User talk:2605:6000:798E:4B00:F473:B30E:AC2E:5E33

Construction of a Multimodal Digital Identity
Introduction

When students compose with technology and engage in multimodal composition, they, deliberately, choose to appropriate a discourse by using semiotic resources, knowledge of social media, knowledge of rhetorical conventions, and their lived experiences of existing in a social world in order to construct their digital identities.

Digital Social Identity

Social networks are pervasive and the majority of students, ranging from middle-school through undergraduate college seniors own a smartphone to have access to social networks apps that keep them connected to their network of friends. When students compose on popular social media sites, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Snapchat, they are composing with digital tools and technologies. By studying students’ digital literacy practices on social network sites, Composition teachers can gain an understanding of the way in which students’ composing practices on social network sites construct their identities as writers.

In my own experience, posting on Facebook is a social practice that occurs via digital codification, because I use my iPhone to post status updates or to edit pictures that I choose to upload to Facebook. Due to the proliferation of the smartphones over the last decade, many persons are utilizing these devices to share on their social media sites. For example, I have a Facebook profile and an iPhone, which I’ve used to download the Facebook App. When I choose to post on Facebook, I usually take videos and pictures with my iPhone and upload them to Facebook, accompanied by a caption that describes what is occurring in those photos. When something meaningful happens, like a day out with my friends, I post some pictures and upload them to Facebook. My writing on social networks does not occur in isolation; it is influenced by the events that happen in my life every day.

Social network sites also have affordances for their users. Buck states that “web-based services allow individuals to (1) Construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system (2) Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (11). Thus, in her study of Ronnie’s social network sites, she discovered that he describes himself as a “publisher” who creates online content for others. Ronnie stated, “I try to keep my followers greater than the number of people I’m following because, you know, it’s just like my, I guess, weird habit. All the big people who tweet have—tend to have—more followers than people they’re following, so I feel like in a way that I am a publisher and not just someone who’s following people.” (14). What this statement implies about “digital identity” and “real-life” identity, is that there is not a disconnect between the person he is in real-life, and who he is when he posts content on social network sites. Ronnie is aware of how his posts will be perceived by his Twitter followers. Behind the screen, there is a person composing, for a specific audience, and Ronnie is using specialized language to create his audience, which are his Twitter followers.

Regarding the construction of multimodal digital identity, what this suggests is that students deliberately choose who their audience will be on social network sites. The student described above, named Ronnie, posts on Twitter and he perceives himself as a “publisher” who is publishing Tweets for his audience. This student is able to take advantage of the affordances of social media by carefully crafting the language of his Tweets, to reach the audience he wants to communicate with. For Ronnie, Twitter is a site that allows him to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system by tailoring every Tweet to fit within the limit of 280 characters. His profile can be public if chooses not to have his tweets protected, and this will allow him to reach a larger audience. Also, Ronnie is able to view and traverse his list of connections and those made by others within Twitter. Twitter allows users to follow each other because users are able to see who they are following and who is following them. Buck also follows Ronnie’s interactions on Facebook where she discovers that the interactive aspect of Ronnie’s identity representation on Facebook was a filtered form of his Twitter account. For example, he updated Facebook with progress on his graduate school application, and he writes, “Excited to see if Ronnie will get into grad school at UIUC? Stayed tuned to see how the story unfolds” (17). Through his interactions on Twitter and Facebook, Ronnie has presented a specific view of himself on a specific social network site for his imagined audience. Obviously, Ronnie is aware of the (digital) contexts in which he is composing and he also seems to be very aware of his identity as a “publisher”. Thus, Ronnie is aware of the conventions of rhetoric, and on his Twitter and Facebook profiles, he presents a specific view of himself for his imagined audiences. Here, it is apparent to see that Ronnie makes a distinction in how he uses Twitter and Facebook for communicating with different audiences. Twitter has a limit on the number of words that a user can include in a Tweet (280) and Facebook does not have a limit. When he writes on Twitter, he is mindful of the fact that his Tweets need to have a specific character limit, and he crafts his Tweets, accordingly. However, when Ronnie decides that his posts will be lengthier, he posts on Facebook, which does not have a limit on the length of a post. 

Audra K. Roach and Jessica T. Beck, like Buck examine digital literacy practices on social networks. Adults are also, gradually, attempting to embrace digital literacy practices that are afforded to them on social network sites. In the article entitled, “Before Coffee, Facebook: New Literacy Learning for 21st Century Teachers”, authors, Audra K. Roach and Jessica T. Beck, illustrate how  21st Century teachers use their own literacy experiences to launch a new literacies pedagogy. The authors believe that the future of literacy studies must include helping students to communicate across differences in a globally networked world and “develop consciousness of the audiences they address, invoke, ignore, reject, exclude or deny” (244). In this specific study, they discover that teachers, in addition to their students, too, live literate lives online. The authors’ methodological approach is to study by screen-capturing and transcribing a 2-week period of Facebook interactions from one of their colleagues, named Jessica. Specifically, the authors paid attention to how Facebook conversations invoked teaching or the roles of teachers. In their study of Jessica’s Facebook posts, Roach and Beck code and write analytical memos to identify patterns in social positions about the roles of teachers on Facebook. This teacher admits that she is reluctant to accept writing about her life on Facebook and she refers to herself as a “reluctant grown up who is trying to accept change”. Her posts, however, attract a diverse range of people from fellow educators, to internet friends who she has never met in person.

The example illustrated in the paragraph above describes how a teacher is, initially, reluctant to adopt social media into her life, but she attempts to experiment with this technology. Considering that she is a teacher, she chooses to create 2 separate Facebook profiles. One profile is to keep in touch with former and current students, and her secondary profile is to network with other colleagues. In this example, it becomes apparent to see how this teacher has constructed her social digital identity by posting content that is intended for specific audiences, on Facebook.

Roach and Beck continue to describe the digital identity study of this teacher and state that, “Through her writing, Jessica could predictably accomplish the same kinds of social things again and again and elicit the same kinds of responses from people no matter how far or wide; her way with words were, therefore, powerful in constructing author/audience relations as a community of confidants” (247). In addition to communicating with other teachers, she also added her former students as Facebook friends, but her online interaction with her former students was strictly professional. Roach and Beck describe a post in which Jessica chooses to move “in and out of sight” by showing up in different conversations selectively. Her decision to respond or not “suggests that she understood that a writer can choose strategically when to speak and when to stay silent” (251). 

The example described above is describing how Jessica, deliberately creates 2 Facebook profiles for the purposes of communicating with her students, and for networking with colleagues. In this example, the construction of her social digital identity is described. It is noteworthy that Jessica is selective of her posts on social media and she chooses not to respond to some posts from her students, and she makes herself “invisible” to them by not carrying on a conversation with them. Obviously, she is rhetorically knowledgeable and she knows the implications that her language of her posts, and choosing when to speak or remain silent, will have on her audiences.

Also, Roach and Beck suggest how this knowledge can be implemented in classrooms. One of their suggestions is that teachers can have their classes read together from discussion boards that support hobbies like games or fan fiction. They state, “Young writers can consider critically how users are positioned within a particular site, how it is designed, by whom, for what purposes, with what effect, and for whose benefit…and we might invite talk about power and fairness, noticing things like whose voices are heard or not, who gets along, and who sets the rules for participating” (252). Therefore, social networks not only invite participation from teenagers, but also from adults, who deliberately choose to create an audience with carefully constructed posts, and who also choose how to represent their “real-life” identities in an online space.

