Because Community

image via knottytotty.tumblr.com

Pretty much all I teach these days are classes on the study of writing in digital communities. For 15 weeks, students in my undergraduate and graduate courses embed themselves in a space of their choosing and investigate how participants write, read, communicate, and think in that digital network. I’ve had the pleasure of reading studies on interesting linguistic constructions like the “because noun” and “I can’t even.” I’ve learned about the ways that language gets debated on the black hole that is Tumblr, and I’ve witnessed countless ragequits and twittercides as they are documented and analyzed by the student scholars in my classes who write with clarity and confidence about the people in the communities they study throughout the semester.

Image from http://the-toast.net/2013/11/20/yes-you-can-even/view-all/

We talk about the difference between image macros and memes (they are often taken to mean the same thing, where one is actually a subset of the other). We construct research questions that often boil down to: “Why would anyone waste their time on that?” We then design qualitative (short term) ethnographic studies that attempt to account for why people spend hours a day buying and selling pixelated items in virtual auction houses, or why it’s not cool to retweet a post from someone’s protected account. Students have taught me the difference between “bro” and “brah,” learned via investigative research into fantasy sports leagues. They’ve explained doge to me in ways I could have never possibly understood without their assistance. Best of all, we have learned together how difference is best appreciated when experienced firsthand. The rest of the world may not understand my obsession with flowcharts, but my fellow Pinterest users sure do. To them, it makes perfect sense why anyone would want to spend hours a day curating their niche collections of taxidermy photos and DIY lip balm recipes.

I’ve always believed that to study language is to study people. Studying how people write and value texts and paratexts in their everyday lives is to appreciate perspectives that were perhaps previously misunderstood. From the insides of these communities, we can make and share meaning in ways that feel different and somehow new. Take, for example, the 19-year-old Tumblr user who created a comic about white privilege. The comic itself generated a huge buzz and loads of negative backlash from nasty Tumblr users. But in the end, it’s a teaching moment for those of us who study the ways that people use Internet-based writing spaces to communicate with one another. On the one hand, this communicative form enables hate and ignorance in countless ways. On the other hand, it exposes hate and ignorance in concrete, readable, consumable ways, too. The raw, unedited, unfiltered Internet communities are rich with opportunities to teach students about the power of language and text. I believe strongly in exposing students to both the bloody awful and the radically accepting ways that digital textual communities shape our lives.

Screen grab from http://imgur.com/gallery/l8Rdg

In 2006, I was a co-author on a white paper titled “Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” primarily written by one of my mentors, Henry Jenkins. In that piece we wrote about something we called “the transparency problem.” The “transparency problem” is the notion that adults (educators, parents, mentors, media makers) often mistakenly assume that because young people are “born digital” as “digital natives” (an idea, by the way, I wholeheartedly disagree with) they must be so rhetorically skilled at interpreting media messages that they don’t need our help “to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world” (p. 3). While it is definitely true that some people younger than I am are more knowledgeable about digital tools and communities than I am, it is equally true that I still have plenty to teach them about these spaces, too. That’s why we work on understanding these spaces together. Shared understandings of shared languages, artifacts, and activities enable us to become better thinkers and writers, and that, in turn, enables us to share better thinking and writing with other communities, like the folks participating in this Sprint Beyond the Book. Thanks for reading, and feel free to invite me to understand your weirdo niche subreddit or strangely addictive Pinterest board.

#hashtagging

Date February 7, 2014
Author Alice Daer
Tags hashtag, social
Comments 2 Comments

In my scholarly life, I research the ways that people use language in social media contexts. To do this, I use two methods/approaches to language—the so-called “New Literacy Studies” (NLS) framework and something called “North American rhetorical genre studies” (RGS). I basically spend a lot of time participating in and observing social media communities and contexts, watching for trends and patterns to emerge. I try to determine whether these practices are recurring enough to be a “thing” (a genre), and if so, how and why they work the way they do.

For example, I’m interested in how hashtags were once designed and used primarily to sort information, but over time have become more metacommunicative and contextualized for certain purposes and populations. What might have started as a wayfinding tool to enable searches within big data sets (#tbt—short for “throwback Thursday” or #sorrynotsorry or #sherlocklives) is now an identity expression used to signal membership within an online network or space. Communities of social media users are retaining the hashtag form but redesigning its function in order to achieve specific rhetorical objectives.

The very act of posting via social media has its own language depending on what’s being posted by whom and in what context and for what platform. What it means to tag an image in Tumblr, for example, is markedly different from tagging images on Instagram. Pinterest uses the hashtag (#) form, for example, but its function is essentially useless as an organizational tool for searching (as of the writing of this post, anyway; that might change).

Therefore it is only through sustained, contextualized participation in these social media communities that users come to redesign language forms in order to achieve new meanings. And each community or network has its own (often strong) opinion regarding what things mean and even how they should mean (e.g., see the numerous anti-hashtag Facebook groups, or the regular debates among Imgur users about whether hashtags should be used there in the ways that they’re used on Tumblr). Perhaps not surprisingly, this is very close to the way that language works in offline networks as well.

Language has always been social, and it has always been a product of particular situations as they arise within specific communities. Even in the dark ages, monks were writing notes to each other in the margins of Latin texts. Therefore any discussion of how texts work must necessarily include a study of the places from which those texts were born. Language and culture are inextricable. Social and digital media forms must reflect their cultural ecologies.

Of course this presents an interesting methodological problem for those of us who study these things. Is it possible to study how language works without participating in its community? Yes, but I would argue that the “emic” (as opposed to “etic”) perspective gained via participant observation and ethnographic data collection will yield the most accurate and nuanced understanding of language-in-use. Can a great study of Twitter be conducted via a “scrape” of a large set of data? Absolutely. But the questions I hope to answer in my research require me to work from the inside-out. I guess I’m just one of those scholars who believes the richest knowledge about language, writing, and literacy comes from my direct experience with the people who are producing new meaning-making practices via social media every day.

Rhetorical Interfaces and Designed Affordances

Date February 6, 2014
Author Alice Daer
Tags affordance, design, interface, rhetoric
Comments Leave a comment

via flickr user Eric Holsinger

I was reminded recently when reading rhetorician Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd’s work on genre in the blogosphere (2009) that psychologist J.J. Gibson’s concept of “affordances” (further developed by his student Don Norman as “perceived affordances” and applied to the design of environments) emphasizes the ways that users’ experiences with interfaces are, in part, determined by the suasory qualities of its affordances. Miller and Shepherd note:

An affordance, or a suite of affordances, is directional, it appeals to us, by making some forms of communicative interaction possible or easy and others difficult or impossible, by leading us to engage in or to attempt certain kinds of rhetorical actions rather than others. (p. 281)

In other words, what we can do with a designed tool or object is necessarily shaped somewhat by “those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing can be used” (Norman, 1988). By their very nature, these “fundamental properties” are suasory—they shape and limit and push us to interact, interpret, perceive, and do (or not). Interaction is never without some kind of inferred restriction, whether material or rhetorical. We are always working within what we perceive as some kind of designed thing or space with its own capabilities, as we understand them from our own situated perspectives.

Therefore any basic interface engagement with a digital tool requires us to quickly assess what can and cannot be done with it. We tinker and push upon its limits like nonverbal toddlers exploring the limits of their own behaviors, pushing and hitting and biting until someone or something tells us “no.” And it’s interesting to think about the many ways that we almost instinctively push back on designs’ efforts to persuade us to use them only in the ways that their designers intended.

I’m reminded of when I once watched an expert gamer pick up a new first-person shooter for the Xbox. The first thing he did was readjust the controller’s settings, inverting the X/Y axis. He flipped to the inventory screen, assessing the character’s weapons and their damage capabilities. Within seconds, he had read the map and determined an exit strategy. And surprisingly (to me), he spent the next ten minutes repeatedly figuring out all the ways his character could die. I instantly realized that I had been playing the game all wrong: I hadn’t been willing to fail miserably as a method of learning how to play the game better. I needed to play with the affordances of the game in order to gauge my ability to master it. I wasn’t going to get better if I wasn’t willing to make mistakes. And I wasn’t going to be able to make mistakes if I didn’t push back on what the game was designed to allow me to do.

[Truthfully, this is exactly what good writers do best: break and remake language in order to push it to the limits of its own design. We value those texts that most ardently force us to think differently about what language can and cannot do.]

My interest is in everyday literacies and the ways that people make meaning with texts within particular contexts. I am deeply interested in how we almost instinctively and habitually push back on designed technological affordances and mold them to our liking. We constantly seem to expect different tools to behave the way we want them to, and when they don’t, we abandon them. I like to think of this process as a response to an almost ambient argument: a designed tool or application has its own perceived affordances that, as Gibson argued, have suasory qualities. When we take up these designs, we are responding to their insistence that we use them in the ways they were intended. What’s funny is how often we naturally resist the rhetorical “argument” that the designed object is trying to make. We almost always want it to be and do something else entirely.

When the Google Android operating system was introduced, I tried switching from my iPhone in hopes that I would enjoy the Android interface better. I was in favor of the principle of what Google was trying to do and wanted to give it a shot. But the first thing I did was configure all of the phone’s settings to make it more familiar to me (i.e., I changed its settings to make it more like the iPhone). Predictably, I eventually went back to my iPhone because, as I think I said at the time: “although it does all the same things my iPhone does, it’s not my iPhone.” (The same is true now as I write this on my Chromebook: I’m wishing I had chosen to bring my Macbook to write on instead. As much as I love the Chromebook, it’s not my Macbook.)

I think that over time, these habits and practices and ways of “talking back” to designs are the foundations of the kinds of “textual communities” we’re writing about today. If we agree that the term “community” is to be broadly construed (we could also use the terms “networks” or “affinity spaces”) then we might see how this way of organizing ourselves by our interactivity can represent the starting point for larger nodes and networks over time. We might gravitate toward certain digital literacy practices (e.g., collecting images; buying and selling objects; curating resources) based on how different tools—and their designed affordances—respond to our attempts to redesign them. That’s why people who use Flickr regularly are a different community than those who use Instagram, and those who spend their days on DeviantArt share some overlap with those who use Imgur.

The “arguments” that designed interfaces make by attempting to determine what users can and cannot do are almost always taken up and redesigned by their communities, and this is a natural and organic process. If we are to become real fans and experts in our chosen digital communities, we must necessarily respond to the interface’s attempts to convince. To participate in an online textual community, passive response to interface is not an option.