Today’s Remix Culture class is about fan writing, collective writing/creation and vernacular creativity. Students have read these articles:

We’ll talk a bit about key concepts in these articles (cultural studies: audience as co-creators of meaning, vs today where they’re more literal creators; amateur, prosumer; , and then move on to explore a case study, which admittedly only minimally involves remixing. It heavily involves responding to mass media/celebrities though, so I’m using it anyway. We’ll look at Dan Bull’s “Love Letter” to Lily Allen and the media fuss it’s gained. Groups of students will be given different tasks and then we’ll all come together to discuss the case and in particular, ideas about democratisation of the media (or not) and the power relationships between celebrities and “ordinary people” and the media.

Here are the tasks groups will work on and present to the class:

  • Who is Lily Allen? What did she recently say about copyright and piracy of music? Can you summarise a few media/popular responses to this?
  • Who is Dan Bull? Was he well known before this video? What other things has he done/made? Were they popular? Is his Twitter account popular? What kind of things does he write there?
  • How popular is Dan Bull’s video? It was featured in the free London newspaper Metro – how important was this mainstream media attention in making the video popular? Was it featured in other mainstream media? Has it spread in other online/social media? Summarise the video’s rise to fame.

    Once we have the “facts” of the case on the table I want to discuss the way Dan Bull used a celebrity to pull himself (or perhaps better, his message?) into public view (see also his Twitter feed where he comments Yoko Ono, for instance), and the relationship between mass media and this kind of viral media. Is Dan Bull simply playing us – is this a carefully planned market strategy to get famous? Or is he just as dependent on mass media as the rest of us? What’s Lily Allen’s position in all this?


Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

1 Comment

  1. […] H??res kjent ut, eller hva? Men dette er ikke en beskrivelse av remikskultur p?• nett. Det er slik Jeff Bishop og Paul Hogget i 1986 beskrev subkulturelle fellesskap organisert rundt felles interesser (side 53, sitert i Jenkins, 1992: 280). […]

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

From 17th century book factories to AI-generated literature

When I studied literature we mostly read the classics. Great literature, the canon. But that’s not necessarily what most people actually read. What if instead of comparing AI-generated literature to the literary canon, we tried comparing it to super popular and commercial forms of literature instead? Like the folkebøker that […]

Triple book talk: Watch James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me discuss our 2023 books

Thanks to everyone who came to the triple book talk of three recent books on machine vision by James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me, and thanks for excellent questions. Several people have emailed to asked if we recorded it, and yes we did! Here you go! James and Jussi’s books […]