Mediated Practices in Connected World: Platforms as ‘Sponsors of Literacy’ and Youth-Led Coalitions’ Relational Practices

• In Event: Exploring Digital Platforms, Literacy Practices, and Pedagogical Futures from Diverse Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives
The interwovenness of digital technologies in everyday practices of youth has meant youths’ lives are more connected than before (boyd, 2014; Wargo, 2015). They often compose and create texts and media based on conversations encountered in both online and offline communities and share their content across networks, platforms, and physical spaces. By looking ethnographically at two youth-led media coalitions that are situated outside of school in two urban cities, one in North India (A Hip Hop collective) and in North-East U.S. (An online newspaper), this multisited ethnography pays attention to interconnectedness between the physical and the digital, people, environments, histories, materialities, and relations of power.
Further, by tracing the social and digital media practices of youth, this paper examines how these platforms, through its features, norms and circulating cultures, platform logics and algorithms, have emerged as “sponsors” (Brandt, 1998), enabling, supporting, and also constraining what youth write, create, and share.

Theoretical Frameworks
Drawing on critical feminist studies, platform studies, and decolonial perspectives, this critical ethnography (Madison, 2005) examines how literacy practices emerge and circulate in and across physical, digital, and community spaces, and critically interrogates how youth collective literacy practices develop over time and in relation to the digital and physical spaces that youth participate in. Further, this research engages with Lu and Steele’s (2019) study on the simultaneous cross-platform practices of users that allow for the (re)invention of platforms as critical sites of resistance, and practices of Jugaad (a way to work around obstacles) as theorized by Amit Rai (2019) to understand how youth playfully work against technological/ resource constraints.

Methods, Data Sources, & Analysis
Over a period of 12 months, this critical ethnographic study traced the cross-platform practices of two hip hop collectives (12 youth) and an online newspaper (4 youth) using connective ethnographic approaches (Burrell, 2009; Hine, 2015; Leander, 2010). To trace the movement of these collectives’ digital artifacts across platforms, multiple screencapture methods were used: Media go-along (Jørgensen, 2016) (n=10) and scrollback (Robards & Lincoln, 2017) (n=8) interviews were conducted to center youth perspectives on their social media platforms. Researcher generated screencapture (Bhatt & De Roock, 2014) was used to center research/er questions. These online methods were combined with in-person interviews (n= 54) and participant observations. The study adopted abductive analysis (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012) approach and data was analyzed (via Atlas.ti).

Findings and Significance
While networked spaces allow for youth collectivities to happen (Hall & Stornaiuolo, 2020; Jenkins et al., 2013; Lammers & Marsh, 2015), the two youth-led collectives were keenly aware of how algorithms and platform logics influence their presence, absences, reach and searchability on social media. To negotiate these tensions, they engage in resistive practices on the digital spaces that are deeply rooted in and emerge from relationships that the youth have built with each other over time across the physical and community spaces they engage with.
Such practices across spaces, allow for not only cross-border collaborations but also challenged limitations imposed by platform logics (Robinson, 2022) and resource constraints.

Author

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania