Making Sense of Broader Participation Patterns in Online Writing

• In Event: Emerging Methods for Studying Adolescent Writing Across Spaces and Over Time

Abstract

Scholars of media literacy and learning have described a range of ways adolescents use digital tools and spaces to conceptualize, produce, and share creative works. For instance, research in the United Kingdom indicates that 69% of young adults share photos and 44% share original videos online (OFCOM, 2014). Similarly, 38% of young Americans post original creative work online and 21% produce transformative works or remixes inspired by others’ words and images (e.g. Lenhart, Madden, Smith, Purcell, Zickuhr, & Rainie, 2011).

Grimes and Fields (2012) have pointed out that these statistics typically consider small portions of young people’s online activity, however. Within and beyond such surveys, research often focuses on the experiences of young expert creators. Thus, we know much more about “exceptional cases” who write novel-length fanfiction (Author 3, 2015), build writing and language learning networks (Black, 2008), or establish magazines with global reach (Jenkins, 2006) than we do about young people who contribute to media ecosystems in less visible ways. Gee (2004) and others (Authors, 2013; Black, 2008) have acknowledged the importance of such diverse activities as archiving, lurking, reading, liking, reviewing, and sharing original and transformative works — but few researchers have devised methods to describe these broader, more common participation patterns.

Here, we focus on feedback that fanfiction authors receive from their readers, building a linguistic analysis method for understanding fanfiction reviews. Data collection began with systematic observation (Androutsopoulos, 2008) of sites such as Fanfiction.net and Figment.com in order to gain insight into dynamics of communication, writing, and reading. We collected public artifacts from fanfiction stories, authors’ notes, readers’ comments and reviews, and reader art, in order to establish context.

To analyze the public reviews, we modified a coding scheme developed for classroom writing (Kline, Letoksky, & Woodard, 2013). We divided reviews into idea units (Chafe, 1980), then examined primary linguistic function (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975), comments’ foci of attention, identification of problems, and reviewers’ affect. Through three rounds of coding and resolution, we added categories to better reflect the fanfiction writing contexts. The most significant addition was a recognition of “social communication” — comments establishing a reader’s credibility (Royster, 2005) or social presence (Kehrwald, 2008).

Our results suggest that, similarly to classrooms, few reviewers write in-depth reviews or make concrete suggestions. At the same time, social validation and presence — reviewers’ establishment of “right to comment” — are important to fanfiction authors. In short, writers need instruction, but they need contact with fellow informed writers and readers, too. This linguistic analysis and its micro-focus on writers’ and reviewers’ interactions helped us make sense of the context in which fanfiction authors find themselves, clarifying roles of different kinds of reviewers and the knowledge they share in their feedback. As venues for young people’s creative activities move to online settings, researchers must develop new methods of understanding learning and interaction in these spaces. Even where complete accounts of participation are difficult to collect, we can glean information about young readers and writers by examining a wider range of online activity.

Authors

• Alecia Marie Magnifico, University of New Hampshire

• Jayne C. Lammers, University of Rochester

• Jen Scott Curwood, The University of Sydney