When Everyone Is a Writer: Social Composing in the Wattpad Online Writing Community

• In Event: 58.081 - Exploring Authorship in the Age of Mass Literacy: The Rise of Writing in People's Everyday Lives

Abstract

Objectives. In examining how adolescent writers participated in the online social network Wattpad, this paper explores what Brandt (2015) calls the rise of writing, as people turn to writing as a mass daily experience and texts become the chief form of production in the knowledge economy. In participating in the “world’s largest community of readers and writers,” these young writers are pushing the boundaries of how writing is imagined, generated, and circulated in a mobile era: producing texts in serial form, reading and shaping each other’s stories, collaborating with fellow reader-writers on joint projects, and identifying as published authors across multiple public forums. We argue that these new forms of social composing--writing in digitally networked contexts with interactive audiences--are central ways of participating in the contemporary knowledge economy.

Theoretical framework. As texts and audiences circulate globally, scholars have called for research that “articulate[s] the new models of composing developing right in front of our eyes” (Yancey, 2009, p. 7), especially ones that attend to the multimodal, multilingual, and transnational complexities of writing now (e.g., Bezemer & Kress, 2008; Haas, Carr, & Takayoshi, 2011; Lam, 2009). This study takes up that challenge by exploring the nature of authorship in the Wattpad community, which each month has an audience of 45 million, primarily teens and 20-somethings, who have posted more than 250 million stories in 25 languages. In this paper we develop a framework of social composing to explore the networked, mobile ways writing is being practiced and to highlight how writing is a social process (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011) that involves designing meaning across multiple modes (New London Group, 1996) and emerges across mediated and entangled networks (Author, in press; Prior, 2010; Latour, 2005).

Methods/Data. We draw on affinity space methodologies (Lammers, Curwood, & Magnifico, 2012) to investigate how meanings travel across connected sites of practice (Leander & McKim, 2003). Embedded in a long-term ethnography at a design-oriented urban public high school, this study emerged in our work with 8 adolescent Wattpad members. We engaged in case study analysis (Yin, 2003) of three prolific young women in this focus group. Data included content mapping and participant observation of the Wattpad community, focus group interviews and observation, case study interviews, and a content analysis of students’ online participation and writing.

Findings/Significance. We explore three findings: 1) The social media space was rooted in dialogue, shaping how youth understood writing to be fundamentally oriented to a present, interactive audience. 2) The community drove how youth saw themselves as writers--they could be anonymous but connected to other writers in ways that offered a sense of legitimacy and seriousness of purpose. 3) There were multiple opportunities for collaborative composing, reinforcing the sense that writing was iterative and co-constructed. These practices of social composing are an important form of participation in current times, helping to challenge more traditional (and schooled) paradigms about who can be a writer, where and how writing is practiced, and what constitutes the definition and boundaries of a text.

Authors

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Veena Vasudevan, American Museum of Natural History