Can We Learn About Identity Formation from Online “Lurkers”?

My first thought about the readings this week is that Black’s (2009) article gave me major middle school flashbacks—my 13-year-old self never missed an episode of Card Captor Sakura or Yu-Gi-Oh.

But back to the readings…

Buck (2012) outlined Nakamura’s (2002) critique of the perspective from early online identity scholars that one’s online and offline identities are disconnected. In contrast, Nakamura contends that “online identity is still embedded in, and influenced by, an offline, embodied, self” (Buck, 2012, p. 15). From Buck’s study, Ronnie’s representation of himself online seems closely connected with his offline life, as illustrated by his frequent updates throughout the day meant to update his offline friends and family about his offline activities. Ronnie’s social media use is familiar to me—I have many friends on social media who use their accounts in similar ways, to update their friends throughout the day about what they are doing offline (for example, an aunt who is currently documenting every fish-related meal she eats on Fridays during Lent). An interesting manifestation of this in my own social media circles are the graduate students and academics that I follow on Twitter who frequently post updates about their productivity and/or writing progress. Posts like this have always struck me as a cross between a humble-brag and a strange desire for either accountability or validation.   

Returning to Nakamura’s (2002) contention that our online identities are embedded within and impacted by our embodied selves offline, I find that in many ways, my own social media use mirrors the way I approach socializing offline. I tend to be introverted and prefer cultivating a small but tight group of friends rather than actively maintaining connections with a large social network. Similarly, while I have a relatively large group of friends and followers on various social media platforms, I primarily interact with a much smaller group of close friends, often through direct messaging or other more private forms of communication. While I can be active in conversations with a small group of close friends, in larger social situations I prefer to observe. Similarly, I post very infrequently online, to the point where I now receive notifications from sites like Facebook and Instagram meant to boost my interactions with the site (i.e., notifications about what other people are posting, rather than notifications that are just about folks’ interactions with me—I hate these…I really don’t care that so-and-so updated their story on Facebook). Because I primarily use Twitter for networking with other graduate students and academics, I’ve tried to be more active in posting (even trying my hand at some of the productivity posting mentioned above), but I find this difficult to maintain—posting in that way doesn’t come naturally to me. For example, at CCCC 2019 I posted only three updates—once when I got to the conference, once with the CFP for next year, and once when I was at the airport on my way home. #fail

Evidence of my conference tweeting #fail

I’ve rambled on for long enough so I’ll end the post with a thought I’ve been having as I work on my final paper for this class. While this isn’t my area of research (so take this with a grain of salt), my sense is that much of the research on social media use tends to focus on active contributors—people like Ronnie who post frequently and engage often. People like me who post infrequently but still maintain a presence on these sites tend to be treated as foils to more active contributors in this research. This makes sense—there is certainly more data to be gathered from folks who engage more consistently. But I wonder what a study of identity construction for online lurkers/observers would look like? How do people who prefer to observe represent themselves in these spaces? Is there something to be learned from a lack of contribution and engagement?

Maybe I Should Research K-Pop?

In their articles, Black (2009) and Buck (2012) both speak to how social media platforms, ranging from Twitter to fanfiction sites, constitute spaces for important literacy practices, especially among youth. While Black’s (2009) and Buck’s (2012) articles emphasized different kinds of users and different platforms, their findings both made me think of K-Pop fandoms.

In Black’s (2009) case study, three young fanfiction writers developed agency in the act of contesting plots of their favorite anime stories and through making meaningful contributions to discussions of these stories. These young women were also able to access their personal cultural knowledge in profound ways, becoming experts to some readers. In this, I was very much reminded of the current phenomenon surrounding K-Pop Fans. Based on my limited and outsider experience with K-Pop fans, there seems like there may be the same kind of channels for agency that Black (2009) discusses. Namely, bilingual speakers of Korean tend to be the avenue through which those who aren’t fluent in Korean can truly participate in the K-Pop lyrics and discussions.

