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ReMix: Reading and Composing Culture

With a mix of humor and analysis, a collection of fresh readings, lively assignments, and an enticing design, ReMix is not your ordinary textbook. It asks students to re-examine everyday concepts (such as identity, entertainment, and technology); to question assumptions about everyday life and culture; and to respond critically and creatively to some of the most imaginative projects you’ll find in a composition reader.
Built on the idea that students live in a do-it-yourself world in which they are the writers, designers, and inventors, ReMix invites students to bring their own creativity into the composition classroom. It inspires them to ask: Why do I think the way I do? What is my relationship to the culture around me? Am I truly, as one advertisement claims, "my playlist"? This question-posing approach allows students to write about culture and identity in a meaningful way.

Working from home today, so comfort is key.

Dress: Mlle Gabrielle
Cami: ???
Shoes: Palladium (remixed many, many times)

Remix II thrill ride at the Franklin County Fair, Greenfield Mass.

The author of Free Culture shows how we harm our children—and almost anyone who creates, enjoys, or sells any art form—with a restrictive copyright system driven by corporate interests. Lessig reveals the solutions to this impasse offered by a collaborative yet profitable “hybrid economy”.

Lawrence Lessig, the reigning authority on intellectual property in the Internet age, spotlights the newest and possibly the most harmful culture war—a war waged against our kids and others who create and consume art. America’s copyright laws have ceased to perform their original, beneficial role: protecting artists’ creations while allowing them to build on previous creative works. In fact, our system now criminalizes those very actions.

For many, new technologies have made it irresistible to flout these unreasonable and ultimately untenable laws. Some of today’s most talented artists are felons, and so are our kids, who see no reason why they shouldn’t do what their computers and the Web let them do, from burning a copyrighted CD for a friend to “biting” riffs from films, videos, songs, etc and making new art from them.

Criminalizing our children and others is exactly what our society should not do, and Lessig shows how we can and must end this conflict—a war as ill conceived and unwinnable as the war on drugs. By embracing “read-write culture,” which allows its users to create art as readily as they consume it, we can ensure that creators get the support—artistic, commercial, and ethical—that they deserve and need. Indeed, we can already see glimmers of a new hybrid economy that combines the profit motives of traditional business with the “sharing economy” evident in such Web sites as Wikipedia and YouTube. The hybrid economy will become ever more prominent in every creative realm—from news to music—and Lessig shows how we can and should use it to benefit those who make and consume culture.

Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms our children and other intrepid creative users of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the post-war world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded.