Mashup vs Remix - a tale of two text types

What are the similarities and differences between these two moving image commentaries? Below are some definitions and interesting examples.

A Remix - is an alternate version of an original source, a newly created version from source material. Elements are re-assembled in a new way.

A Mashup - is a version using multiple sources sometimes with little or no relation, often lampooning or referring to another text or source. It is a derivative work with properties of intertextuality where a texts' meanings are shaped and informed by other texts.

This bricolage idea of use what you have is not a new one, but with the easy availability of multiple texts and technology, the remix and mashup are moving from messages passed between peer groups into broader realms of social commentary and education. Aided by the speed of social networking, they can move from one phase to another in a matter of hours.

A Fair(y) Use Tale by Eric Faden - a remix illustrating copyright law, derivative but not lampooning. It's a great example of remix explaining Fair Use and Copyright law. Note that he cites his sources at the end.



The measurements for fair use involve elements of criticism, news reporting, teaching and parody. Keep these in mind as you review the following pieces below.

Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan - Jason Stakeman's remix incorporating mashup techniques intended to educate the viewer about the war in Afghanistan as well as comment on American foreign policy and culture. It compares the US invasion with the westerns of John Ford.

Click To Play

Edward vs Buffy - a remix by Rebellious Pixels/Jonathan McIntosh lampooning the romance genre in a mashup style and commenting on male/female relationships.


And another by Rebellious Pixels - a remixed commercial for a popular SUV.


Here's a mashup lampooning the Twilight series and the music video Wanted Dead or Alive that was created to market fake engagement rings by Ms. Taken.



Here's a mashup of a mashup - the Hitler video parody. Using a clip from the 2004 German film Der Untergang (Downfall), these videos number in the hundreds at least. Seeing Bruno Ganz as Hitler rant about current events and setbacks seems to have an endless appeal. The film's director Oliver Hirschbiegel seems to get the spirit in which they are presented, while Constantin Films, the production company, has requested the videos be removed.

Open Source – The End of Scarcity means More

IBM has estimated that the amount of digital information will double every 11 hours in 2010.

That’s an abundance of unlimited content, access, and information. Something barely imaginable. It is frightening and exciting at the same time. It is a huge paradigm shift for a culture used to a previous world driven by scarcity, preciousness and exclusivity.

The potential here is best understood in the context of education.

At Itunes U any number of amazing and free lectures from places like MIT, the Sorbonne, Cambridge and UNC Chapel Hill can be downloaded.

It’s a remix of the traditional idea of education: get some experts, people eager to learn and start a discussion. Where it takes place is less relevant, though to draw students the content must be strong and the sense of Bakhtinian sobornost – “togetherness” or “true sense of community” must still exist.

More control and choice for learners creates a P2P environment where students are both learners and teachers as well as creators and consumers. Knowledge flows freely rather than being stockpiled.

A unique example of this is happening at Purdue University. They have designed an app called Hotseat. It functions like Twitter for the lecture hall and in fact was developed with the idea that students were already texting anyway -- why not create a faculty endorsed distraction to focus that back channel discussion? With this app, students are commenting on the commentary and asking questions. Student to student sharing has been embraced by Purdue rather than seeing it as a threat for it’s potential to encourage cheating and non independent learning. In this way, redundant academic work becomes more vibrant and open. Hotseat is remediative - a new way of showing an old media form. Ie; the "class discussion" experience.

The Spectacular Society: why the open source movement could lead to a conscious revolution for social justice

Kite running in Afghanistan is a dangerous sport. Lives are endangered in this endeavor so distracting that Afghans have plunged to their death from great heights or been gravely injured chasing their beloved kites, as precious and revered as baseball and apple pie for Americans.

Guy Debord, the author of “The Society of the Spectacle” suggests that mass media offers a distraction by showing a fake reality to obfuscate the degradation of capitalism. After being subjected to a few minutes of the reality TV series “The Real Housewives of New York” in a physician’s waiting room, one might suspect he was on to something.

Could distraction be the metaphor for our involvement in international conflict? Is the pursuit of war a massive spectacle to distract the ordinary citizen? The phrase, “Go fly a kite” comes to mind. In other words, beat it, so the important work can get done.

