Reading the Remix

During the spring semester, we had some excellent Cac.ophony posts on the theme of remixing: “Agents of Information Change? Perhaps Not” by Melissa; “Vanilla Ice All Over Again” by Lauren; and “Lessig on Remix” by Wendy.  These posts raise essential questions about how we teach students to produce media in this digital age when it so easy to sample others’ work.

For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend  “Texts Without Contexts,” an essay from this past March by literary critic Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times books section.  Kakutani begins with a review of many of the challenges involved with production of media in our time, including reviews of texts new and old that challenge the boundaries of copyright law.

I found this part interesting, but was most struck by the next section, beginning with the following:

THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.

Kakutani focuses on intellectual, cultural, and social changes associated with the consumption of media.   She is not writing about teaching students how to read and research, but it is not difficult to see the implications for the classroom, as well as for graduate-level research, and the general communication challenges we grapple with on this blog.