Further, as the young women in the fanfiction case study accessed different languages to construct and play with identity, a common trope in the discussions of K-Pop songs includes Romanized Korean words. In fact, many of the YouTube videos that allow for streaming popular bands like BTS provide Korean characters, Romanized Korean, and English versions of the lyrics in the video, as you can see here, at your own risk. These videos are created by fan accounts, typically by people who have a working knowledge of both the Korean and English, which is reminiscent to the ways in which Grace, Nanako, and Cherry-Chan “leveraged their own transcultural identities and multilingual skills to gain status within the community” (Black, 2009, p. 415).

K-Pop Fans, From Flickr

Finally, the expansive audience of K-Pop extends into many languages and cultures much like the audience of fanfiction.  Again, I am reminded of Black’s (2009) discussion of contemporary imagination where technological mediation works “to provide points of contact and cultural exchange for youth from across the globe” (p. 416). 

While, thanks almost exclusively to the work and writing of my students over the years, I was able to directly connect Black’s (2009) ideas to the fans of K-Pop, I wonder if research would reveal that the points brought up by Buck (2012) could also connect to this large group of fans. Specifically, I wonder if actions reflected in Ronnie’s negotiation of the social media interfaces could also be seen in the K-Pop fan group and how they use Snow and Amino, apps that are exclusively developed for the K-Pop fan on the go. Like Buck’s (2012) work with Ronnie, interrogating the social media use of a K-Pop Fan could reveal some fascinating behaviors and habits.

Critical Digital Literacy: Theory to Practice

For four years after high school, I lived on campus at my undergraduate home SUNY Purchase. Known for its 1960s brutalist, modern architecture, the campus has always received criticism for its starkness. However, one of the more intriguing aspects of the campus design remains how doors, building shapes, and step depth alike were all designed to thwart massive on-campus protests. Selber (2004) mentions this type of architectural design when commenting, “that certain technologies have been designed to oppress subaltern groups” (p. 89).

In thinking of critical literacy with technology, a large concern both pedagogically and generally lies in the design of any given program or device. In the case of the difficult-to-open doors at SUNY Purchase, the design encouraged students to exit and enter a building one at a time, opposed to en masse.

SUNY Purchase Campus, From hauntedhouses.com

The uses of the building features were mostly invisible to users, who were simply annoyed by the heavy, difficult doors until a design student conducted a historical assessment of the buildings. In many ways, this is the kind of project Selber (2004) seems to be getting at in “Chapter 3: Critical Literacy”.

For Selber (2004), “a critical strategy would be to seek oppositional discourses that defamiliarize commonsensical impressions of technology in educational settings” (p. 88). In investigating some of the aspects of this literacy, Selber (2004) encourages the use of metadiscourse heuristics which asks students to view technology as an artifact, rather than a neutral tool. This examination, according to Selber (2004), will often lead to students recognizing four distinct contexts: design cultures, use contexts, institutional forces, and popular representations (p. 106). The design student at SUNY Purchase, who discovered the hidden agenda of the school’s architecture was likely using many of the contexts Selber (2004) speaks of.

Throughout the text, Selber (2004) provides examples to think through these contexts; although, many of them are are located in the year 2004 (For example, Girlhoo is no longer in commission) and, more poignantly, focused in the specific school scenarios that raise issues of access. Repeatedly, Selber (2004) mentions that students must have access to technologies he proposes examining. In terms of theory to practice, I am left with a number of questions and concerns.

As with all things related to teaching with and through technologies, I can’t help but wonder how we begin to overcome the issues of access. While we can try to work in the absence of technologies, I’ve worked at schools that did not use certain tools, not because they were ideologically opposed to them, but because there simply wasn’t funding for them. Of course, students could begin to examine the larger political implications of this, but I have to wonder what the payout would look like in this case. Is there something especially stark when critical assessment leads to the conclusion that students attend a poorly funded school? In some ways it seems so, since most students already know this to be the case. Of course, this could lead to a larger conversation about funding and how schools collect money, but this seems to pull us away from the use of technologies. Cut and dry answers around access don’t seem to exist, as so many factors contribute to what constitutes access. However, it’s something I can’t help but grapple with.

