Information (Remix)

I was recently in a client meeting with my boss, Julien Brunet, discussing social media marketing and how the various platforms available can be used to meet a brand's communication needs. Specifically, we were going over the various possible applications of a microblogging platform, such as Twitter. During this convo, we were explaining to our clients that if a company doesn't have the proper resources (at first) to fully engage in social media and produce fresh daily content...then a microblogging tool could be used (and is so used by many Twitterers) to aggregate and share a series of interesting (and pertinent!) information pieces relative to the client's industry.

It was at this precise point in the conversation when Julien coined the term "Information DJs" in reference to how many Twitterers use this tool as an information remix platform. His term really struck a chord. I found this to be really interesting, as it is yet another manifestation of the remix culture we are currently living in. We are all information remixologists in some form or fashion... sharing cultural artifacts we find to be of interest with our entire network.

But, has this not always been so? Have we not always been information remixologists? Have we not always shared the information we've acquired with our friends, family, coworkers...Don't we spend our entire lives giving shape to information? Is it not simply our tools and our selected channels of communication that have changed? But then... if "the medium is the message", then would it not mean that this new medium has altered the way we remix and convey the information we acquire?
Hmmm....so many questions...

In an attempt to answer these questions, here's the information (wink) I found that helped clarify things a bit in my mind.

First, I found this interesting video that answers the question "Do you know what information is?" Check it out:



Ok. So information has no form. We're the ones who give form to information... we give form to it by the manner in which we choose to communicate it. Therefore, we often confuse information with the form that it takes. So, according to this video, the medium is not the message... and this digital revolution does not directly alter our understanding of information, because information has no form to begin with.

But I still want to know how the medium affects the message. How does the medium (the Web) change the way we seek out, find, understand, manipulate and share information?

I found my answer in the following video "Information R/evolution" produced by Michael Wesch, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University:




So "We no longer just find information. It can find us. We can make it find us... It's an information explosion, an information revolution. And the responsibility to harness, create, critique, organize and understand is on us."
Beautiful!

Cultural remixology and the art of the cover song

While I was sick with a nasty cold last week, I spent a lot of time engaged in one of my favourite activities: exploring and listening to music! The geek in me always tries to uncover the cultural relevance behind each track, behind each genre... and my attention, lately, has been focused on the art of cover songs. Particularly, rock covers of hip hop and pop songs.

Many people have criticized the rock remake of hip hop songs by labelling it as a fad, a soulless commercial trend, draining the original piece of all its meaning. Though, in some cases, that may be true (such as the Punk Goes Pop albums), I feel that artists generally succeed in creating culturally relevant and authentic pieces by borrowing from what other artists have expressed in the past and making it their own.

After all, this is nothing new. Artists, for decades now (and centuries, I dare say) have been inspiring themselves and drawing on the works of others in order to create their own unique pieces. The Cultural Remixology of music is nothing new. I found many interesting blog posts and articles covering the subject ( Here's one by MicControl for your reference).

The key in creating a successful cover song seems to be authenticity. Music is a form of communication, a medium of expression, like any other art form. Musicians dig deep into their well of feelings, thoughts, emotions and beliefs and borrow from the cultural codes they've been exposed to, to formulate a song and share their thoughts and feelings with the world... their songs, like any art work, are always open to interpretation. A cover song is successful when an artist interprets the original song with transparency and authenticity, bringing his or her own unique expression to the piece.

In an interview, Chris Cornell of Audioslave gives us a glimpse into the art of recording and performing a cover song:

"I have to take a song and somehow reinvent it and make it my own... and make it exciting... and bring some emotional angle to it that's not already there."

When an artists draws on an existing song in order to bring a new emotional (as well as cultural!) angle to it, that artist changes the semiotics of the song, attaching a whole new set of signs and symbols to the piece. Thus, the remade song appeals to a whole new audience.