Victor Klemperer’s writing regarding the language used by the Nazi regime illustrate the importance of observing how those in power manipulate language. Ironically after surviving the oppression of this regime as a Jew he went on to serve in the Volkskammer of the former German Democratic Republic, one of the most oppressive states of the 20th century.

Repeated negative images, news of death and failure, unemployment, the continuing spill of oil into the Gulf all cause us to suffer from “compassion fatigue”, burn out, secondary traumatic stress disorder. Where political events and our private lives in the post 911-era intersect, it appears that scaremongering and schadenfreude create compassion fatigue which in turn is remedied tidily by spectacle.

The disconnect caused by spectacle has also engendered a sense of desperation for contact. We are so obsessed with the need to be ‘in touch” that we repeatedly reach out to our colleagues and family members via text message and Facebook. In a dislocated, spectacular world, our constant seeking of reassurance that everything’s “okay” drives us as intensely as the Afghan kite runners.

A little distraction is probably okay, within the realm of normal even. But how can we be assured that we aren’t completely disconnected from human suffering and injustice? One way is by reclaiming the message we’re given. If everyone can possess the means to reshape the images and messages sent to us, then meaning can be re-framed and the hegemony of those who have power over our language can be challenged.

New meaning can be recreated, communities formed and social change created. In this way, much like the open source software movement, open data and information access can be the tools of compassionate social change.

Mind Mapping - Tinderbox, Scrivener and Neo Victorian Computing

I'm developing narrative that I hope to eventually turn out into the metaverse as an open source collaborative project/experience. It might be a hypertext, a space in Second Life, a web series, or it could become any number of things. Ultimately, I believe it's the narrative that matters and the experience of it, not the distribution method. To this end, I am exploring mind mapping software (which I admit sounds nefarious and cyberpunkish) in the form of Tinderbox and Scrivener to organize my non-linear thought paths.

I'm not sure which one I like better, the free demo for Tinderbox is limited by number of entries and features in demo mode but at this point I'm just not able to financially spring for it at $200+ for the full access. This is also partially why I downloaded Scrivener, which is only slightly more affordable by about $50. Initial use of both however as not yet swayed me one way or the other.

I am inspired by images. I have had photographs send me off into my imaginative deep end - diving into places where I step back after a frenzy of creativity and marvel at where this stuff came from. The world I am creating this codex for has origins in a lot of science and pseudo-science and multiple cultural influences. I want to keep these images, web links, PDF's and clips organized and also be able to see other ways I can mix them together to form the canon. For now I'd like it resident only on my computer, until I am ready to release, which is why I have not chosen a wiki as my main tool.

The creator of Tinderbox, Mark Bernstein has a blog which caught my eye, particularly his thread about Neo-Victorian computing and he defines it as

Built for people 

Built by people 

Crafted in workshops 

Irregular 

Inspired

This has a resonance for me because these seem to be the same characteristics held by the open source movement. Built by those who will use it. Created in small work groups by individuals. Democratic (as in the irregular chaos of a democracy). Inspired - people want to make things work better. An example of this is Blender.org which Ton Roosendaal talked about as a community that evolved around the software with people from all over the world wanting to improve upon it.

Thanks to Jonny Goldstein for this mind map image on Flickr.

Alternatives to Facebook -- what are the options?

Maybe you've just had enough. Perhaps your profile's been hacked, or you can't sort out the byzantine privacy settings options, maybe one of your "friends" mentioned a sex organ in status their update, (Once was enough to get me to "unfriend" you...) Or maybe you just long for something different.

Well dear reader, before FB Quitting Day May 31, 2010, here are some of your choices. Old and new soc nets (social networks) for your review.

Diaspora - the latest new, new thing. It's the sweetheart start-up developed by four charmingly geekalicious young lads from NYU and crowd funded by Kickstarter. It's not actually a social network yet. But they're working on writing the code to make it an open source alternative. They aren't the first ones out there per this link I found. (However to be honest, the Linux, Apache, MySql and Php talk starts to get a bit too techy for me and my brain melts just a little. Anyone care to enlighten me?)