Examining a class with a wiki requirement is a good example of studying how an online space can be designed to invite a specific type of audience. For example, in my graduate school experience, one of my professors mandated that classroom discussion of weekly readings be continued on a wiki page that he created for the purpose of the class. Each student who was enrolled in the class needed to sign up for access to this website, with a link provided by the professor, and an email address. Although this site was not meant to replicate Facebook, it enabled students to ask questions about the course assignments (via a discussion thread), or to send a private message to the professor. One useful aspect of this wiki page was the fact that it allowed students in the class to post their responses to the assigned readings, and classmates, as well as the professor, would continue the discussion thread throughout the week. Therefore, this wiki page was an online space that invited, and required, a form of social participation from each of the students enrolled in the course.

Digital Identity as a Multimodal Construction

In the construction of multimodal digital identity, a meaningful element is an individual’s knowledge of familiar genres. For example, if a student watches YouTube videos, by subscribing to a channel that they are interested in, they will likely approach an assignment that requires multimodality, by applying video production and editing conventions, similar to those found on YouTube. In the article entitled, “From Screen to Screen: Students’ Use of Popular Culture Genres in Multimodal Writing Assignments”, Brownyn T. Williams, explores, through student interviews and textual analysis, how student responses to multimodal assignments in college writing courses draw on popular culture genres, both explicitly and implicitly, in ways that students find unremarkable, but of which their instructors are often unaware. Williams argues that what has gone largely unexamined in the production of multimodal composition assignments is how, “the influence of popular culture influences students’ conceptions of and approaches to composing digital video and image assignments” (111). Therefore, students’ use of popular culture genres as a rhetorical and semiotic resource for their course work can result in texts that are creative and engaging.

According to Williams, a number of theorists have argued that, “genre is more productively perceived as the result of social actions and relationships that are mediated through particular texts; consequently, genre simultaneously shapes social relationships and actions that are enacted through rhetoric and is highly contextual” (113). Upon analyzing this quotation, it is evident that students’ multimodal productions are the result of social actions, which suggests that their digital identities are connected to their real-life identities and their lived experiences in the worlds that they inhabit. Students draw on their knowledge of genres that are familiar to them, and on their knowledge of rhetorical conventions, to compose and this results in the creation of an audience. 

For example, if I were assigned to write a video narrative about my weekend on Instagram, I’d probably take multiple pictures and videos of the events that happened over the weekend. Based on my knowledge of posting an Instagram story, I’d probably record short videos that do not exceed more than one minute in length, and I would take several pictures of my activities throughout the day, as well as some selfies (pictures of myself) to post to my Instagram story. If I wanted to adjust the color and lighting of a photo, I could accomplish this with the photo filters that are provided on Instagram. Therefore, posting an Instagram story would be the result of my knowledge of composing with Instagram.

Rhetorical Knowledge and Digital Tools

Another important element to consider is the fact that when students are being assigned to produce a digital composition, students draw on their knowledge of rhetoric and elements such as audience, context, genre, ethos, pathos, and logos to produce their digital work. Digital media technologies and rhetorical knowledge are enabling students to construct their identities, as writers, for multiple rhetorical contexts and audiences. Students are, increasingly, utilizing their knowledge of digital technologies, referred to in this article as, “antecedent knowledge”, to compose because their instructors are, in, some cases, expecting them to compose for a YouTube video, or in a genre that, somehow, involves digital tools. Williams argues that when students use their existing knowledge to produce a digital text, the results may not precisely be what their instructor expects. In order to understand how students use their “antecedent knowledge” of popular genres (such as YouTube videos or television programs) to compose, Williams studies the composing process of students and asks them to reflect on their writing and any challenges they may have experienced in completing their assignments. For example, a student named Marie, researched the literacy practices of football fans, and, as an English major, she had minimal experience in composing multimodal texts. As she began working through ideas for her project, she decided that she wanted to argue that being in fantasy football league changed how fans watched games as they paid more attention to how individual players performed and earned fantasy points than they did about whether a team won or lost. She reflected, “If I blended together what the video games look like and sports broadcasts, with the fantasy football way of seeing a game, I could make it change the way you see all of them at once” (117). At the same time that Marie was using content and conventions from different genres of sportscast and video games, she was conscious of setting up her video in a way that used conventions from remixing videos of title cards, juxtaposing images and overlapping sound. In the example of this student, it becomes apparent to see that she utilizes her knowledge of writing, considering that she is an English major, and decides to research about football fantasy leagues. This student is also familiar with video games, and she combines this knowledge with her digital production skills in order to create a video that is engaging to her audience. Therefore, this case illustrates how one student has combined her knowledge of rhetoric and of digital production to construct a multimodal video project for her class. https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezhost.utrgv.edu/science/article/pii/S8755461514000656?via%3Dihub

