Update 1.4 Digital Literacies

Remix is the idea of someone mixing cultural resources together, and then someone else coming along and remixing the thing the previous person had created, by selecting from it and adding new cultural resources to it, and inserting their own purposes and inflections into it. (Lankshear and Knobel, 2008) Booktrack, a New Zealand company, has remixed and developed an enhanced reading experience on audiobooks. In an effort to encourage more people to read, this company has remixed reading by incorporating synchronized sound with text. Sampling from the film industry, Booktrack seeks to offer readers the same level of entertainment through reading with ambient movie like sound clips that play as the reader reads. Booktrack allow the reader to connect with characters, improved learning and remember more due to the emotional impact of music. This new medium offers an enhanced reading experience as it seeks to improve learning as the music help memorialize reader’s emotions. The dramatic sound effects enable readers increase concentration as it reduce the number of distractions which is a common concern with today’s growing technology.

Credit: Lankshear, Colin and Michele Knobel. 2008. “Digital Literacy and the Law: Remixing Elements of Lawrence Lessig’s Ideal of “Free Culture”.” in Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices, edited by C. Lankshear and M. Knobel. New York: Peter Lang,