Everything is a Remix

The primary thesis of everything is a remix is, as the title says, everything is a remix. The video series goes through brief musical, movie, and invention history to show how one idea led to another which led to another and so on. Remixing is copying, transforming, and combining to create a new piece, item, or idea. One example given in the first video is Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin copied a lot of parts for their songs, such as the very recognizable guitar intro to Stairway to Heaven, which came from Taurus by the band Spirit. Ironically, Led Zeppelin later had many parts of their songs used by future artists, such as Eminem sampling When the Levee Breaks for his song Kim. 

Fergueson’s concept of remixing connects to rhetoric because these remixes can change the world. One notable example is the assembly line, first used to great effect by Henry Ford in the early 1900s. Ford remixed ideas that already existed such as interchangeable parts and the assembly line, to create the first line of mass produced cars in the Model T. In the present day, most companies use an assembly line style production system. Another very important invention was the internet, created in the early 90’s. The internet is one of, if not the, greatest and most impactful inventions in human history. The way the internet affected the way people around the globe live may never be achieved again. Looking at the use of the internet only in the time span of the last month, we use it for work, for classes, for leisure and entertainment, shopping, banking, and communication. Without the internet, we would lose almost all contact with everyone. The invention of the internet is the best example of how remixing connects to impacting the outside world.

If we look at the third article we read for this class, Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric. In this piece, the authors talk about how extremely influential rhetoric is and how someone may respond to it based on their rhetorical ecologies. A rhetorical ecology goes back to the article we read before that, From Rhetorical Situations to Rhetorical Ecologies. This piece explains how multiple rhetorical situations transform and combine, which is Fergueson’s definition of a remix, to form a rhetorical ecology. If we go back one more piece, we’re looking at the Rhetorical Situation, which defines a rhetorical situation as an event that consists of an exigence, an audience, and a set of constraints. The ideas presented in A Rhetorical Situation are remixed in From Rhetorical Situations to Rhetorical Ecologies, which are remixed and used in Green Culture, and many of the texts we have read past that point.