New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders

Bronwyn Williams, Amy A. Zenger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415897679
• eBook ISBN: 9781136635632
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How do students' online literacy practices intersect with online popular culture? In this book scholars from a range of countries including Australia, Lebanon, Nepal, Qatar, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States illustrate and analyze how literacy practices that are mediated through and influenced by popular culture create both opportunities and tensions for secondary and university students. The authors examine issues of theory, identity, and pedagogy as they address participatory popular culture sites such as fan forums, video, blogs, social networking sites, anime, memes, and comics and graphic novels. Uniquely bringing together scholarship about online literacy practices and the growing body of work on participatory popular culture, New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture across Borders makes distinctive contributions to an emerging field of study, pushing forward scholarship about literacy and identity in cross-cultural situations and advancing important conversations about issues of global flows and local responses to popular culture.

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Introduction

Popular Culture and Literacy in a Networked World

Bronwyn T. Williams and Amy A. Zenger

A student from Brazil uses a soundtrack of techno music from the U.S. and images including Darth Vader, Dr. Evil, and Peter Pan to create a video she posts online. Another video from Lebanon mixes personal photos and images from Japanese manga with a U.S. hip hop soundtrack. On a fan forum for the movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One, the young people discussing the movie gather from around the world, including New Zealand, Japan, Argentina, Spain, Britain, and the U.S. Meanwhile, on FanFiction.net the authors of fan fiction also come from many countries, including, Jordan, Finland, Tanzania, and Korea. And students from India to Australia to Lebanon have Facebook pages that include lists of their favorite music and movies, as well as clips from videos and links to other popular culture webpages.

These are just a few of the exciting and disruptive, but certainly significant, shifts in literacy practices and popular culture brought about by digital technologies. As one recent study of young people in the U.S. found, in a typical day 8- to 18-year-olds spent more than seven and a half hours using some form of media, from television and computers to music, with almost half of that time spent using a computer and with the amount of computer use increasing substantially among adolescents (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010). Digital technologies have created opportunities for individuals to create, distribute, and read multimodal texts with ease and enthusiasm. These new media and online technologies have not only changed literacy practices (Alvermann, 2010; Brooke, 2009; Lankshear & Knobel, 2008) and popular culture (Bruns, 2008; Buckingham & Willett, 2006; Jenkins, 2006), but have also allowed digital texts to cross borders with increasing speed and have brought languages, cultures, and texts into contact as never before.

New media technologies have created a participatory popular culture in which audience members do much more than interpret the movies, television programs, video games, and music produced by large corporations. Digital technologies allow individuals to sample and remix popular culture content, write back to popular culture producers, and connect with fellow fans from around the corner and around the world. Personal webspaces such as Facebook are filled with popular culture images, links, and video as ways of performing identities rather than expository, written personal statements. Individuals sample and remix music and video to create their own films that they post on YouTube. Any new movie, video game, or recording becomes the subject of page after page of written reviews, analysis, and discussion. Fan fiction and fan film creators use the characters from existing pop culture narratives to create their own stories. Not only is popular culture changing how people are reading and writing, such shifts in reading and writing online are changing popular culture. Whether as subject matter, discourse, or rhetorical patterns, popular culture often shapes the content and form of current online reading and writing. It is important that we understand not just how online technologies have changed literacy and popular culture practices, but why popular culture dominates the online literacy practices of our students.

Although popular culture has crossed international borders for some time, digital technologies have both increased the access people have to popular culture from around the world and put them in contact with audience members in other countries. The literacy practices shaped by popular culture online are also influenced by the ways in which popular culture images, ideas, and references are read across borders. As students from around the world read and write with popular culture, their literacy practices raise important questions about the interplay of rhetoric, power, technology, and global capitalism. Students who are already reading popular culture texts from other countries, or communicate with online friends across borders, are developing ideas about literacy and culture that are significantly different than those of previous generations.

In New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders we explore how students’ online literacy practices intersect with online popular culture. The book draws on literacy and popular culture scholars from Australia, Lebanon, Nepal, Qatar, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States, to illustrate and analyze how literacy practices that are mediated through and influenced by popular culture create both opportunities and tensions for secondary and university students. The chapters in the book cover issues of theory, identity, and pedagogy as they address participatory popular culture sites such as fan forums, video, blogs, social networking sites, anime, memes, and comics and graphic novels. There are two central focuses to this collection. First, the authors explore the ways in which new media and online technologies are shaped by, and influence, the connections and tensions between transnational popular culture and local cultural practices. Participatory popular culture raises new questions about the interplay between the mass popular culture and local audience members. This collection will explore the role of new media in the economic and cultural debates about “globalization” and how those are complicated by the local uses of popular culture texts. Technologies that allow an individual to not only access popular culture texts from around the world in an instant, but also share, comment on, appropriate, and remix those same texts alter the way the individual perceives popular culture, and alter his or her sense of agency in regard to the texts. New media technologies have changed the relationship between mass popular culture text and individual users, and they engage individuals in new ways of negotiating language and culture.

Those negotiations of language and culture define the second focus of the collection: the influence of participatory popular culture on the literacy practices of young people. Through cross-cultural participatory popular culture, young people are engaging with and responding to global audiences in ways and to an extent simply not available to previous generations. Though we should, of course, be wary of being naïvely celebratory in our approach to studying these practices, there is no denying that many young people are in contact with texts and people around the world through the lenses of popular culture: popular culture provides the rhetorical, linguistic, and semiotic building blocks through which they engage in cross-cultural discourse. They encounter these texts on a global stage, deal with issues of difference and unfamiliarity, and then rebuild them in local contexts. While their practices and ideas are certainly shaped by the popular culture content that corporations produce and distribute around the world, it is also the case that young people are appropriating and reusing these same texts to perform identities and make meaning in their own lives.

The chapters in this book, then, analyze how people interpret, create, and distribute popular culture texts across cultures, and how they think about the role of culture in defining the nature of texts, the negotiations of language use, the employment of rhetoric, and the construction and performance of identity. Individual chapters offer many different perspectives about local responses to these global forces from scholars working in a wide range of international contexts. How do young people access transnational texts online, but then respond and rework them according to their local contexts and concerns about identity (gender, social class, ethnicity, sexual orientation)? How do these online practices influence their approaches to reading and writing, both with print as well as with images, sound, and video? Such research offers obvious possibilities for conceiving of how the use of popular culture across cultures could be used in the classroom to talk about issues of literacy, cross-cultural communication, identity, and power. Some chapters include discussions of the innovative ways in which instructors around the world connect participatory popular culture with classroom pedagogy, particularly the ways in which students’ out-of-class literacy practices online can be connected to the literacy classroom.

The collection itself also reflects the diverse opportunities and practices within participatory popular culture. As the contributors sent us their chapters, we found that their conceptions of participatory popular culture and literacy often challenged us to expand and rethink our own. What you will not find in this book is a lock-step set of definitions or scholarly approaches to this subject matter. The contributors represent not only a number of different countries, but also several different academic fields and approaches to research and scholarship. We encouraged these authors to demonstrate how their scholarly backgrounds and local cultural contexts led them to conceive of the issues involved with participatory popular culture across borders. The result is a book that ranges widely on this subject, but around every corner provides new and provocative ways of thinking about how people in different cultures work with and respond to the affordances of new media and popular culture. The effect is a book with intriguing juxtapositions, unusual connections, and often unexpected tensions and insights, all drawn together by the idea that literacy as a social practice is being changed by participatory popular culture in a transnational world.

In order to have a sense of the focus of this book, it is useful to review, briefly, the three threads of scholarship concerning new media that we are drawing together with this project: Participatory Popular Culture, Literacy and Writing, and Global and Local Contact.

New Media and Participatory Popular Culture

Much has been written in recent years about the effect of digital technologies on popular culture. In a little more than a decade and half, the way people around the world engage with popular culture has changed dramatically. For most of the twentieth century popular culture was a mass-produced phenomenon that people could consume and interpret, but not easily respond to or change. The advent of digital media and online technologies, however, has radically changed the paradigm of popular culture production and consumption. Perhaps one of the best-known critiques of the changes brought to popular culture by digital media, and one that certainly influences our work in this book, is Henry Jenkins’ (2006) theorizing of this participatory space as a “convergence culture” in which individuals privilege having the ability to participate in a variety of ways with popular culture, including sampling and remixing their own texts, discussing texts with other fans, and responding to producers of mass popular culture texts. In addition, he points out that convergence culture allows individuals to move quickly and easily from one media platform or mode to another while engaged with popular culture. So, for example, a student sitting at a computer can now open multiple programs and move between web pages, video games, music, video clips from movies, and, yes, even printed text. Such movement in Jenkins’ eyes, however, marks more than mere technological innovations. Instead, he argues, “convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others” (p. 3). Understanding convergence culture as a social practice is vital if we hope to gain insights into how and why young people engage in participatory popular culture. For the student in the example above is very likely not simply “watching” or “listening” to popular culture in passive isolation, in the stereotype often invoked by critics of popular culture. Instead, she is just as likely to be reading comments about the videos she is watching, gaining ideas about how to advance in her video game from fan forums, or sampling popular culture content to reuse on her social networking site to perform her identity and make social connections with her friends.

The example above is indicative of the conclusion of much of the research about the online practices of young people (Burgess & Green, 2009; Ito, 2010; Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010), that it is often directly or indirectly connected with participatory popular culture. Popular culture, then, has clearly become something that is not only read and written about, but that is also written with. Digital technologies have made popular culture content available as a semiotic and rhetorical resource for composing, not just a text to consume. Given the time young people spend engaged with participatory popular culture, it is small surprise to see the rhetorical and discursive influence of popular culture in their new media literacy practices, whether in print, sound, or video. For young people, participatory popular culture texts are regarded as available for interpretation, but also for critique, appropriation, response, and reuse. A growing emphasis on speed, visuals, and combining multiple modes of communication on any given text means that individuals now have the same concerns and capabilities that have been available to popular culture producers for decades. As the authors in this book make clear, young people from around the world are making use of the participatory elements of contemporary popular culture and, in turn, their deep and extensive engagement with popular culture is having a profound effect on how they interpret and compose with digital technologies.

New Media and Literacy and Writing

At the same time that much has been written about the ways in which digital technologies have changed the perception and engagement with popular culture, there has been a great deal of attention paid to the ways in which new media are changing the conceptions and practices of reading and writing. Developments in digital technologies have focused the attention of scholars on the role of technology in literacy practices in ways that had not been as explicit in the long period dominated by print as a medium. New technologies make it all but impossible to discuss literacy practices without also confronting the complexity of interpreting and composing texts that have been created by new media and online technologies. Even in the circumstances where print is the dominant form of communication, the reality is that it is just as likely to be composed, distributed, and displayed in digitized form on a computer. Indeed, every word of this introduction will have been written on a computer and sent back and forth electronically between the two authors who work in universities on the other side of the world from each other. At the same time, in cultures around the world, computer technology, and the ability to compose with and read texts on computers, is considered part of the essential core of sophisticated literacy practices.

Exploring the ways in which digital media shape literacy practices has been part of the focus of New Literacy Studies on literacy as a socially constructed and defined set of activities. With the general acceptance that literacy is social practice, not a set of a-contextual skills, comes the necessity of understanding how such a practice intersects with the uses of technology for writing and reading. For example, new media creates opportunities for collaboration, interactivity, copying and recomposing, and publishing and distributing with a much greater ease than print on paper technologies of the past, and Cope and Kalantzis (2010) argue that new media have changed the “social relations of meaning making” (p. 89). As new media allow audiences the capacity to become users, and not just consumers, the division of labor between creator and audience member has changed. For Cope and Kalantzis, this means that “knowledge and authority are more contingent, provisional, and conditional-based relationships of ‘could’ rather than ‘should.’ This is what we mean by a ‘shift in the balance of agency,’ from a society of command and compliance to a society of reflexive co-construction” (p. 89). New media, then, have not only changed the nature of the social practices of literacy, but have also made the social aspects of literacy practices more visible, explicit, and open for examination.

The collaborative and interactive opportunities offered by new technologies emphasize the social contexts of literacy with an immediacy and power far different than in the era of the printed page. A blog provides an explicit interaction between writer and reader quite different than writing in a print journal, for example. Such interactive activities have raised important questions about the nature of reading and how it can become a more immediately and explicit dialogic activity. Other new media forms, such as wikis, also emphasize collaboration and dialogue, as well as the instability of the texts being created. Wikis and discussion forums also draw on what Jenkins terms “collective intelligence” in which knowledge is created and shared by individuals contributing their knowledge and comments around an issue of common interest. Such collaborative spaces also require attention to questions of genre and audience. A young person contributing to an online fan forum must know more than simply how to read and write. Misunderstanding the social contexts and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction Popular Culture and Literacy in a Networked World
• Part I New Media Literacies Across Cultures
• 2 The World on Your Screen New Media, Remix, and the Politics of Cross-Cultural Contact
• 3 Constructing “Local Context” in Beirut Students' Literacy Practices Outside of Class
• 4 Uncovering the Multimodal Literacy Practices in Reading Manga and the Implications for Pedagogy
• 5 Adolescent Literacy Practices in Online Social Spaces
• 6 The “Popular” Turkish Academy
• 7 Digital Worlds and Shifting Borders Popular Culture, Perception, and Pedagogy
• 8 The Participatory Meme Chronotope Fixity of Space/Rapture of Time
• Part II Constructing Identity in an Online, Cross-Cultural World
• 9 Faceless Facebook Female Qatari Users Choosing Wisely
• 10 Russell T Davies, “Nine Hysterical Women,” and the Death of Ianto Jones
• 11 Leapfrogging in the Global Periphery Popular Literacy Practices of Nepalese Youth Online
• 12 Queering the Text Online Literacy Practices, Identities, and Popular Culture
• 13 Creating a Fandom Via Youtube Verbotene Liebe and Fansubbing
• 14 Virtual Places in the Physical World Geographies of Literacy and (National) Identity
• List of Contributors
• Index