CAN YOU BUILD A MORE CRITICAL SOCIETY THROUGH THE POLITICAL REMIX?

<Dad says, "Well son, let me try to explain it this way: I'm the breadwinner of the family, so let's call me capitalism. Your Mom, she's the administrator of the money, so we'll call her the Government. We're here to take care of your needs, so we'll call you the people. The nanny, we'll consider her the Working Class. And your baby brother, we'll call him the Future. Now, think about that and see if that makes sense,"
So the little boy goes off to bed thinking about what dad had said.
Later that night, he hears his baby brother crying, so he gets up to check on him. He finds that the baby has severely soiled his diaper. So the little boy goes to his parents' room and finds his mother sound asleep. Not wanting to wake her, he goes to the nanny's room. Finding the door locked, he peeks in the keyhole and sees his father in bed with the nanny. He gives up and goes back to bed. The next morning, the little boy says to his father, "Dad, I think I understand the concept of politics now."
The father says, "Good son, tell me in your own words what you think politics is all about."
The little boy replies, "Well, while Capitalism is screwing the Working Class, the Government is sound asleep, the People are being ignored and the Future is in deep poo.">>
This is a little story that I think that explain what is really politic.
I think that answer at the question: “What is politics?” is simple if you think about the definition of the word POLITICS: politics is a process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. It consists of "social relations involving authority or power" and refers to the regulation of a political unit, and to the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply policy. This is the real definition of politics but i think that our politicians don’t think about this definition when they do their work.
I think that politic is something that is in your life always, that lives with you, that help you during your life. It is something that should make a better and simple life… but is it always in this way??
Today politics is fundamental in our life. It help us to respect the laws and to live in a civil country and done civilize…but so, which is the problem? The problem is that people live politics as a distant thing; as a thing that doesn't touch they from near; a thing that don’t belongs to our daily life. There is nothing more wrong. Politics is our life, it is not something outside our life. If we take politics in this superficial way the world will collapses. Thanks to the democracy we can choose ours political and therefore we can’t afford not to think when we take our decisions in this field.
I decided to assemble me on politics in my project of remix culture because I think that it is one of the most important and fundamental things of our life.
In this project I will be a little bit critic because i don't agree at all with the decisions that my country has taken in this field.
But also this is an aspect of the democracy, isn’t it? I think that Italy is becoming a country a little bit superficial and maybe it’s right that we have this kind of Prime Minister but this doesn't brake me to make some satire on him, and I will do this! Sometimes when I see the things that it does or that it also tells during the international meeting, I surprise me that there are still people prepared to vote him. But I repeat, this is the democracy and I accept it, but I try to make to open the eyes to the people of my country making video or writing articles on him and on what he does or what he says. In my work there aren’t almost personal comments because everything that he does doesn't need comments, his actions are explained alone.
But a series of coincidences made it possible that I began to do something concrete.
In August 2009 I started attending the University of Bergen in Norway and I started to follow a course whose name is digital culture. This period is terrible for the Italian politics. Silvio Berlusconi is our Prime Minister! I am quite worried for my country because without even realizing it, the Italians are giving absolute power to Berlusconi. There's a great revival of fascism. Berlusconi is acquiring the judiciary to control the country at will. He convinced Italian people that all investigations of fraud and corruption against him were false through the television, and he managed to push through laws to protect staff bypassing the Constitution. Now Berlusconi has the control of the legislative power and of the judiciary power. Executive power is also easy to corrupt because the President Napolitano plays only a very small position of power. Meanwhile, Berlusconi controls also 90% of the mass media. And as if all this were not enough, Italy is also plagued by economic depression that goes crazy in the world.
Like many people living in Italy I was deeply disturbed by this situation.
I always said I wanted to do something to change this situation but, at 20 years old you feel almost useless. I always think, what can I do to change things? But ... here is the answer!
As I said previously, this summer I started attending a wonderful course of cultural studies that let me discover a world that I did not know before, the world of remix. Before that time I had heard about remix only associated with the remix music, I thought it was just an alternate version of an original song. Nothing more. But it is not so, there is a world behind the remix!
So I decided to start a project with a remix between cartoons and politics especially Italian politics. This to make to see that we often vote characters that seem gone out of the cartoons, that behave in international circle as if they are in a village vacations on the sea. People that don't think seriously about the things that happen in the world but rather people that try to render less dramatic with some bad jokes. So, why we call this thing politics? I think that this is not politics, but therefore… what is politics?
And people think about politics as something serious and important? The people who vote have a political conscience? We live in a critic society? How can we open the eyes of the ordinary people who go to vote?
How do we grow in them a civic sense and the political consciousness?
I think that, with the advent of the Internet Era, the best way is the political remix, infact it is a new way to say our opinions!
But before talking about political remix is better to understand what the remix culture is.
Remix culture is a term employed by Lawrence Lessig and other copyright activists to describe a society which allows and encourages derivative works. Such a culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright holders. Lessig presents this as a desirable ideal and argues, among other things, that the health, progress, and wealth creation of a culture is fundamentally tied to this participatory remix process.

The remix culture can be defined as the global activity consisting on the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies that is supported by the practice of cut/copy and paste.
The concept of Remix often referenced in popular culture derives from the model of music remixes which were produced around the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York City, an activity with roots in Jamaica’s music. Today, Remix (the activity of taking samples from pre-existing materials to combine them into new forms according to personal taste) has been extended to other areas of culture, including the visual arts; it plays a vital role in mass communication, especially on the Internet.
There are a lot of field where the remix is used. In art we can se many variants of the Monna Lisa (Fernando Botero, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol and so on…) and in music the hip-hop is the most important example of remix. Literature has remixes too, like the William Burrough’s cutups, of course, or Tom Phillip’s Humument, a “treated” Victorian novel. And of course literature is saturated with reinterpretations and appropriations of more traditional kinds - Romeo and Juliet to West Side Story, for instance, or Shakespeare’s own borrowing of stories. Games can be remixed with mods that actually rewrite or modify the game itself (Quake is a great example, with lots of mods) or in machinimas, videos made by “taping” actions in the game. There is also a remix between different films like Edward/Buffy video or the fan remix from Pirates of the Carribbean as well. Exist also a biological remix but i decided to focused my attention on political remix.
The political remix is a process of cutting and pasting video, images and words together, trying to create something new, that expresses which is your point of view. Through the political remix, people can say important things in a playful way. The beauty of these videos is that different artists assign their own meanings to the raw materials they share. Infact they are a kind of memory palace, encapsulating a complex narrative within a smaller number of highly iconographic shots.
Henry Jenkins, an American media scholar, considers the political remix like an art of “making do”, a poached culture. He thinks that It is the recontextualization of borrowed images, that it is an art of quotation that anchors its images to a referent, either drawn from the fan’s meta-textual understanding of the series characters and their universe or assigned them within the construction of a new narrative.
One of the first remixes for political purposes was General Adolph takes over, created for the allies in the 1940s. This video was created by Universal Newsreel. They took appropriated film of Nazi solders on parade and re-sliced it to a quirky British tune making Hitler and his army skip and dance like wind-up toys.
Another company that has created political remix video is the Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN). But today most video are created by individuals.
First video of political satire comes from many years ago. Infact we had understood from the beginning the social importance that had the political remix video. At that time the only problem was that there wasn’t a way of communication that could reach a large number of people. Is for this reason that the advent of the Internet has been essential in the growth of political remix videos.
Infact video is the primary element also including an appropriated audio, music, photos, text or graphics as well and with the increased accessibility of recording, capturing, editing and distribution tools the genre has become obtainable (available) to many more individuals causing a torrent of Political Remix Videos to appear all over the net.
Political remix videos are designed to create a political consciousness for the ordinary people and to create a critical eye in looking at things and do not be charmed by all that people or television say.
