Remix Inception

I have always considered thoughts or ideas as property or a possession. This is my thought, that is your thought. This is my idea, that is your idea. I never questioned that fact that I believed them to all be my own and originally brought to life by me. However, when I take the time to really investigate and question whether or not originality concerning our thoughts and ideas exists as the documentary “Is Everything a Remix?” explores, I have found that our thoughts and ideas are a lot more interdependent than what I have chosen to believe.

I have persistently strived to be completely independent. As a student, an older sister, a daughter, I took pride in doing things all by myself. I was the four-year-old who insisted on buckling her own car seat while my parents were willing and able to complete the task in half the time. I was the girl who tore her ACL and went to physical therapy three times a day trying to do the work to heal myself and avoid having a doctor fix my knee for me. I know how appealing the idea of independence can be. I took pride in being able to look at my work and say I did this all by myself, wow look at me and all I accomplished. I think this mentality to some extent is natural, part of our human nature and when Beyoncé is singing to all her independent women out there we want to be included in that. However, it is just not true.

Humans have never been independent we are constantly relying on one another and our thoughts and ideas are no exception to that. The idea that everything is a remix is that all of our thoughts, breakthroughs in science, advances in technology, creative movies, and thought provoking novels are all based on the thoughts and ideas that came before them, completely dependent on those that came earlier. And how true is it that this is what we were designed for, we are social beings meant to have relationships with one another and work together to accomplish things. If we honestly had this independence we strive for where would we be? None of us would have made it this far without the help we receive from others and our current music, movies, inventions, and thoughts would not exist.

It has been said that even in our dreams all of the people and faces we see are not new, we have to have seen them before because our brains are incapable of making new faces and the same idea pertains to colors, we cannot create a new color in our minds. Yet, we can make “new” faces by mixing the features of ones we have already seen or a vast array of colors by mixing the ones we know. This is what we are down to our core, our DNA. My DNA is not mine, I didn’t just put it all together one day on my own, half of it is my fathers and half of it is my mothers. Again, not original but a combination. I have two little sisters and we are nothing alike yet our DNA is a combination of the same two parents. Just because we are interdependent on one another’s thoughts and ideas does not mean that what we create with our “remixes” of old ideas are worth any less. Just like you would never think me and my little sisters to be exact copies of one another. New mixes and combinations of old ideas are what we consider to be “original” thoughts or ideas while in reality this the definition of a remix. And the interconnectedness and interdependence of it all should be seen as something truly astounding, beautiful, and humbling not looked down on as unoriginal, weak, or a copy.