This article argues that "new literacies" is a useful construct for recognizing and understanding the extent to which changes in the current conjuncture are extending social practices of using codes for making and exchanging meanings in directions that warrant serious rethinking of how and why we research literacies. It provides a conceptual definition of "literacies", according to which literacies can best be described as "new" when they are constituted by "new 'technical' stuff" and "new 'ethos' stuff". On the basis of this account of new literacies the article advances a framework for envisaging new literacies research agendas and briefly discusses two cases of current research that illustrate this framework.