Social Writing/Social Media - A Few Interesting Excerpts and Some Discussion Questions

Walls, D. M., & Vie, S. (Eds.). (2017). Social Writing/Social Media: Publics, Presentations, and Pedagogies. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Retrieved from https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/social/

Social Writing/Social Media is, in short, an examination of social media from various rhetorical and pedagogical perspectives. While the chapters cover a large range of discussion about social media itself, Walls and Vie have divided the book thematically into three sections: the first examines how social media writing addresses different kinds of publics and audiences; the second addresses how individuals can be represented in social media, both by themselves and by others; and the third discusses the use and effect of social media in pedagogy. All three sections paint a picture of a rapidly changing environment that is not only worthy of studying, but also essential for understanding how individuals communicate digitally. For the purposes of time and brevity, I have chosen excerpts (one or two quotes) from one article in each section, followed by a series of questions that I think could spur additional discussion. I have also considered ways that these articles in particular could touch on our ongoing discussion of Open Access. By no means do I anticipate getting to all of this in the brief time we'll be covering this one book in class, but these are definitely interesting points that, I think, are worth considering.

1:

• "In many ways, the relationships people and social media sites forge rests upon a prosumer model of interaction. As people produce and consume content in Web 2.0 spaces, they also become the users and products of social media because of the range of data tracking and surveillance technologies monitoring and recording user actions. […] By examining the convergence of prosumerism as a response to shifts from the industrial era to the information era, and by briefly considering how rhetoric and composition scholars and the ideology of the open-source movement contend with prosumerism as a model without financial gain, I suggest that market-driven prosumerism will continue to thrive in the digital information age. However, I argue that it is up to educators, especially writing teachers, to sustain critical literacies in their classrooms in service of connecting, and possibly subverting, the market-driven prosumerism for an exchange benefiting humankind without financial incentive" (pp. 37-38)
• Beck, E. "Sustaining Critical Literacies in the Digital Information Age: The Rhetoric of Sharing, Prosumerism, and Digital Algorithmic Surveillance."
• Prosumerism - the economic idea that individuals both produce and consume what is produced, in essence removing some need for specialized labor.
• Example: IKEA furniture removes the need for specialized labor to complete the production of furniture, allows consumers to do it
• Example: Individuals create posts, blogs, etc. on social media for others to consume. Because these are created on a corporate-owned platform, corporations are given a freely-given, constant stream of data from which they can mine information and target marketing.
• Is prosumerism all bad?
• Consider open source, open access, sharing of content

2:

• "Anonymity provides a realm of safety from consequences. It also provides people with the ability to comment on the way anonymity allows for people to say horrible things." (p. 200)
• "Most of us have to account for our social positions, genders, politics, even our sexualities when we speak online. Therefore, anonymity is one way to protect oneself from the restrictions of speaking publicly as a regular, everyday person. I call anonymity a form of identity encryption because it allows anyone who wears it to keep parts of themselves safely hidden while still enabling them to speak online." (p. 201)
• Hutchinson, L. "Writing to Have No Face: The Orientation of Anonymity in Twitter"
• How might anonymity benefit an individual in online discourse? How might it hinder them?
• How might anonymity create challenges to the idea of open access that we've been discussing in class?
• Considering anonymity, how fluid is our identity? How much control do we have over it? Is there a point where the control given is too much control?

3:

• In their online interactions, individuals' writing reveals "multiple rhetorical, linguistic, conceptual, and information-giving and receiving skills at work, as well as multiple functions of language that scholars such as Michael A. K. Halliday (1975) placed at the center of human interaction and that educators believe should be part of the repertoire of students’ literate experiences in school. These interactions are admittedly without a teacher or mediator, raw and undifferentiated, and subject to the usual flaming or name calling (one poster writes in response to a critic of the grinds, 'I think you are ignorant and stupid. If you want to eat meat, you have to kill an animal. That’s it'). But serious intellectual work is quite common—work that involves and hones skills of problem-solving, argumentation, the negotiation of alternate views, the mediation of ideological clashes, critical examination of related contexts and issues, and the sharing of further material through eyewitness accounts or links to deeper and more extensive background reading. Much of this obviously takes place on the participants’ own time, when they might otherwise be unengaged in anything resembling academic learning or the consideration of important subjects." (p. 324)
• Anson, C. M. "Intellectual, Argumentative, and Information Affordances of Public Forums: Potential Contributions to Academic Learning."
• What are examples of digital literacy you have seen in your own students' work that has surprised you?
• How might students' current digital literacies help them in the composition classroom?
• How can we as instructors utilize their previous experiences to help them not only do well in our classes, but also in future classes? In other words, how can we make these concepts transfer to other contexts?
• How can we avoid assuming certain proficiencies?
• How can we utilize open access materials to assist us in our task of literacy instruction?