Copy/paste and remix: What does school have to do with it?

Abstract

The concept of New Literacies, endorsed by Lankshear and Knobel, is constituted by a new mindset involving the use of New Information and Communication Technologies. This concept embraces digital literacies practices as the remix, which is the ability to cut and “mix” various ways in writing, sounds, still or moving images and recreate them from that mixture. Such practices have become popular, especially among young people, due to two factors: (i) the use of digital tools able to handle the new multisemiotic/ multimodal character of the contemporary texts circulating in virtual network environments and in several media; (ii) the resignification of old practices like copy/paste, now involving the digital world context. Based on this perspective, the objective of this study is to analyze literacy practices of a young person creating templates and web pages, particularly, to a social network. The analyses are developed from diSessa, for whom literacy is based on three elements: gender, social niche and representational form. In addition, we bring Bazerman in his consideration of how the school has dealt with the issue of plagiarism from the popularity of the internet. Theorical discussion evolving Bazerman and the analysis of literacy practices of these young person indicate the huge gap between the literacies valued by the school and the (new) literacies that are practiced by young people outside and thus the discussion indicates the need for school to (i) (re)consider the remix concept, since the idea of copying and pasting is immersed in a new mindset among young people in the use of digital tools and the actual content that is available on the Internet; (ii) incorporate these digital literacies, which already occur in network digital environments, to the school literacy practices.

Keywords: new literacies, copy/paste, remix.