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What Would Herman Melville Say to Soulja Boy?: Remix Culture and the New Media

Posted June 23rd, 2008 by Alan Levine
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Henry Jenkins, 2008 NMC Summer Conference
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Closing Keynote, 2008 NMC Summer Conference, Princeton University
Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

New media technologies make it easy for us to circulate, appropriate, transform, and recirculate media content on an unprecedented scale. It is part of the mythology of MIT that young people learn to become engineers by taking apart household gadgets and putting them back together again. Can we say the same thing about contemporary artists and humanists — that they learn by breaking down and remixing elements of their own culture? We falsify the creative process when we teach young people that great art comes from single and isolated intellects rather than emerging from the creative engagement with and appropriation from older cultural traditions.

In this presentation, Jenkins will address the ways that contemporary remix culture — whether embodied in music, You Tube videos, or fan fiction — forces us to reconsider older forms of cultural appropriation. Drawing on materials being developed by MIT’s Project NML, this presentation will explore the concept of “new media literacies” and explain why we see appropriation as a core cultural competency for the 21st century. Jenkins will explore how this concept might shake up how we teach traditional literary texts like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, how we respond to contemporary youth culture, and how we talk to young people about the ethical dimensions of their relationship to media content.

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