Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Food for Thought for 2009

Posting this blog on Christmas will be too late for this shopping season, but it may influence your shopping choices in 2009. My daughter Lori who is a communications major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, composed this video after reading, The Better World Shopping Guide. The book is a “comprehensive, up-to-date, reliable set of rankings on the social and environmental responsibility of businesses and corporations” (p.2).

Lori and I had an interesting discussion about her thoughts and intent in creating the video. “This is a purposeful message,” Lori said. “These are real problems and without the images, the words are just facts. Without the emotional impact that these images have, people will be less likely to take the message seriously and act on it.”

An article in the September, 2008 issue of Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, “Remix: The Art and Craft of Endless Hybridization” defines remix: “To take cultural artifacts and combine and manipulate them into new kinds of creative blends. “ Although remix originally referred to using audio-editing techniques to produce a new mix of a recorded song, recently it has been “expanded to include music and sound as well as moving and static images taken from films, television, the Internet, personal archives, and elsewhere” (p. 22).

The authors note that “we remix language every time we take an idea, artifact, or a particular stretch of language and integrate it into what we are saying and doing at the time” (p.23). The article explores several remix practices and the art and craft of remix. The implications for literacy education are enormous. As you view the video, consider not only the facts that Lori presents, but also the literacy skills she needed to create it. Food for thought for 2009.

Lori recommends that you purchase a copy of the book yourself; it is compact and travels easily. But if you don’t want to purchase it, you could e-mail me at cbaldwin6@carolina.rr.com and I will send you a spreadsheet that she and two friends created condensing the information from the book.

Images for this video were taken from Google images; the text is from The Better World Shopping Guide, music is Love Come Down by The War.

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2 comments:

Colin and/or Michele said...

Nice mix. Clean and punchy. We are just about to read Larry Lessig's new book called "Remix". We reckon he's done more than anyone to politicise remix and establish its status as a catalyst for much-needed reflection and change on many levels.

Joyce Moyer Hostetter said...

Excellent! No more M&M's huh?

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