Of all the rock cover songs out there (and there are many!), here are my Top 5 favourite songs:

Here is The Fray covering Kanye West's "Heartless" :



This is Chris Cornell's cover of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" :



Here is 30 seconds to Mars covering Kanye West's "Stronger" (which is also a cover song of Daft Punk's "Harder Better Faster Stronger"):



Ok. Maybe this one's not so deep and thought-provoking. It does, however, reflect certain prominent aspects of our pop culture psyche. And, I must admit, Framing Hanley's version is a rather catchy remake of Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" . Needless to say, it got tons of radio play:



Last but not least is Rage Against the Machine's cover of Afrika Bambaata's "Renegades of Funk" .This one always gets me going on the heavy bags at the gym:

A cultural cocktail. Shaken, not stirred.

Cultural identity is a very complex beast to tackle. As individuals in society, we define who we are by who we are not. That is, we establish our identity through our relations with others. In observing others, we can locate ourselves in the vast spectrum of all the possible ways of being human and living life. Until recently, due to spatial and temporal constraints, we had limited access to witnessing and observing all the different ways people choose to express their humanity. With all the technologies available today, these temporal and geographical barriers are being removed, and we’re gaining access to, well, the entire world! We are gaining LIVE access to entire life perspectives and forms of expressions we didn’t even know existed.

 Technologies like Youtube, Peer-to-peer  file sharing, Social Media platforms and so on are making it possible for diverse people from diverse cultural backgrounds to connect and share meaning with one another.  These technologies have made possible a whole new set of conversations. As Marshall McLuhan said “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”. These New Media are creating new ways of relating to others and, therefore, creating new ways of knowing ourselves and defining our identities. Now that we have a bigger window to the world, we have more and more cultural codes to choose from on our quest to find our authentic selves. We can create for ourselves a veritable cocktail of cultural signs and symbols that make up our cultural identity. (As if identity wasn’t complex enough!)

What we see happening all around us now is a Remix Culture, unlike any we’ve ever seen before. The reality of this remixed culture dawned on me last weekend, when a good friend of mine convinced me to check out a live show at Les Bobards. I’m really glad I went, as it ended up being a unique experience! The artist, Max Pashm, created a live remix of Greek, Balkan, Jewish electro-tribal new wave punk. I'd never heard anything like it before in my life! It was a uniquely beautiful fusion, musically speaking, but also in terms of the cocktail of people who were there on the dance floor. There was a young Native American-looking guy with long black hair who was break dancing.... next to him, there was a girl dancing in eastern European fashion, her arms swaying gracefully in the air (very similar to Armenian folkloric dancing)... then there was this Asian girl in a sari, moving as though she was dancing the bhangra.... and many other types of very different people who came together to form a unique vibe. I couldn’t help but join in, drawn to the crowd like an olive to a Martini, adding my own unique ingredient to the existing cocktail. And as more and more people united on the dance floor, the overall expression we created together as a whole became its own living, breathing, evolving entity.

The experience really left a deep impression on me. This would not have been possible without the technologies that are available to us today. And it made me wonder just what this cultural shift means and how we are to define cultural identity in the future.  It seems that we are remixing ourselves. Each of us are borrowing diverse cultural elements from across the globe, remixing them to form the unique individuals we are becoming, and then sharing our individual expressions with the world, thus contributing to the evolution of culture.

Hello World!

It is a wonderfully rich world we live in. Fascinating, really. There are countless forms of human expression to explore. Via this blog, I will do precisely that... I will explore diverse cultural and sub-cultural groups and the manner in which they use the modern tools available to express themselves, to create meaningful content, to share their ideas within a community, and to thus contribute to the evolution of culture.

Culture is fluid, always changing, always evolving. Digital technology has facilitated (and has sped up!) this evolution, creating uniquely creative forms of human expression, blurring the lines of cultural identity.

So what fascinates me the most is the way various human expressions come together and are remixed to form new and unique experiences. If we look at how expressions are shared, we can state that meaning is constructed by an individual (or a group of individuals), transmitted via a channel, and then decoded by an audience. But with the shift from a one-to-many model of communication to a many-to-many model, it doesn’t end there anymore. The initial message, once decoded by an end user, is in turn modified, reconstructed, remixed, and again retransmitted to other end users, who in turn start the process over again.

This is what I wish to share with you...my fascination with the evolutionary fusion of diverse expressions into unique experiences.
Welcome to the Cultural Remixology Blog.