In this talk given to Brad Rosen’s CPSC 183, Dr. Francesca Coppa, Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Muhlenberg College and founding member of the Organization For Transformative Works, examines the ways in which remix culture speaks back to mass culture, creating counter-narratives which broaden the relatively limited perspectives of professional mass media content providers. Coppa surveys a broad array of remix genres – image, music, text, video, and code – to talk about how fair use allows amateurs to create culture as well as respond to mass culture in that culture’s own languages (including computer languages.) Coppa argues that remix culture is in many ways a return to the local, participatory cultures that existed before the relatively rise of the mass culture industries, and argues that we must all continue to see ourselves as makers, doers, and creators rather than, as digital “users” or “customers.”
