Interrogating the Global in Critical Digital Literacies: Imagining the "Other" in Online Writing Spaces

• In Event: The Continuing and Renewed Urgency of Critical Digital Literacies: Ethical and Political Considerations on Research and Practice

Abstract

Objectives/Background/Theoretical Perspectives
This paper interrogates the role of ‘global’ in critical digital literacies (Aguilera & Pandya, 2021). While existing frameworks like cosmopolitanism theorize the importance of living in a fractious yet digitally-connected world, these carry asymmetrical framings that continue to position the West as the dominant paradigm from which all ‘others’ are imagined and understood.
To study how meaning-making and power are intertwined in, entangled with, and distributed across social and material relationships in global media networks, we present data from an ethnographic case study of Wattpad, the largest online community for writers. We focus on Wattpad’s ‘global ambassadors’ program, tracing the official discourse about writing, construction/fashioning of the ‘globally inclusive’ writer, and transnational media practices of writers responding to these demands and possibilities of public writing and audiences in and beyond the platform.
We respond to theories of cosmopolitanism (e.g., Appiah, 2007) and cosmopolitan literacies (e.g., Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2014), which recognize differences and suggest that understanding this legitimate difference allows for a making-sense-of-each-other. We explore Carrington’s (2015) decolonial framing of black diasporic cosmopolitanism to ask: in what ways does cosmopolitanism (Appiah, 2007) allow the (post-colonial) ‘other’ to subvert inherited representation? We argue that a decolonial approach to cosmopolitanism highlights that though we occupy fundamentally different yet entangled worlds, an asymmetric ignorance (Chakrabarty, 2000) forecloses certain ways of knowing (Todd, 2016).

Methods/Data Sources
This study was an online ethnographic inquiry (Lammers, Curwood, & Magnifico, 2012) that used digital wayfinding methods. Defined as the ways that people come to know the world through responsive and historically-conditioned movement through it (Ingold, 2000; Page-Reeves et al., 2019), wayfinding is the navigation of unanticipated challenges/opportunities while creating pathways through an environment. We engaged in digital-wayfinding for intertwined data collection and analysis by using a combination of data mining tools (Google’s Twitter scraper, Voyant) and ethnographic inquiry (field notes, interviews, artifact collection) to trace how people moved in and through Wattpad and related online spaces.

Findings
We found that ‘global community’ was central to the platform’s identity in its official discourse (e.g., “We recruit and train new ambassadors from all over the world”). The ‘ambassador’ role was presented as coveted (one is “selected and trained”) making the ‘global’ aspirational but masking Wattpad ambassadors’ unpaid labor. Official discourses around ‘global community’ were echoed in writers/readers comments, often rife with stereotypes about different cultures/countries and unidirectional readings of ‘others’ (“I wonder if maybe these (Filipino) readers are more forgiving of errors in representing Europe and North America”).

Significance
We argue that discourses of global inclusion can perpetuate hierarchical frameworks by erasing/minimizing legitimate difference (Haraway, 1991; Strathern; 2004; Govindrajan, 2018) and masking asymmetries (Cadena, 2015; Chakrabarty, 2000; Cusicanqui, 2012). Critical engagement of the global challenges these ‘surface’ celebrations of difference (e.g., welcoming others), interrogating how asymmetrical positionings (e.g., English-speaking hosts, inviting ‘global others’ from the margins and imagined in the hosts’ own image) represent new forms of colonizing relationships in these online spaces inhabited by young writers.

Authors

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania