remix is a tool of innovation, and it has NOT discouraged new and/or original ideas from thriving. Thoughts?
I think a lot of our identity is remixed. We take the things we see around us, from sub cultures, tv, people on the street and mix them into our own personal identity. Similar to the way Girl Talk takes bits and pieces from different songs and puts them together into something new. It is a little like Judith Butler's performativity where we adapt different things we see into what we understand as femininity or masculinity.
ReplyDeleteOn one hand, I totally agree that our identities are a remix, and are a constantly changing smorgasbord of the information that we take in, and in turn put out a totally reconstructed message. On the other hand, if we are remix, what is our 'original copy'? Is it us at the most fundamental biological level? There is no time in our lives that we might identify as when we 'started to remix ourselves', although I'm sure for a portion of our childhoods it was really our parents.
ReplyDeleteThe example brought up in the previous comment about Judith Butler is a great example in this case, I think. All we really do is act out or perform the image that we want to convey, and in that image lies meaning, and that is the remix.