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04/05/2004 Archived Entry: "Sprite Remix"
Sprite Remix. What makes Sprite so relevant to the rhetoric of cool is not, as Frank would argue, its reliance on teenage habits or language. Instead, it has borrowed an entirely new media rhetoric upon which to organize itself. Note this excerpt from the article:
"The ReMix idea came out of Sprite's weekly talks with ''teenagers and young people'' about the drink and ''society and popular culture,'' Carroll said. Sprite has for some years courted hip-hop artists and fans, seeing the music as a kind of lingua franca of youth culture. But last year, Sprite's share of the carbonated soft-drink market fell slightly, partly because of competition from newcomers like Sierra Mist. So Sprite tuned into its teen feedback crew's interest in musical remixing. Taking a familiar song and ''adding a different and unique spin to it,'' as Carroll put it, sounded like a useful notion in a novelty-thirsty cultural moment. Sprite envisioned a soft drink that would riff off the familiar lemon-lime flavor and cultivate loyalty not to a consistent taste but to a consistent idea about taste."
The logic of the remix has made its way into consumer culture - we know that. But what we haven't yet identified is how to integrate that logic into the university (what I wrote about in my ctheory article). It took hundreds of years before the university completely adopted the logic of print as an organizing principle, and only in the late 1800s did the composition program evolve out of this logic. We can imagine assignments and pedagogy based on the remix ("adding a different and unique spin" to previously constructed arguments, writings, images, etc.). But what about the entire composition curriculum? How would a remix composition program function? What would it look like? How would students become remixologists instead of "precise" and "identifiable" figures (products of topic sentences and linear argument)?
Replies: 1 Comment
Interesting set of observations. In literature classes, I try to combat the ubiquity of SparkNotes summaries and online term papers by coming up with new assignments... for instance, in an "Intro to Literary Study" class, I had students write a news story about the events that the protagoinsts would have made public in "A Jury of Her peers" (the Susan Glaspell short story about women who conceal evidence to prevent an acquaintance from being charged with murder), and also to write an editorial in the persona of one of the characters in the story. If the news story or the editorial gave away the truth -- that is, if either claimed that evidence was tampered with, then I reasoned that the student didn't understand the story.
Likewise, by asking students to blog their oral presentations and link to whatever online sources gave them their ideas (even if those online sources are not credible academic ones) I try to put the focus on writing a new idea, rather than summarizing information that already exists. I've had great success with having students blog their oral presentations and plan to do more with that later.
I hadn't connected what I was doing with the Sprite "remix" campaign -- but you're right, that fits beautifully!
Posted by Dennis G. Jerz @ 04/12/2004 04:29 PM EST