Additionally, while Selber (2004) suggests a great many activities to consider in the classroom, we also have to consider the currency of time in a given class. Tackling all of this in even 15 weeks seems difficult. Because of this, perhaps the functional, critical, and rhetorical must overlap. Undoubtedly, this would mean losing nuance in some of the parameters that have been so carefully parsed out. Or, this could mean that teaching digital literacy needs to be a wider university/college goal.

Understanding “functional” literacy

The concept of “functional” literacy, it’s place in the classroom, in the mind of students, in the minds of educators, and in the minds of designers and culture creators, is explored in the readings this week. Selbers starts with affirming that since computers and digital technology is here to stay in classrooms and the workspace and educators are being pressured to produce technologically literate students ready to perform well in their jobs, educators and writing teachers should think about contrast between the face value importance of digital literacy and the societal and social contexts and implications of implementing technology functional literacy goals. Selbers shows that the tension between seeing technology as a neutral tool used to enhance traditional forms of writing and liberal arts education or a highly pervasive force with generational implications stems from the division among educators over whether education should be a function of society or whether society should be a function of education. Ultimately, the goal of academic institutions is to produce “educated,” intelligent students capable of “critical thinking” and educators are concerned about how the phenomenon of computers and technology should be incorporated in the education system. Selbers argues that both teachers and students should be aware that their own technology use could inevitably promote inequitable and counterproductive technological practices. Understanding the place of and utilizing technology just as a neutral tool is dangerous, Selbers says, because that sort of thought makes it difficult for students to think critically and contextually about the ways computer technologies are developed, distributed, and used within our culture. This sort of academic distance from the social reality of the implications of technology allows individuals and movements unrelated and disconnected from the world of education and traditional literacies to control, shape, and utilize the technological force for their own purposes. This puts educators at a disadvantage because they can’t impart the appropriate and accurate knowledge to their students, ironically most of whom will have more functional skills than the educators themselves.

Selbers also dives into a critique of current technological literacy curriculums implemented in universities by showing how a curriculum altruistically is influenced by corporate interest of having a steady supply of skilled yet not super critically thinking workers. Selbers also uses the example to prove that English and Writing faculty are “rarely consulted in matter of computer literacy” at a disadvantage to the long-term education of students. Florida State’s definition of basic computer literacy, while impressively imparting upon its students technical knowledge of computer parts and networks, misses any discussion of the cultural and social contexts of technology development and use. This means that students don’t have the background knowledge and skills to make rhetorical judgements. Selbers uses the example to develop an argument that teachers need to develop a disciplinary approach that teaches students cultural and rhetorical literacy in addition to the obviously valuable functional literacy.

I agree with Selbers’s point that cultural literacy and rhetorical literacy are hard to teach to a general and broad student audience if the classes are categorized in a certain department. What Selbers is arguing for aligns with traditional liberal arts goals exactly: ultimately what needs to be taught is critical thinking skills. The concern is that integration of digital literacy will impede in that process.

Layering Rugs

This week’s two main texts from Writing New Media (2007) begin to centralize the discussion of technology and literacy in the writing classroom. Both Anne Francis Wysocki in “Opening New Media to Writing: Opening and Justifications” and Cynthia E. Selfe in “Toward New Media Texts: Taking up the challenges of Visual Literacy” are advocating for a move to acknowledge diverse literacies that have been fostered in digital spaces in the writing classroom. From my perspective, these kinds of practice-oriented texts are especially potent in beginning to understand why teachers choose to include and exclude technology and new media. What Selfe (2007) refers to as opening new media to writing or what Knobel and Lankshear (2007) call new literacies, is a new frontier for many longtime composition instructors who have for years prioritized alphabetic literacy in their classes.

