Digital Materiality, Composition, and Intentionality in Mediational Means

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

Abstract

Objectives
Everyday writing is increasingly mediated through digital apps and other interactive platforms whose designs, especially with the emergence of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017), are intimately intertwined in and designed with corporate interests, societal and language ideologies, and other factors. The ways platforms come imbedded with the ideologies of their creators is most poignantly highlighted in the case of Facebook and incidences of algorithmic oppression (Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018) but also evidenced in mundane interactions, such as Google searches (Bhatt & MacKenzie, 2019) or autocorrect, where ideological constructs are conveyed not simply through semiotics but through the logic, process, and structuring of interactions. The analytic power of sociocultural literacy theory is well positioned to unveil and analyze this subscreenic world (Golden, 2017; Lynch, 2017), but this requires revisiting the concept of mediation, which is often understood as passive.
Theoretical Framework
I build on Vygotskian ideas of mediation (Wertsch, 1985) to bring together recent ideas in relational ontologies and embodied cognition to think more deeply about digital writing - specifically ways the digital objects/processes bring in additional "intentionality" in mediational means, and how such objects act more as participants than in analog writing. Technology is part of, but not reduced to, social relations – this is under-examined in the field of education. Rather, technology is seen as a mediator. But technologies themselves have social relations embedded within them – in their design. In a step towards a political theory of learning (The Politics of Learning Writing Collective, 2017), technology should be understood as neither deterministic nor neutral (Law, 2009; Toyama, 2015), intimately intertwined with human intelligence (Cole & Derry, 2005; Vygotsky, 1978), and fundamental to preconceptions about human nature (Woolgar, 1987) and liberation (Law, 1991).
Methods and Data Sources
Methodologically, I augment activity theory with socioculturally-influenced (Marxian) empirical traditions in human-computer interaction (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006; Suchman, 2006), mediated discourse analysis (Jones & Norris, 2005; Scollon, 2001), and the (digital) ethnographic sensibilities of queer and feminist postcolonial science and technology studies (STS), such as found in the “walkthrough method” (Light, Burgess, & Duguay, 2018) and critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock, 2018). I examine a number of empirical examples from classroom ethnographies in the form of video to consider the place of “things” in digital writing practices, interactive digital artifacts in particular, understanding them as participants in the meaning-making process.
Results & Significance
I close by discussing implications for theorizing, research, and instruction of digital writing that pushes students (and researchers) to critically engage with subscreenic worlds, including through their own designs. Mediational means come with the biases and ideologies of their creators. There are a number of ramifications: 1. Writing experiences and activities, while continuing to be social practices, are shaped by designed artifacts, in particular the digital. 2. Material artifacts are pivots into figured worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) in digital writing. 3. There are impacts on digital writing of an idealized user/users embedded in designs. 4. Digital writing are increasingly intersectionally differentiated experiences - they are gendered, racialized, and ableist.

Author

• Roberto Santiago de Roock, University of California - Santa Cruz