The purpose of political remix videos is to pass a message, if it is right or wrong it depends on the point of view of who is watching it. And this message has to capture the attention of people who are watching the video, that is the attention of ordinary people. They are people that go to vote, they are people that have to choose who will govern our country. And so you need to capture their attention. But how can this be done? First of all, video should be short and sharp. A political remix video must be ironic because the humor is essential to reach people. In fact I think that irony is a fundamental Ingredients because she can hit people's attention, especially the ordinary people. In the web there are many videos and so you have to capture people's attention to is that your video is seen by people.
An other feature that I found important in achieving a good result for political remix videos is to select current issues that are known for the viewers; I think is also important that the creator of the remix needs to have a deep knowledge in the issue he is focused. So first is necessary a study on the field of the issue. But is also necessary a critic point of view. If we want a critical society the creators need to be critics as well.
The video remix artist, photographer, new media teacher and the consultant and activist, Jonathan McIntosh, is one of the most important sources that I have studied during this month. He also worked on numerous media and social justice related projects in the United States and around the world. The text he wrote on the occasion of Ars Electronica Festival is very interesting for my research. His definition of political remix videos is quite similar at the others that we have analyzed:
“Political Remix Video is a process of Do It Yourself cultural creation by transforming mass media fragments through re-cutting, recycling and re-framing messages.”
For him, political remix videos help to create a more critical society. The parody, satire, humor and critical comments are the trends used in this new way of understanding politics trying to fight a passive culture. Political remix video not criticize the way that mass media work, but it used them to send messages totally different from that which the media want to launch trying to capture the attention of people. New messages that may suggest to the viewer a critical way to see the world, to create a political consciousness for the ordinary people and to create a critical eye in looking at things and do not be charmed by all that people or television say:
“Political remix video is an increasingly popular and relevant form of remix that can at its best challenge dominant power systems, media and myths in our society, our culture and ourselves. It has the potential to help us imagine a better more just society and help illuminate corruption, hypocrisy and injustice in our world. These video works also have the ability to help nurture a critical talk-back culture of resistance and liberation. The work’s content is not confined to government, leaders, and elections but also focuses on critical consciousness to engage issues of media, culture, economics, race, gender, sexuality and class.”
I totally agree with him infact I think that the political remix videos are important because they can help society to create a critical political consciousness.
“Still a powerful potential exists for Political Remix Videos to impact our cultures, our society, our media networks and our political systems.” (McIntosh)
Everyone can create political remix video and put them on the web. For this reason it is very common the breaking of copyright. I think that it is the worst enemy of the remix video.
The discourse on copyright is very important for people, like me, would like to work in the field of journalism writers and is also important for people that want to create a political remix video.
Copyright gives the author of an original work exclusive right for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation, after which time the work is said to enter the public domain. Copyright has been internationally standardized, lasting between fifty to a hundred years from the author's death, or a shorter period for anonymous or corporate authorship.
But however the culture of the Read-Write of the web is based on remixes and Mash Up and it is redesigning the network as we know it, using imagination and creativity of young people that often ignoring the copyrights laws. This culture is threatened by those who would like to maintain some economic control on creativity and, while there are many who support this new collaborative and democratic current, the old entertainment industry continues to increasingly consolidate its grip on intellectual property through restrictive laws on copyright. Each country still has its own copyright laws and I think that everyone should know them, because it is very easy to break them. Infact, as McIntosh says, works typically use unauthorized media fragments captured from corporate owned and copyrighted sources but because of the transformative nature of the work and the fact that remix in this genre employ parody, satire, and critical commentary they qualify as a fair use of the original material.
Why to create laws that can stop the spread of ideas? I understand that we must protect the author, but perhaps we could create laws less restrictive and in this way we can benefit both parties.
Fearing of infringing the copyright and because of the perceived legal risk of using copyrighted material the political remix videos are usually created by individuals and not by institutions.
“The remix is a process of constructing a new artistic creation out of pieces of the original but never simply copying or pirating the whole original source.” (McIntosh)
After all this writing, iread, study, create and watch political remix videos, I feel able to answer to Jonathan McIntosh when he says:
“I used to say that Political Remix Videos would not change the world. I held this point of view because social transformation begins with collective grassroots action in the physical world. An individual standing on a soapbox or in this case standing on one’s computer doesn’t create real political change. The word politics itself, by definition, refers to a collective process.”
I think that politics is a collective process and I think that the social transformation begins with collective grassroots action in the physical world.
But the physical word is stimulated by what comes from the outside world and thus also the man in front of the computer, that observes passively the video, slowly becomes involved in the process of change. After a lot of time and watching too many videos will remain imprinted something in his head.
Infact the most important thing is to spread your message to as many people as possible.
I believe that the ocean is made up of many drops and that if no one did anything to try to fix things the world would go wrong. There are several ways to change things or to tell the world your opinion and try to open people's eyes. One of these ways is create political remix videos.
All this things to get people to remember that video, he'll show up to others, and maybe someone endorses what it is trying to say to you; maybe someone will find the courage to say what he thinks and then only at that point political remix video reaches its end, it will open the eyes of some blind man, a man that before was stunned by dupe notions of politicians and mass media. Only in this way we will have helped create a MORE CRITICAL SOCIETY!
“Political remix videos promote a critical culture rather than one of acceptance, obedience and acquiescence, producing a healthy skepticism and a critical eye in regards to the mass media and powerful institutions.” (Jonathan McIntosh)
I think that Italians need many political remix video much more than the other country.
Infact the whole world has realized that we have a Prime Minister who seems ridiculous caricature of himself but we didn’t noticed this things!
And so we continue to vote for a man gangster that seems to be born in a holiday village next the sea that looks like the protagonist of a nasty cartoon. These entire things are strengthening the idea that I carry on with my project.
I also tried to create a political remix video between politics and cartoons. just to emphasize that there is considerable similarity between these two things in Italy in this period.

Now the policy has no meaning, it is just a huge game of money and power, where those who govern do not think about the welfare of his people but they govern for their own purposes, without thinking of the nation that is leading to disaster, day by day.
Sorry to be so critical and sharp but I live in Italy and my comments stem from the experience. Now if I think the policy I have to laugh ... the same mocking smile that I have when I watch a nasty cartoon.
But we can not stay still and watch we must act and do something.
“The act of political remix can offer and true sense of active participation and empowerment by giving people a vehicle to express their own reality and engage in the process of cultural creation. It can promote a more open participatory discourse and culture turning people from passive consumers into active creators.” (Jonathan McIntosh)
Many people need to scream and give talks to the streets to be heard, others decide to write books. But with the advent of the Internet Era appeared several new ways to say our opinions and the remix is one of those new ways. And I think that Political Remix is one of the most important. The political remix is a process of cutting and pasting video, images and words together, trying to create something new, that expresses what is your point of view, through the political remix, people can say important things in a playful way. Some people decide to stay in the shadows and you’ll never know who the author of the political remix video is. Others are willing to infringe the copyrights to express their ideas. They do all these things to create art, to create something that will stay etched in time, something you can not control the movement, the circulation. In the political remix video words emphasize the pictures and pictures emphasize the words… The beauty of these videos is that different artists assign their own meanings to the raw materials they share only because they want to share their feelings.
Political remix video can help society to create a critical political consciousness.
In your life you can do whatever you want… you can stay in your little shell and learn everything that the others passively to tell you. Or you can get up, wake up from the slumber of your monotonous life and start doing something concrete. Infact I think that every person in his small can do something to change the world and try to create a more critical society. I decided to start from the political remix!
Have a political consciousness is a fundamental thing; to be critical of what surrounds us is foundamental at the same way. And if through political remix video we are able to move at least our society trying to take her to have a more critical view of life ... Why not try?