What both Wysocki (2007) and Selfe (2007) bring up, that I find especially important, are the tensions surrounding the adaption of new literacy for teachers. I’ve seen and heard this tension and anxiety in many of my teaching experiences. (We even watched a rather dramatic retelling of this tension in class.) Specifically, Selfe (2007) refers to the discomfort experienced by teaching literacies that we are not entirely familiar or acquainted with and because “they confront us with the prospect of updating our literacies at the expense of considerable work, previous time, and a certain amount of status” (p. 71).

Delicate Tension by Wassily Kandinsky, 1923 AD, aquarelle and ink on paper

Certainly, a lot of time and effort has been invested in pedagogies associated with alphabetic literacy and the ever-changing and quickly evolving digital landscape does not offer entirely solid ground for teachers to stand on. In the digital landscape, it is difficult to become expert that we might want to be as teachers.

 

While the tensions are real, some of our misgivings as teachers seem to be about abandoning or leaving behind our old literacy practices in order to make way for new literacy practices. I agree with this–to an extent.  Of course, some of our older classroom literacy practices will have to take a backseat to make room for new literacies, but that doesn’t mean alphabetic writing will cease to be. The shift isn’t necessarily from one form of literacy to the other, but rather in valuing multiple literacies, as the New London Group (1996) have argued.  Selfe (2007) makes this point in discussing how visual texts have traditionally been viewed as “second-class” texts (p. 71). If you were to look at the classic composition classroom assignment of advertisement analysis, I think this becomes clear. The visual ad is not a real work of composition, but the essay constructed about the ad is.

However, when we consider Cooper’s (2010) point that writing tools do not arise separately, but rather they inform one another, it becomes more of a reciprocal relationship between old and new literacies. In this case, I hope we can move past seeing these new classroom additions as having the rug pulled out from under us as Wysocki (2007) suggests in her opening; instead we could begin to think of it as layering rugs. In this layering, our classes can consider how alphabetic writing informs and is informed by digital literacies or new medias, rather than feeling like we have lost our old mainstay. In this way, writing teachers can act as both experts and learners alongside our students perhaps bridging our practices and minimizing some of our fears.

 

Writing as Technology: From the “Great Divide” to “Algorithms of Oppression”

The readings for this week were quite dense—I know I at least struggled a bit to get through them. This post may seem somewhat unstructured as a result…here are a couple of ideas that stood out to me.

These readings highlight the “great divide” in literacy studies and places it in the context of larger discussions about technology and writing studies. Haas provides a good summary of the debates around literacy and orality/aurality—she notes that scholars like Ong and Havelock emphasized not only the differences between writing and speech as tools for expressing language, but more importantly, argued that these differences fundamentally altered the cultures and cognitive capabilities of oral and literate societies. Haas contends that these scholars characterized writing as decontextualized—or as Ong puts it, separate and divided from cultural contexts in ways that speech is not. In contrast, neo-Vygotskian scholars like Scribner and Cole argued against a view of literate activity as decontextualize speech, contending that both writing and speech are deeply embedded within cultural practices.

Haas also contends that there are two main myths impeding technology studies: 1) that technology is transparent, and 2) that technology is all-powerful. Both myths, Haas argues, err in that they present technology as somehow independent and immune from influence from outside factors (i.e., history, culture, ideology, etc.)—this stance encourages us to be “noncritical and nonparticipatory” (p. 35). To combat these myths, we need to “acknowledge that technologies’ effects depend on how they were culturally represented and how people reason about them. That is, technologies are made through our thinking and talking about them, and through our use of them” (p. 36).

I was really struck by Haas’s point that technology is neither transparent nor free from cultural, ideological, or historical influence. It made me think of Safiya Noble’s book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. In short, Noble argues that while the algorithms that guide search engines are often thought of as neutral or decontextualized—simple tools meant only for find and retrieval tasks—because they are not only shaped by and learn from human actions but are also subject to the interests of advertisers, they are in turn infused with human perceptions, ideologies, and prejudices. These perceptions, ideologies, and prejudices are culturally constructed and codified in particular languages that return particular results. For example, Noble’s research showed that in 2011 when one searched for “black girls” on Google, the first page of entries is largely filled with links to porn sites. If you’re interested in learning more about Noble’s research, here’s a video of a talk she did a few years ago:

