Although Lessig comes to his work with a background in law, composition studies has certainly wrestled with remix for quite some time now. His arguments offer us much to wrestle with in the ways in which we approach remix and understand the potentials of digital meaning-making tools. ![]() We start with this discussion of Lessig’s work because we think it speaks powerfully to the context in which writers currently compose. ![]() More than 2.5 million articles are included in the English-language area of Wikipedia. Now, less than 6 months later, that number is more than 11,500. The velocity of Wikipedia is impressive within 24 hours of September 27, the number of English-written news articles in Wikinews topped 10,000. He noted that the success-the growth and, we would argue, the velocity-of Wikipedia was not possible with 20th century technologies. Appropriately for this audience, he lauded the success of Wikipedia as an ideal democratic space in which users take culture, remix culture, rewrite culture, and thus make culture. We want to add another, less visible and less discussed aspect of remix here: that is, composing for remix, composing for recomposition.Ī few months after his CCCC talk, speaking at Wikimania 2006, Lessig shifted his focus slightly to talk not just about remix culture, but of “rewrite culture.” And at Linuxworld 2006, Lessig again emphasized that “writing is how we remix culture.” At both venues, he spoke of the new technologies that have created “tools of creativity,” “tools of speech”-and, importantly, tools of rhetoric. To situate remix more appropriately and accurately, however, we need to leave behind what we think are the two dominant views of remix: 1) remix as simply cutting and pasting, and 2) remix as anchored and only related to music. Remix is perhaps the premier contemporary composing practice. Remix is how we as humans live and everyone within our society engages in this act of creativity.” Remixing-or the process of taking old pieces of text, images, sounds, and video and stitching them together to form a new product-is how individual writers and communities build common values it is how composers achieve persuasive, creative, and parodic effects. culture is remix, knowledge is remix, politics is remix. ![]() At the 2005 CCCC in San Francisco, Lawrence Lessig opened his featured talk by defining remix as “what we do when we mix together culture or knowledge, and then give others the opportunity to re-express that which we have mixed. Sergio Polano and Pierpaolo Vetta (1993) argued, “true innovation is one that is rightly able to link the adaptive history embodied in any artifact with the changes of production tools whenever they occur” (p. Contact: Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVossĮast Lansing, MI – Remix, appropriation, and composition.
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