ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors read two excerpts about how ordinary people use media to resist governments and other powerful entities and attempt to promote alternative political views. In the first excerpt, media scholar Paolo Peverini discusses the political dimensions of remix. In the second excerpt, discourse analyst Rodney Jones and political scientist Neville Li talk about the role of digital video in the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong and explore how the meaning of visual artefacts can change as they circulate through different professional and activist communities. Transformative works use pre-existing audio-visual source texts, privileging pop culture materials (music videos, trailers, commercials, news fragments) and ignoring copyright laws. The reworking practices appropriate content, reopen their structure, commenting on narratives, ideological assumptions, and stereotypes with the aim of criticizing and/or highlighting original meanings.