week 3

This week’s readings grapple with the phenomena of technology and the internet affecting us as individuals and society at large. The increasingly important role the screen world plays in our processes of communication, expression of identity, building of identity, and learning and teaching democratically brings up questions of digital literacy. Both readings discuss how different social backgrounds, economic status, race, and gender affect the acquisition of digital literacy. This is because not only does the technology affect our lives and our learning and communicating patterns, but also our social processes affect the development and utilization of that technology. I think one of the most fascinating dichotomies that I continually ponder about is one that Buckingham discusses: “On the one hand, the technology is seen to liberate the individual from constraint and from narrowly hierarchical ways of working, while on the other, it is regarded as a false substitute for the supposedly authentic values it is seen to be replacing.” Technology, specifically advanced forms of communication, does indeed liberate the individual of archaic social norms structured by traditions and baked with a moral viewpoint shared by fewer and fewer people. Modern communication allows us to converse with whoever we want without permission from elders or moderators, social media’s purpose allows for expression of opposing opinions, and dynamic software and interactive games supposedly allows learners to learn new concepts again without the permission and moderation of teachers. Buckingham shows that all the processes mentioned above are taking place in more innovative, flexible, and  instant manner, leading to a more “skilled” workers and individuals of society who can for example, understand more social nuances, meaning those people are more digitally literate; Hawisher mentions that while people seem to be using technology, or more precisely word processing, to compose differently (and maybe more quickly, though this is unmentioned), they are most likely not composing better, meaning producing better work. More recently, we have learned that individuals who physically write with a writing instrument learn, remember, and understand concepts better compared to individuals who type their notes during class. Ultimately, I think that no matter how sophisticated our digital literacy evolves as individuals or as a society, we need to recognize that dependence solely on technology as a replacement for social services instead of as a vehicle to transport those social services isn’t considerate of social and biological processes that take time and require the human touch, such as providing mental and emotional support, developing capabilities for deep focus and thought, and increasingly, toleration for opposing viewpoints.

Defining New Literacies: Participation, Collaboration, and Communities of Practice

Unsurprisingly given the title of this week’s class, the readings from this set were all interested in exploring and defining the concept of “literacy/ies,” and in particular, “new literacies.” Gee defines literacies as “the mastery or fluent control over a secondary Discourse” within the context of his notion of primary and secondary Discourses. For Gee, all Discourses are embedded within particular cultural and social contexts that shape literacy practices within those Discourses. Building on Gee’s work, Lankshear and Knobel define literacies as “socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses (or, as members of Discourses)” (p. 4). In both definitions, the social nature of Discourse is emphasized—literacies and the texts they generate are both socially constructed and embedded within particular social and cultural practices.

For Lankshear and Knobel, new literacies differ from traditional literacies not just in that they use “new technical stuff,” or new tools and/or mediums enabled by evolving technologies to “generate, communicate, and negotiate” meaning in different ways from traditional reading and writing. More importantly, new literacies involve “new ethos stuff” in that they are “more ‘participatory,’ ‘collaborative,’ and ‘distributed’ in nature than conventional literacies” (p. 9). While literacy practices have always been social, new literacies are less “author-centric” and “expert-dominated” than traditional literacies (p. 9). 

The more participatory and collaborative nature of new literacies means that new members are more likely to learn through participation as opposed to overt instruction—for Gee in much of his later work on concepts like “affinity spaces,” this is a key way in which new literacies are changing the ways that learning happens, particularly for adolescents. In the 1989 article, Gee argues that one can only learn a “Discourse” through enculturation (as opposed to overt instruction). Gee differentiates acquisition from learning in relation to Discourse—one acquires a Discourse through participation while one learns about a Discourse through instruction. For Gee, acquisition is crucial to mastering the performance of a particular Discourse.

