Learn About Viral Video Remixing with Mobile Broadband Service - Internet

Increasingly affordable audio and video editing software has given the average person access to tools for editing and making art and music that used to be reserved for professionals in the field. Additionally, the Internet and mobile broadband services have allowed these amateur creations to be shared with people around the world at the click of a button. One result of these changes has been the phenomenon of remixing Internet videos. With wireless Internet service, you can watch some of the Web's most interesting and creative remix videos without even being in front of a computer.

Remix videos often consist of existing music videos that have been cut and spliced by aspiring DJs and musicians, but the idea of remixing has been extended to almost all forms of media. For example, Auto-Tune the News was a highly successful series of Internet videos that started with clips from television news programs, proceedings of the U.S. Congress, and other sources. By setting the speech audio from the clips to music using the Auto-Tune software popularized by hip-hop star T-Pain, the makers of these videos were able to create catchy, recognizable songs from language and clips that would have otherwise disappeared from our consciousness long ago. In this way, video remixing can almost be a form of recycling of the debris that media producers create and discard every day.

Remixing can also be a way to make a political statement. For example, when UCLA student Alexandra Wallace posted a video of herself complaining about the behavior of Asians in the UCLA library, people were able to capture it and make various remixes during the few brief hours the video remained on the Internet. One group calling itself the UCLA Dubstep Collective created a particularly arresting remix, prominently featuring the part of the video where Wallace imitated the tonal speech of many Asian languages in a sing-song manner seen as offensive by most people. In this way, remixing becomes a form of advocating not for the suppression of speech that would be considered offensive, but for the ridicule of this speech, a tactic which is often more effective in the long run.

Remixing videos of course, can be all about fun as well. One uniquely Internet form of expression has been the remixing of clips from the movie 300, as well as the introduction of these clips into other videos. 300 or Sparta art is particularly interesting in that it often quickly devolves into remixes of remixes, and remixes of remixes of remixes, and so forth, with some videos having been reconstituted to the point where they are effectively random and have a visual and audio language all their own. In particular, many Sparta videos feature a particularly effervescent piece of European techno that is often inserted into other remixed videos independently of its 300 context. With 4G service, you can watch remixed and other videos easily and reliably without the skips and other problems that often occur when trying to download videos on the go.