“The Whole Thing is Pretty Meta”: Capturing Youth Digital Composition Across Digital Assemblages

• In Event: Cross-Platformization, Digital Media Platforms as Global Ecosystems, and the Shifting Understandings of Critical Platform Practices

Abstract

Objectives
This participatory design research (PDR) study (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) traces how an intergenerational research team can co-design a collaborative online writing community on Discord, a hub for multiple platform spaces, from games, to bots, to live events — each with unique conventions for youth digital composition (Burgess, 2021). With platforms becoming increasingly layered and unbounded (Authors, 2016; Leander & Boldt, 2013), youth face new decisions about how they compose, and for whom. The project explores what platforms have more uptake for youth writers, what features engage youth writers, such as live events, and the affordances of working across platforms.

Perspectives
Bringing together the knowledge of platform studies (Burgess, 2021), which emphasizes the ways platforms shape the communicative and artistic conventions of digital writing, and Leander and Boldt’s (2013) call to consider literacy’s rhizomatic nature, transliteracies theorizes digital writing as inherently mobile, flowing across networked platforms (Discussant, 2016). Discord’s embedded network of platforms can be conceptualized ecosystemically (Discussant, 2021) as interwoven assemblages rather than as sets of discrete tools (Discussant, 2023). This study asks how youth writers shift and adapt as they digitally compose across this “kaleidoscope” of networked platforms (Discussant, 2023).

Methods and Data Sources
While screencapture video methods have been a mainstay of multimodal, video-based research in education for decades (e.g., Authors, 2014; Wohlwend, 2015), there has been surprisingly little theorizing of what screencapture can illuminate about youth’s cross-platform writing. The project draws on a critical, participatory approach to screencapture which accounts for the layered, embodied, mobile ways youth compose across online interfaces in a postdigital era.
To trace youth participants' digital composing across these multiple platforms, we used a combination of digital methods that included critical platform walkthroughs (Light et al., 2018) and a content analysis of the TikTok hashtag #amwriting, which features a self-generated form of screencapture in which users film and share their writing process (Author, 2016). Both forms of screencapture, self-generated and collaborative, allow researchers to understand the layered platforms embedded into a writer’s compositional process, as narrated by the writer themselves.


Findings and Significance
Posthuman critical literacy challenges researchers to construct networks more ethically alongside computational agents (Leander & Burriss, 2020). To that end, this co-designed Discord server offers a compelling example of a participatory, networked writing space. As one participant reflected, “The whole thing is pretty meta. Also now during this [walkthrough] we are visiting last week's contributions and conversation with an added layer of a change in presentation and a shift in time.” In a single “research encounter” (Møller et al., 2019), emergent findings show youth writing, communicating, and inquiring in strategic ways across times and spaces, as afforded by Discord’s unique amalgamation of writing platforms. Moreover, the space of Discord and the writing community as a whole offers a unique launchpad for youth to demonstrate their networked and cross-platform writing processes: as youth write digitally, they strategically layer these platforms to promote their work and reach particular audiences.

Authors

• Clara Abbott, University of Pennsylvania

• Mary Elizabeth Talian, University of Pennsylvania

• Jennifer Freed, University of Pennsylvania

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania