![]() The origins of remix, I argue, provides a lens for thinking critically about the rhetorical uses of the term in current discourse and forces us to ponder materialities. Drawing on qualitative analysis of popular music cultures, I argue that the conceptualization of remix as any media made from pre-existing media is problematic. ![]() I argue that Lessig’s understanding of remix is problematic as it seems unable to accommodate its musical namesake and obscures the particular history of media use in recent music culture. How did 'remix' a post-production technique and compositional form in dance music, come to describe digital culture? Is it an apt metaphor? In this article I consider the rhetorical use of remix in Lawrence Lessig’s case for copyright reform in Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008). This effort intervenes in current conversations and sparks enhancement of its concepts to shape the mediascape. ![]() An approach based on digital argument is capable of accounting for the rhetorical strategies of the formal elements of remixes while still attending to the specificity of the discourse communities from which they arise. In examining these pieces in terms of remix theory to date, a more expansive view is warranted. After exploring the roots of contemporary notions of orality, literacy, narrative and rhetoric, I turn to examples of marginalized, disparate artifacts that are already in danger of neglect in the burgeoning history of remix. A more valuable view of remix is as a digital argument that works across the registers of sound, text, and image to make claims and provides evidence to support those claims. Yet recent attempts to categorize remix are limiting, mainly as a result of their reliance on the visual arts and cinema theory as the gauge by which remix is measured. In this context, video remix becomes a rich avenue for communication and expression in ways that have heretofore been the province of big media. The affordances of digital technologies increase the available semiotic resources through which one may speak. Author: Owen Gallagher (Routledge, 2017) Multimodal analyses of both remixed and non-remixed intertextual work, with a particular focus on examples of critical remix video, fuel the discussion, synthesizing a number of investigative methods including semiotic, rhetorical and ideological analysis. The assumption that cultural works should be considered a form of private property is called into question in the digital age thus, he proposes an alternative system to balance the economic interests of cultural producers with the ability of the public to engage with a growing intellectual commons of cultural works. Gallagher argues that remix is a fundamentally transformative practice. Remix is now considered by many to be a form of derivative work, but such generalizations have resulted in numerous non-commercial remixes being wrongfully accused of copyright infringement.
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