As a result of this study, the authors conclude that teachers should help students to appropriate their knowledge of popular genres to fulfill expectations for a course that requires digital composing. Williams offers the following pedagogical implication for Composition teachers, “The opportunity provided by digital media to produce multimodal texts means that students can now use their knowledge of popular culture genres not only in interpretive contexts, but also as a compositional resource as well” (119). If teachers start with what students know from popular culture genres and engage them in reflecting on that knowledge, they will develop a more critical understanding of how and why these genre conventions work as they do in popular culture. This type of approach can result in multimodal writing that crosses or challenges genres as well as the critical knowledge of how genre shapes, and is shaped by, writing in context.

In the article entitled, “Embedding Digital Literacies in English Language Teaching: Students' Digital Video Projects as Multimodal Ensembles”, Christoph A. Hafner argues that as a result of recent developments in digital technologies, new genres as well as new contexts for communication are emerging. The article describes an undergraduate course in English for science at a university in Hong Kong, which incorporated elements of digital literacies. The analysis shows that students met the challenge of writing for an authentic audience by combining a range of modes to develop an effective rhetorical “hook” and appropriate discoursal identity in their efforts to appeal to their audience (655). The students in Hafner’s study were assigned to produce a digital video scientific documentary shared through YouTube with a non-specialist audience and a written lab report, designed for a specialist audience. This study investigates the first task, where students shared a video through YouTube. Hafner defines the term called new literacy studies and states that, according to scholars such as Barton, Gee, and Street, “literacy is more than a mere set of cognitive skills located in individual minds, because it is socially situated in the contexts of literacy events. Different literacy events call for different kinds of reading and writing” (657). This quotation is meaningful in understanding the construction of students’ digital identities as writers because it implies that literacy is socially situated in the minds of students and that different writing assignments necessitate engaging in various non-traditional methods and different tools for writing. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/43268012. www.jstor.org/stable/43268012.]

The process of designing involves rhetorical strategies in the design of multimodal ensembles, where strategies are meant to realize the designer’s communicative intent. In one student production, Hafner found that video evokes a drama which tells a personal story. In order to catch the attention of the audience, the two students, who were working together on this assignment, present their topic as an investigation of a personal issue, and they use an overarching narrative to unify the documentary. The documentary follows 2 students who believe that they have become sick and it follows the students as they go to the library to do research and form their hypothesis and collect data. In attempting to manage this blend of narrative and scientific report the students have created a script, which records their conversation and which shifts between the different pragmatic demands of the language of conversation and the science of language (676). The students used music in order to make their documentary accessible and less intimidating for a non-specialist audience. The story is told through visuals and with multiple camera angles. At times, the footage is a bit bumpy, but this fits well for 2 students who are on an adventure. Interestingly, the narrator role is prominent, in the style of a participatory documentary with documentary makers participating actively in the narrative. Viewers are invited to identify with the protagonists and follow along with their story. According to Hafner, this case was participatory, because the narrator became the focal point of the video and conveyed a one-sided point of view. At the same time the video project opens up many interesting alternative modes of expression for students and it also provides students with many opportunities for spoken and written language practice (680). In relation to digital identity and composition, it is noteworthy that students are able to assume the role of narrator and invite their audience to follow along with the message that their video is attempting to convey.