My name is Felipe and I'm from Seville
I'm a member of a team called ZEMOS98
Which investigates and reflects upon what I’m going to talk to you about
The first idea is actually a very curious coincidence
On the 23rd of June which is my birthday
Just last year, on June 23rd of 2010
I got the book by Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, as a present
I play this game with my friends that, when we gift each other a book,
We randomly open the book to a page and we write down a quote from it
And the quote that came up that day, by Henry Jenkins, said
"A game is a form of learning, and in a period of reorientation and redefinition of the skills...
it can result to be much more important than what it seems to be at first sight"
The story of the coincidence I was talking about earlier is that that very same day on June 23rd of 2010
But in a different latitude from Seville
In Huntsville, a city in the state of Alabama, in the United States
A girl called Kelly Dodson was sleeping when suddenly someone broke into her house and got in bed with her
Her brother, called Antoine Dodson, heard noises and went to her rescue
Of course the story did not go unnoticed by the local sensationalist media
And on the very next day they were covering the story, and interviewed Antoine Dodson
Even though we didn’t see the whole video
Evidently, Antoine Dodson has a peculiar way of speaking
The video that we just watched was uploaded by someone who thought it was entertaining
And suddenly the video had a lot of hits and it went viral
It reached the hands of 2, sorry, 3 brothers
Who have a music group called The Gregory Brothers
Who decided to remix the video, adding an effect called Auto-Tune
Coming up with this musical creation
In reality, making the song takes a lot more work than what it seems
and today it has received 80 million hits on YouTube and is available on iTunes
and the most curious of it all is that it has created so much buzz
that many people have been making their own versions of the song, which we now have to call "song"
One of these versions
If you put "bed intruder", you are going to find thousands of videos, because there are now thousands of them
And another that I really enjoy because I think that it requires a lot more effort is this huge marching band
Without doubt, the highest paroxysm takes place when
Antoine is invited to a hip hop awards ceremony, along with one of the Gregory brothers, and performs himself the song
What this story represents to me is that the remix, because this is a process of a remix
Is now irreversibly part of the media landscape
It’s a social game, which probably has no limits
Going back to June 23rd of 2010
To finish up the story about this great coincidence I was telling you about
Someone, who I will reveal later, uploaded the following video
This video, would probably go unnoticed along with the many other animation videos that are uploaded on YouTube weekly
If it had not been uploaded by a 14 year old person
This person is called Pep, a young boy who lives in Tarragona
Studying his 4th year of the ESO (High School)
He likes dinosaurs a lot
He likes video games and he loves to watch videos on YouTube
Watching videos on YouTube is how he learned to do animations
He also doesn’t have his own computer, he shares it with his sister
And well he happens to be my cousin
That is why I know him well, I know his story
The curious thing is that at school he no longer receives class about communication or media
The teaching of the media is included as subject under Language & Literature matter
So when I did the "CAP", the Pedagogical Aptitude Course
I had to teach classes at the Macarena High School
Located in a neighborhood in the historic center of Seville
And so it’s a very peculiar school because it has a lot of immigrant children as well as children from families of lower incomes
It was a wonderful coincidence that the week that I had to do my internship
Because you had to teach for a week and then the other week you had to attend to your tutor's class
That week the tutor-professor had to teach about the internet
I went to the first class about internet as a student for about an hour
And so I witnessed how this professor, a woman stuck to the old methods and very strict
Explained to 12 year olds about Arpanet, protocols TCP/IP , commutation
And would write on the board with chalk, World Wide Web
Well, it was exciting….
So when the class was coming to an end, and of course there were no computers; we hadn’t seen anything on the internet
A girl called Triana, a typical name in Seville.
Raised her hand and asked
“but professor how are we going to learn about internet, without internet?”
So Triana’s question brings up one of the challenges that currently exist in education.
That Pep has also had to deal with
Learning is occurring outside of schools
And learning can occur at any time at any place
Education is not what IT IS, instead IT IS BEING
So if we had to ask ourselves what elements make up the paradigm of people like Triana or Pep
I would say there are three elements and so I’m going to show you a couple of things that Pep has created, to explain them.
This is a version of the trailer for District 9
This place is Mora de Ebro, where his grandparents live, and those people are his sister, cousins and other family members
The point is that for someone like Pep, playing with many recording devices has enabled him to do what he knows the best, to play, without prejudices
And the first element of that paradigm is the capability of appropriation
people like Pep have no regard about making his stories by others that he consumes
So it’s hard for me to believe that those movies that he consumes, like Harry Potter and Avatar, have no critical thinking
But what this demonstrates is that he is trying to tell his own story and he is doing so through the imaginarium of the movies he consumes
And so this is what has to be closely analyzed
The second one of these elements is the narrative convergence
Evidently, Pep likes Jurassic Park and dinosaurs but he likes the world of Legos as well
The same way a DJ can take music from the Beatles and Jay-Z, remixing it and making something new
People like Pep are doing this as well, taking two imaginarium
Like the world of Legos, animating it, as well with the imaginarium of Jurassic Park
And in that sense, the ideas is that the remix functions as a mental software
The cultural and narrative convergence, of which Henry Jenkins speaks of, happens usually within the minds of the people who consume these stories
And they are consuming a lot of stories and remixing them daily
The last of these elements, is the necessity of sharing the experience with someone else
The media has a judgemental idea of those who sit in front of a computer
That young people are alienating themselves because of computers
And the curious thing about this video is that they have not stopped playing soccer to make this video
They play soccer in order to make this video
Which means that they make it part of their daily lives
They get to school and they talk about the videos that they had seen the day before
So what we have to keep in mind is that what they want to do is to
Share things, share experiences, share videos, share ideas, share culture in general
Pep’s story didn’t go unnoticed
So a documentary director, called Stephane M. Grueso, wanted to interview Pep for a documentary called "Copyright, or the Right to Copy"
Talks about intellectual property and audio visual work
This documentary has been aired on RTVE (Spanish Television)
And is supposedly the first documentary in history to have a Creative Commons license
An interesting and unprecedented happening
In it Pep talked very naively yet with an assertive intuition
He said “Well, just recently I learned that what I do is illegal but how is it illegal if I don´t make money from it?”
That was his conclusion
And so it’s true, Pep is at a weird place because what he does is illegal for the industry but since it’s not a threat to its business it’s not going to take Pep down obviously
And at school, no one asks him to analyze videos on YouTube or make animations to upload them.
But at the same time, schools are supposed to shape individuals who know how to express themselves and that are creative
So in conclusion, regardless of our age we should all take a look at the little “Pep” we carry within ourselves
The idea of playing, and experimenting
And to finish since I'm good with time
I want to do something, something really special
A couple of weeks ago, a writer came to Seville, member of the Nocilla generation
Who said that in order to remake reality you have to have an alien (different) perspective
So I think that education, just as any other world that needs to be remade, needs to be done through an alien perspective
So I want to propose that end of this talk, doesn't end like this, that it ends as a soap opera
Let´s think that this is a soap opera
So in this soap opera I have a romance with the Minister of Culture
Angeles González-Sinde
And there’s drama, an evident twist
And the thing is she has a law with her name that negates everything I´ve just told you
But we love each other, secretly
And the moment we are going to live, to end of this talk
is the scene in which I ask her to marry me
Don´t look at me like that Angeles
I know you are upset
All of this disturbance, "Real Democracy Now"
"Don't vote for them" (No Les Votes), these “Ni-Nis” they don´t know what to do anymore
What? There´s older people protesting too?
No, they must be “Ni-Nis” in disguise!
I want you to leave the chaos of your job
I want us to run away together to a copyleft horizon
kiss me with Creative Commons
Share your heart on P2P
And let’s camp out together in the country of remix
Thank you very much