Love's Labor's Lost and Folklore in the Digital Age

We live in a remix culture. This is extraordinarily problematic when considering current copyright laws, but that is a discussion for another day. In our culture, we take things we've heard, seen, read, or experienced and incorporate them and remix them for our own purposes. In academia, this is as simple as quoting someone and expanding upon that quote to support your argument (and then citing them so as to protect their intellectual property). On Facebook, this could be taking a movie still and commenting on it with your own words to make a witty point. On YouTube, this is taking clips from several different romantic period movies and putting music over it to make a romantic music video.

There are a billion and a half ways we remix, but this concept of remixing wasn't born of the digital age. Authors have always borrowed from others authors, reference popular culture works to make a joke, and taken age-old fairy tales and made them their own (a nod to Mr. Disney).