Digital Writing on/With Platforms: The Emergence of a Writing Community on Discord

• In Event: The "Invisible" Resonance: (Re)Imagining Writing for a "Just Present" in Local and Global Technoscapes

Abstract

As young people engage in digital writing online (de Roock, 2021; Pandya & Sefton-Green, 2021), educational researchers have turned a critical eye on how platforms are shaping youth’s literacy practices and how youth’s literacies shape platforms (Nichols & Garcia, 2022; Robinson, 2023a). Taking a critical perspective on this mutually-constitutive relationship, this paper is authored by an intergenerational research team working to design and study a youth-led online writing community on Discord.
This participatory design research study (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) brings together 16 high school, undergraduate, and graduate students/researchers in a collaborative inquiry project oriented to educational equity. We follow Lyiscott et al. (2020) in designing a critical partnership that: (a) is youth-led; (b) privileges the ways of knowing/being of BIPOC communities; and (c) recognizes inevitable tensions/vulnerabilities. Our work is informed by critical theoretical perspectives about the mobile dimensions of young people’s literacies across complex media ecologies (Garcia & Nichols, 2021), particularly transliteracies’ (Author, 2017a) focus on how uptake and resonance in new media contexts is tied to identities/histories/systems shaped by power.
We collected data on our team’s design/research practices and 30 participants’ online practices. We focus on the six-month launch period, collecting Discord screencapture data, platform analytics, youth writing/artifacts, interviews, fieldnotes, and weekly team meeting recordings. We draw on computational and ethnographic methods (Aragon & Davis, 2019) to ask:
What (and whose) ideas are taken up and circulate, and how do those reflect the community’s stated commitments to writing, change, and equity?
How do participants’ digital writing practices unfold in relation to aspects of the online community?
We used Light et al.’s (2018) method to engage in a critical ‘walkthrough’ of the Discord community, and then engaged in inductive analysis of the data through descriptive coding (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2016), resonance mapping (Author, 2017b), critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock, 2018), and collaborative data analysis (Lupton & Watson, 2021).
We found popular culture (playful talk about books/TV/music/movies) permeated across what was shared/circulated in ways intimately intertwined with talk about critical issues (e.g., racism, climate activism, linguistic discrimination). This intertwining of fun/criticality in youth’s digital writing was shaped by two influences: (1) the community’s infrastructure and (2) intersecting histories. By infrastructure, we include the platform, which prioritizes written text/audio over visual media, as well as how the research team designed the space, such as organizing discussions via separate channels (see Figure 1) and using different moderation strategies (e.g., visibility of youth moderators, use bots; see Figure 2). Histories were important in the community history archived on the platform (writing/conversations accumulated over time) and individuals’ histories (e.g., referencing fan practices like trigger warnings).
These findings suggest that the distributed mentoring in online affinity spaces (Aragon & Davis, 2019) occurs through the imbrication of platform and literacy practices. These can catalyze critical conversations that ‘resonate’ online, carried along on waves of pleasure/joy that may be discounted by adults – highlighting youth-centered ways to design and facilitate justice-oriented learning experiences.

Authors

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Opal Jawale

• Andrew Yao

• Sunny Ajitabh, Rutgers University

• Haley Creighton, University of Pennsylvania

• Luiza Louback Fontes, University of Pennsylvania

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania

• Mary Elizabeth Talian, University of Pennsylvania