Nothing's New, But Everything's Remixed
When you think to yourself, “everything is a remix,” what does that exactly mean? I wouldn’t have understood how to answer this question until after I watched the video. As I watched it, everything the author was saying made sense to me. The fact that I found out music and movies are basically remixes of past songs and films was an interesting realization for me. I would have never noticed this because I don’t watch many old films or analyze the beats of different songs. So to me, everything really is a remix. This means that every idea you have isn’t exactly new or original. Our ideas are influenced by everything that happens around us. There are no new ideas, just copying.
The elements of creativity the author described in the video included the steps, “Copy, Transform, and Combine.” Our ideas come from copying other ideas that we see and then transforming and combining them so that they’re “new.” This is called Social Evolution. Our “new” ideas are just ideas that have evolved from older ones. In society today, we are working on making products more efficient. The products aren’t new; they’re just transformed from older products. The Macintosh computer was a great example. There had been computers before this one, but they weren’t affordable for the everyday citizen and they weren’t for the home. Computers prior to the Macintosh were mostly used for work at businesses. Since the Macintosh was the first computer that people could have in their homes, it was known by many as the first computer. In reality though, there had been computers before the Macintosh. This computer was evolved from the earlier models and was made to be more efficient. This shows exactly how there are no new ideas, just ideas that are transformed from prior ideals.
The most interesting part was the fact that all movies are either remakes from books, comics, or other movies. If they don’t fall under that category, then the movies are genre movies and they usually have the same plots as the other movies before them. When a new movie comes out, people are always saying for example, “Oh, the new Spiderman movie comes out today!” This movie isn’t actually new though. The movie is just a remake of the earlier Spiderman movies and those are remakes of the comics. The example that the video gave was about the Star Wars movies. The video showed how many of the scenes in the Star Wars movies are actually very similar to scenes from older movies. This shows how remixing is very prevalent in even the most popular movies.
Everything is a remix, but I think there’s still creativity in the world. By using your past experiences and influences, you are able to create something unique to you. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s unique to everyone though. Somebody could have the same ideas as you, but you just express those ideas before they do. There might not be anymore “new” ideas, but that doesn’t mean people can’t be creative and transform older ideas.
