Assignment 5/3- Reading Takeaways

Source: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/

In Lankshear and Knobel New literacies the main takeaway for me was the idea about culture as a remix. No remix, no culture. The idea that cultures have to be moving forward and be recreated by mixing "new" elements with "pre-existing" elements. What they are trying to say is that cultures need to re-mix to be able to move forward, as well to know how to engage with other cultural beliefs and elements from other cultures and mix. When I think of this remix, I think of my own background as a Mexican Jew, it is a remix because my family moved form Russia (and Poland) all the way to Mexico to find new ways of remixing our cultural knowledge.

We remix the meaning of language as well, depending in what is our current situation. An example of my life is using Yiddish. Yiddish is a language (well, some people say isn’t a dialect) that mixes Hebrew, German, Russian and English into one, a complete remix of the previous languages to move forward. It was invented for Jews who lived in Poland and Russia in the early 20th century and needed to communicate with eachother (Hebrew was not a formal language to then, so it was hard to have a language to communicate).  Nowadays I use Yiddish as a way to remember this past, but keep moving forward and adapt to even the life I have in the United States and how even some words in Yiddish are used in English’s (jutzpe, oy vei, shmuck). 

Connections nowadays are so crucial! And with all the amount of ways we remix helps to really use either a song, an image or a video to remix and connect. I liked the idea of the mixing of music, and how much we see it as a natural existence. Soundcloud (www.soundcloud.com) is the main online internase i think of when has to do with having your sound mixing. GarageBand is also another application I think of. When I was younger it was fun to try to create my own beats with GarageBand, and add my voice make it into a unique song.  But at the end of the day the inspiration of remixing exists because of connecting with others. 

With the Peppler reading chapter 3. I was curious about the digital art form know as Machinima, never heard the name. This all has to do with creating an alternative world using either video games, animations, or cartoons. There is an avatar moving through the virtual space and there are a million different ways the “adventure” can happen, it all depends who is playing. It Ian a virtual real-time and often has multiple players talking to each other to finish a task, or to defeat other enemies. 
Did some reader just boot what is machinima, and whether or not I have played it. World of Warcraft is one of those games, as well as Black and White by epic entertainment. I have played both of this games, which really makes you go in quests and think about you as individual and the the changes you can create to this homogeneous universe. Now I know about the name, and that there are so famous amongst teenagers, and even some create this Machinima stories that can even be seen in film festivals.

Video about simulation- very interesting! 

http://www.machinima.com/ (some resources)

Article in the Washington post about machinima 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/10/AR2005111001507.html