Remix America

From ObamaVideo08.

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6 Responses to Remix America

  1. David Berry says:

    One would ‘hope’ that people were voting on the basis of the policies, I know that everyone has now decided the policies are so similar that there is no difference between the candidates (healthcare of course disproves this). But seriously, Obama as brand? Obama as rock star? Is this really the right direction for a campaign?

    I’m not saying it won’t work – the massification of media and the celebrity culture it has engendered has certainly helped valorise surface over depth – but seriously. It comes to something when even the intelligentsia of America begin to fall pray to aesthetics, smoke and mirrors….

    Why not enumerate the policy differences IN DETAIL. I know it might be boring to a certain proportion of the population, but surely it should be the role of the educated, the literate, and those able to use these new technologies to provide detailed, well argued and clear articulation of policy, policy, policy. If you don’t do it, who will?

    What has happened to the public intellectual in the US, when they merely mirror the most populist arguments of the mainstream. Where has this web 2.0 critical counter-culture vanished to?

    It seems to me, in a McLuhanist vein, that what we are seeing is the ‘implosion’ of media systems to some of the worst features of traditional media. Blogging was supposed to represent a new form of critical political imaginary, the reconnection of people able to debate and discuss. I note for instance that this blog seems to rarely reflect on what people comment about on the blog (and some commentators spend a great deal of time formulating some interesting and well thought out arguments). In this, the blog is becoming one-way, monological, not much different from TV or other broadcast media.. Clearly this is a real shame.

  2. sean coon says:

    “Blogging was supposed to…”

    i’m sorry, i missed that international meeting of bloggers. what exactly was the memo’s directive?

  3. David Berry says:

    “i’m sorry, i missed that international meeting of bloggers. what exactly was the memo’s directive?”

    If you have a little time, perhaps read the large amount of literature that was created discussing and debating the emergence of Blogging, not least Dan Gilmor’s “We the Media”. You will see that although there may not have been a formal meeting of bloggers, there was a discussion both within the blogosphere, but also within academia and journalism about how Blogging would impact on the public sphere. Many of them were also linked to a normative notion of a revitalised critical reading public (e.g. See Benkler’s work/Hardt & Negri/Kelly/ even John Perry Barlow)…

  4. sean coon says:

    i’m very familiar with dan’s work and the ensuing discussions surrounding the potential of blogging in terms of citizen journalism and the public’s ability to deconstruct media.

    i’ve been blogging since 2002. over that period of time, i’ve come to accept and embrace the notion that blogging is a platform that will be used by people in unlimited ways, with countless strategies for expression and distribution (of ideas and/or packaged bits such as music and documentary installments).

    for larry to present this video as an example of remix america directly on the heals of his very thorough 20 minute video breakdown of why obama is his candidate … well, it flows rather nicely for me.

  5. I am hopeful that blogging will cause shifts in the way that public discourse occurs but, given Cass Sunstein’s recent sobering analysis of the actual impact of digital collaborative systems in ‘Infotopia’, I’m not entirely sure that the optimism that I and others envision for collaborative creation systems is as justified as I/we would have hoped.

  6. C. Scott Blevins says:

    Speaking of remixes, I know this is not a cool political statement, but if you want to see where the true avant gard of remixing lives, check out guys that are doing things like Kid Koala. Watch his bewitching and perplexingly graceful rendition of Moon River….using nothing but turntables. This ain’t your grandparents DJ’ing. This is the art of “turntablism”. Watch the whole thing….it get’s trippy. Here is the link:

    Kid Koalas Moon River remix

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