Culture Remix

Reports from two recent conferences have caught my eye, because they point to an interesting cultural phenomenon -- "remix."

The first is from a Newsweek article about the "Emerging Technology Conference (ETech)" in San Diego. After describing some strange geeky presentations, Stephen Levy writes:

the point of the conference was not to single out strangeness, but argue that such acts were only extreme examples of an increasingly commonplace process: people using cheap and accessible digital tools to "remix" the world around them. Just as music producers sometimes go back to the original components of a tune—boosting some instruments, sweetening the tone and maybe adding a voiceover—consumers can view the formerly one-size-fits-all aspects of their environment as a jumping-off point for hands-on customization...

As conference chair Rael Dornfest put it, we're remixing our music consumption by buying songs online one at a time instead of in CD collections. We're remixing our TV behavior as TiVo-style video recorders let us "make every night Thursday night." We're remixing our media by grabbing online articles from dozens of different sources—and then broadcasting our own opinions with blogs. When you get down to it, the remixing metaphor applies to almost any area you can think of.

Then, on a few blogs, I saw a few references to a talk by Lawrence Lessig, a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and a founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society, at the recent Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). A podcast of his talk can be found here. (The page loads slowly, but it is worth a listen if you can get to it.)

He defines remix broadly as "what we do when we mix together culture or knowledge and then give that as the opportunity to re-express that which we have mixed." For the "over-40 generation", Lessig goes on, text is the primary technology of this practice. But younger generations are now using other technologies, digital technologies -- audio, video, blogging and so on -- for remix. "This is digital creativity... digital remix.... Anyone with a $1500 computer can take images and sounds from the culture around them and remix them to say things differently, to express ideas... This is a kind of writing. It expresses a certain creative potential and a certain democratic potential, changing the freedom to speak by changing the power to speak."

"Remix" using technology for Lessig and others, then, is a creative process; it is the way that many in the "millenial" generation interact with and actively learn about the world around them.

This idea of remix is really fascinating to me, first because it gives me a good way to think about our students' learning styles, and also because of the line of work we are in. It seems to me that as educational technologists, we are in a good position to help faculty create projects that suit our students' learning styles. We have the tools (and are constantly looking for new ones) that can help students and faculty find new ways to remix and learn.

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Quick update: I was reading cogdogblog and ran across a link to a podcast of Rael Dornfest's talk at ETech. I haven't listened to it yet, but thought I would share.