Beyond Writing: A Multidimensional Framework for Conceptualizing "Digital Mediacy"

• In Event: Interrogating the Status of Digital Writing in Practice and Pedagogy

Abstract

Objectives
Concepts such as digital literacy, web literacy, and information literacy have provided helpful ways of understanding representational meaning-making practices in our current society. However, these framings can be limited by a reliance on logocentric representation in an era of widespread multimodal digital composition using electronic media. This project illustrates a framework developing the concept of digital mediacy, based on a study of students’ digital composition practices in a library-based computer programming club.
Theoretical Framework
Practices of digital media composition are embedded in and inseparable from sociocultural contexts in which they occur (Lankshear and Knobel 2008). This project seeks to move beyond ‘literacy,’ as an ever-expanding metaphor for these practices and toward a conceptualization of digital mediacy (Gannett and Brereton 2016). This effort to theorize digital mediacy first considers the nature of digital mediacy as embodied (Johnson 2015), participatory (Jenkins et al. 2009), situated (Hamilton, 2010), and designful (Serafini 2012), drawing on understandings from a variety of fields tangential to writing studies. Secondly, this conceptualization frames digital mediacy across three interrelated dimensions of media produced through digital technologies: addressing the content of digital media, the procedurality (often computational) involved in producing digital media, and the contexts in which digital media are produced, exchanged, and attributed meaning (Aguilera 2017; Aguilera & Pandya 2018).
Methods and Data Sources
The methodological and analytical approaches grounding this theorization are guided by paradigms of naturalistic and interpretive inquiry, which emphasize the study of social phenomena, such as teaching and learning, through methods that attempt to preserve, rather than manipulate, contexts of study as they occur in “real-world” settings (Barab & Squire, 2016). Specifically, this project draws on data from a year-long study examining the digital media artifacts, composing practices, and reported experiences of students aged 8-14 participating in a library-based computer programming club. Data collected included observational field notes, surveys, interviews, and audio-recordings examined through artefactual analysis (Pauwels, 2012), qualitative coding (Saldaña, 2015), and discourse analysis (Gee, 2004).
Results
Findings suggested that while a wide variety of digital composition practices can be observed while students engage with online content on screens, other practices may be obscured without specific attention to the ways that youth are engaging with the procedural dimensions of online content, including the technological tools that render this content visible on our digital devices. Additional insight to students’ literacy practices were also gained from an examination of students’ engagement with the beyond-the-screen dimensions of their digital-age literacy experiences, including the social contexts that simultaneously give rise to and are shaped by sites of online content production, dissemination, and everyday use. Ultimately, the artifacts, compositional practices, and perspectives shared by students complicated established perspectives on digital-age composition as a logocentric phenomenon.
Significance
This study contributes to the literature underpinning contemporary education with further evidence into how digital composition practices extend across media forms and beyond virtual-physical divides. This framing of digital mediacy suggests ways that teachers, parents, librarians, and others can support students developing their own representational and interpretive repertoires in a digital age.

Author

• Earl Aguilera, California State University - Fresno