Authorship in the Age of Mass Writing: Adolescents’ Social Composing in Online Communities

• In Event: Public Writing: Performing Writing Identities Across Contexts

Abstract

We are in the midst of a profound transformation in what we mean by authorship, as people write in their everyday lives on an unprecedented scale, often publicly composing with and for others in this age of “mass writing” (Brandt, in press). This paper takes up scholars’ calls for research that helps “articulate the new models of composing developing right in front of our eyes” (Yancey, 2009, p. 7) and attends to the multimodal, multilingual, and transnational complexities of writing now (e.g., Bezemer & Kress, 2008; Lam, 2009). Exploring how young people participate in writing with and for others in online reading/writing communities, this paper looks at adolescents’ beliefs and practices around social composing, which I define as writing in digitally networked contexts with interactive audiences. This definition, which builds on and extends Haas and colleagues’ (2011) work on interactive networked writing, highlights that writing is a social process (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011) that involves designing meaning across multiple modes using available resources (New London Group, 1996).

This presentation reports on a qualitative study of adolescents’ social composing processes as they publicly performed writing identities in three online reading/writing communities—Goodreads, Wattpad, and Figment. The study is theoretically framed by an ecosocial semiotic perspective (DaSilva-Iddings et al., 2011), which draws together social semiotic (e.g., Bezemer & Kress, 2008) and ecological (e.g., Macmillan, 2012) theories to highlight how writing is a culturally situated social practice enacted in the dynamic co-evolution of texts, individuals, and environments in relationship to one another. The study employed an embedded case study design (Yin, 2003) to address the following research question: How do adolescents’ literate identities, beliefs about writing, and social composing practices evolve in relation to online reading/writing communities? Nested case studies were analyzed in relation to the larger cases of the online communities in order to draw theoretical generalizations about social composing.

Findings indicate that young people ‘wrote themselves into being’ (boyd, 2008) differently across the communities, performing public writing identities through their semiotic choices and in relation to interactive, vocal, and visible public networks. Each community offered particular semiotic affordances for participating in the space that shaped how writers interacted with others and articulated particular writing identities. Across the communities, adolescents’ social composing practices were profoundly intertwined with participatory audiences, leading to a blurring of reader/writer roles as writers became readers of their own and others’ texts in complex ways. Authors and audiences worked together to construct contexts through joint semiotic work, complicating further the reader/writer relationships and offering new insights into the co-constructed nature of public writing.

The study addresses how adolescents make meaning intertextually and multimodally as both readers and writers—their social composing practices. Understanding the relationships between “mass” reading/writing has never been more important (Graff, 2013), as the dynamic rate of change in interactive communicative contexts necessitates better understanding of how composing is shifting in relation to networked publics and the connected nature of learning now.

Author

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania