Blog Post #9 On my Website, I forgot to post

Blog Post #9

Remix Literacy and Fan Composition

            It would almost be impossible to write about under water diving if you have never done it yourself or if you have never heard or read about anyone who have done under water diving. Similarly, for writers to be creative they must draw from their own experiences or the experiences of others. Starting at birth, everything we do and say there is a slew of remixes. We repeat what we hear and sometimes say it in a different way that seems new, but in the end, it’s just a newer version of something old. As Stedman points out in his essay Remix literacy and fan composition “artists don’t start with a blank page or an empty canvas, they start with preexisting works” (107). This brings us to the notion of copy-writing. Who have rights to this slew of remixes that in many respects are untraceable?

            Remix is what we have been doing with our essays. For example, when we are asked to write a paper about a story or to critique a book that we have read, we are generally being asked to take the author’s original work and manipulate it into a new form of creative blend that now becomes an original design from the previous work. We conduct an analytic research to gain an understanding of what others have to say about the particular issue. Then we fuse those ideas together to build on our own views and create a different form of originality that other people in turn use to create their own innovative blend. This blog that you are currently reading is a remix of the A. M. Dubisar et al. excerpt that I just read. I am simply using what the authors said and adding my own thoughts about the issue, I now create an original piece about Remix Literacy. Therefore, this blog post is now an original composition remixed from another original piece.

            Computer technology and digital text, facilitates this experience in a whole new realm that is often inconceivable. The wide array of multimodal rhetoric that one can accomplish with digital remixing and manipulations of video and audio is mind-boggling. A whole new self can be realized.  Remixing, as A. M. Dubisar et al discussed, is a way of exposing students’ creativity through experimentation and invention, as well as “it prepares students for composing the kind of remixes that are common in the civic realm” (78), and pop-culture has that propensity to teach us. It is amazing the capabilities that these students were able to realize while completing these video remixes.

In my view, this Video Remix explains what Literacy remixes really are.

           


Reading these excerpts reveal the importance of knowing what is important to an audience and how popular cultural influences people. I came to realize that what people say is important but more importantly is how they say what they say. Similarly, how they are portrayed in saying what they did not say is also crucial. The political rhetoric remix videos were impressive and go to show how creativity will always find you while engaging in digital rhetoric. You don’t always know how its going to turn out until you have engage in the process and then your creativity even surprises your own self.  

            This brings the issue of fair use into question and we wonder how much of students creativity and invention is being curtailed by the idea of intellectual property and who own the rights to its use.  Should there be a thing as intellectual property where the Web is concerned? Maybe, if it does not interfere with restraining the creative freedom of world wide “web”.