This argument was later echoed by Lave and Wenger (1991) through their concepts of “legitimate peripheral participation” and “communities of practice.” Loosely speaking, communities of practice are groups that share particular interests, crafts, or professions—in Gee’s sense, communities of practice also share the same secondary Discourse associated with that interest/craft/profession. Similar to Gee’s argument that one can only gain mastery in a Discourse through enculturation, Lave and Wenger argue that in order to become a part of a community of practice, novice members must have opportunities to engage in legitimate peripheral participation, or participation alongside expert members in activities that are key to the functioning of the community. Because new literacies are more participatory and collaborative, novice members have more opportunities to engage in legitimate peripheral participation than they traditionally have in conventional literacies.

Of course, new literacies generate their own new challenges to members of communities of practice, as Hammer explores in her article “Agency and Authority in Role-Playing ‘Texts.’” Hammer’s study looked at how “secondary authors,” or participants who construct scenarios within the already-existing world of a role-playing text, navigate challenges related to agency and authority between themselves and other community members. For these authors, the challenge is “exercising their authority within the group without…removing the possibility of meaningful participation by other group members” (p. 74). Because of the increasingly collaborative and participatory nature of these role-playing texts, group members often feel more entitled to a sense of authority and agency within the text than secondary authors are always inclined to grant. In this way, Hammer’s article demonstrates how the old problems of managing and balancing opportunities for participation within communities of practice still exist, even as new challenges emerge.

You’re Invited to Join the Happy English Teacher

The Happy Englilsh Teacher

A Public Facebook Group, where we can talk shop and …share war stories, syllabi, unit assignments, pedagogy, announcements and other resources pertaining to our mission as postsecondary English teachers and scholars (YES, even multimodal and New Media assignments!) It’s a bare bones site that will be developed and curated by its membership.

The Mediated Action in the Composition Process

In Chapter 2, Shipka creates a framework to examine the social and individual variables that influence the composition process. She argues that the individual and the sociocultural settings are interacting to influence each other. When we compose a text, these cultural tools or meditational means shape our process and final composition product. Shipka synthesizes Wertsch’s work to create four characteristic of mediated action. They are:

1. Composers of texts have multiple purposes. Students can compose to please themselves and/or fulfill the class assignment.(44-45)
2. An action is simultaneously enabled and constrained by the meditational means or cultural tools employed (46).
   • These constraints  are only visible in retrospect. Through innovation, a new tool appears and we see the constraints of the first generation of the tools. As we examine the new tool, we also realize how the older tools may have limited an action. (47).
   • Meditational means also carry with it power and authority. Shipka argues that many academics hold academic writing as sacred in order to maintain power (47-48). 
3. Tools or agents are developed from the past. There is a link to the past.
4. Mediated action is transformed by the introduction of new meditational means (49). How does innovation change the composition process? The example of the writing by hand and with computer changes the act of writing. Shipka has an interesting example when she says that the desktop computer limits writing because it confines the writer to the space. Since the publication of her book, we can write on our phones either through typing or even scribbling and have a program transcribe it (50). Even Shipka didn’t anticipate how outdated her commentary could be.

Shipka says that this framework affords us the opportunity to examine both the final product and process. We also see literacy as more nuance. We also give more attention to the tools used and how it affects the composition process and composition product.

I think Shipka has a great point that technology can begin to seep into our everyday practices such that we begin to see it as normal and we fail to examine the complexity of literacy. We can take these technologies for granted,  only reflecting when the technology fails us or when the old technology is eclipsed by the new technology. I love how she says that we need to be more in the moment and reflect about current technology. Maybe it means we slow down and examine our processes for composing a text.

The problem is that instructors must also value the tools used and validated the importance of the process for composing a text. The instructors also need to make it transparent to the student so that they value the tools used. As Shipka says, there is power in maintaining the status quo and I wonder how many instructors would truthfully give the process or the tools used as much credit as the final product. The process is unique for each student and it can be hard to evaluate the myriad of tools used.  In some cases, the students may have greater understanding of the process or the tools and that would mean the student would be in control. Would instructors be comfortable with that?