“No, I’m Not Smart; I’m Just Trolling”: 21st-Century Identities Across Discussion Formats

• In Event: Textures of Social Media Exchange: Youth Identity and Digital Aesthetics in a Global Learning Environment

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore youths’ enacted identities at the intersection of instructional activities (Zacher, 2008) of a college prep summer academy (i.e., collegiate classroom discussion, college application essay generation, multimodal/multimedia design), and the communication affordances of varied discussion formats, including social media (i.e., blog posts, photo comments and chat).

Participants included 58 urban high school incoming juniors and seniors involved in a college prep summer academy over two years. Data utilized by researchers included video of all sections of the academy courses, fieldnotes by instructors and outside researchers, analytics capturing youth’s online participation, pre and post interviews with participants, and written essay samples pre, during and post the academy. Conversation analysis was effective in detailing changes in the seminar/discussion course of the academy, particularly for how the participants “gained the floor” and collaboratively made sense of the text. Further, discourse analysis was used to understand the types of interactions afforded by the online social networking tools including initiating conversation with a blog post and subsequent comments. Pre and post semi-structured interviews captured self-reported descriptions of past experience. These self-reports were compared to the types of youth-initiated discussion moves, writing practices and multimodal and digital products.

The multiple goals of the academy are instructionally intertwined by design to capitalize on the assumed “reciprocal relationship” between reading, writing and multimodal forms. The central text of the academy informed actions students were requested to take with the community online, in the discussion structures used in the course, the multimodal and multimedia products and the approach to the composition of the written essays. However, how the youth enacted these activities could not be argued as intertwined. Skills in each mode of communication and in each discourse community (i.e. online and academic) ran parallel in their own trajectories of growth; whereas the identities enacted were used across discourses, at times borrowing from established identities (i.e. online identities such as troll, lurker, flamer; and off-line school identities such as philosopher, revolutionary, scholar), but always separately performed from other possible identities.

There is a popular notion that youth enact a more authentic identity online or in otherwise supposed “free spaces” while interactions in schools are an individual’s embodiment of the institution. However, the data suggest that academic reading, writing, and designing off- and online affords opportunity not just for representing the institution or the “self” (Goddard & Geesin, 2011; Hogan 2010), but for introspective remixing of identities; whereas, “free time” posting online afforded the intentional embodiment of established social networking identities (i.e. troll, lurker, flamer) the youth reported as “inauthentic” to their understanding of their identity. Identity work (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004) in traditional schooling activities as well as 21st Century designing and online activities afforded and constrained the range of identities available to be enacted and understood as “authentic” by youth.

Authors

• Anna Smith, New York University

• Dee Anne Anderson, New York University