Friendster - 'Memba them? I first heard of them in 1994 and even then it was a little late to be an early adopter.

Then there's Whspr, another recent entry into the soc-net-o-sphere which I mentioned in last week's Noo Yeek column.

Posterous - is a blog/soc-net hybrid you can see mine here. I know it's a bit light on the content, I'm just trying it out.

Ning is an option that I have used for an alumni network or maybe Orkut, a soc-net that is integrated into your Google-verse.

And another exile from soc-net Hipster-ville that might get a resurrection from the Facebook "diaspora" (oh those boys are clever name choosers!) is MySpace which seemed to loose steam and members once it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch.

I doubt people will leave LinkedIn or stop using Twitter due to privacy concerns since those are more readily controlled in terms of whom they broadcast to and yes, while Twitter isn't quite a social networking site, (really microblogging) it is a soc-net tool.

The meta narrative is privacy online. What is is, who controls it, how is it filtered and layered? Clearly the cows have long since left the barn, so it's really verbum sap sat. Everything you post on FB (or the internet) becomes part of the whole. They know a lot about you, because you give it to them, everyday. As one of my Facebook status updates read this week, "all your Face are belong to us".


Thank you Hank Grebe and Mediaspin.com for such a great image.

NOOYEEK

 New and unique  = Newique

(new-yeek)

Bitter Yellow flowers, I think they are some kind of daisy. (Does anyone else feel that this color yellow has a bitter taste/smell?)

Tactical Philanthropy 
It sounds like Soldier of Fortune meets the Chronicle of Philanthropy!

Temple Grandin speaking at the TED conference about different kinds of thinkers.
Cowgirl shirts are awesome!

Transparency Now
Let's make it clear...essays on the media and popular culture

And two new places to post items online
Posterous and Whspr

Whspr is in beta and is going for the people who are fleeing Facebook due to privacy issues. There's even a Quit Facebook Day on May 31, 2010.

Is anyone else using these? Or others? The Huffington Post has a blip about this here.

What if work were fun?

This is something I think about often. In my previous jobs I had fun at work when I accomplished things that were difficult. I had fun when I rallied my crew together to make things happen, or when we were all just a little punchy on a Friday afternoon as we prepared for the week ahead. I had fun when I got to bring my dog in and she helped out by greeting everyone who came into my office with a tail wag. But this is not the norm. People just don't have fun at work.

Why not? How cool would it be to work in a place that lets you bring your well-behaved pooch to the office? Or feeds you lunch in a great cafeteria for free? Where you can have a treadmill desk or a take a spin class in the afternoons? A place to plug in your electric vehicle? On site daycare and preschool? A "quiet room" where you can just unplug for a few minutes? Yes, there is a small percentage of businesses that have cultivated a sense of fun in the work environment, usually in the name of team building and creative thinking due to some kind of expensive corporate consultancy coming in to boost productivity. It's rare that the fun concept is an everyday part of business culture. I'm not talking the recreational eating, once a month birthday cakewrecks in the break room that are served up to us as "fun". I'm talking about your job being one of the joys in a fulfilled life where your office is a place in which you and your colleagues do your best work ever. Every day.

I am betting that this is coming. I believe that more workplaces will add fun to their corporate culture. It's a way to draw in and retain good employees. People will be happier at work, therefore healthier and more productive, more creative and dedicated to the company's mission. Not just picking up a paycheck.

Employees are coming into the business world now who are digital natives. They are media literate, content savvy and are fully conversational in the new media technologies. Multi-modal discourse is the norm for them as is a sense of playfulness in the workplace. They are the people I want to work with.

Why is it important? Because as Douglas Rushkoff said at SXSW this year, it's program or be programmed. We need to be digitally literate if we are going to be relevant. We have to be able to know how to read and view the texts that are presented to us. Foundations and corporations are putting up hundreds of millions of dollars into creating curricula for education to teach this new media literacy which is needed now for our participatory culture in the workplace of fun.

This clip gives a really good explanation of what media literacy is all about:



Wishing you fun in your workplace, Happy Friday!