For Williams, “literacy is connected to the way humans communicate ideas, concepts, and emotions to one another. Humans are meaning-making creatures and we have learned to do so by creating representations of our ideas that can be interpreted by others when we are not present. I see it as important, then, to keep literacy connected to the communication of ideas through representations, whether of words, images, graphics, and so on. In this way, literacy can apply to writing print on a pages, arranging images and words on a webpage, or arranging images and words on film or video” (18). So, “literacy increasingly means the ability to choose between print, image, video, sound, and all the potential combinations they could create to make a particular point with a specific audience” (19).
Audience
“First, the ability of individuals to share knowledge and ideas about popular culture with others online [and theory called “collective intelligence”]…has created new opportunities for people to interpret and analyze popular culture” (31). “Online technologies make at least part of that assumed audience present and available for conversation…[T]his changes both the experience of watching the show and the act of making meaning for the show afterwards. ‘Knowing that one is watching a show with identifiable others and will discuss its details with them will undoubtedly affect the viewing experience, both in an anticipatory manner while watching the show, and subsequently if one is influenced by online discussion’” (37).
Ownership/ Authority
“The second focus…is how interactive audiences for contemporary popular culture are shifting student concepts of credibility and authority in terms of texts and the producers of texts. Authority and credibility are increasingly not created only by the producers of popular culture, but by the responses of audience members” (31). “[B]y writing about the text and reading and responding to the ideas of others, take ownership for the meaning of the texts” (40).
Identity
“The intertextual nature of popular culture texts creates opportunities for multiple readings of social networking webpages in ways that destabilize the identity students believe they have created. These multiple readings creates ambivalence for students who realize that their practices in composing pages online may be in conflict with how they read other pages, and how their own pages are read…Even when writers do not to reveal explicitly personal information, the audience then reads the text to a default identity according to the cultural context” (92).
Composing
Writing for young composers now means readings “with the possibility of appropriation and remix always nearby… [Composing is] closer to bricolage and collage than to traditional linear constructions of texts. As Lankshear and Knobel (2007) point out, ‘Almost anything available online becomes a resource for diverse kinds of meaning making’” (8). Students understand the meaning of the original text, which plays into their choices about how to re-use and adapt that text, a process that Williams refers to as textual poaching. “The mosaics that students compose, then, are both patterned by the social and discursive forces of popular culture and yet made into the coherent designs by the students who ‘fragment texts and reassemble the broken shards according to their own blueprints, salvaging bits and pieces of the found material in making sense of their own social experience” (81).
He also emphasizes that technology has always affected genre.
Teaching
Williams concludes his book by stating that, because students "will try to integrate their various approaches to literacy" into our classroom assignments and activities, "it seems both impractical and unethical...to ignore students' participatory culture literacy practices or to ban them from the classroom" (194). Instead, "we must find ways of engaging students' knowledge while not engendering resentment and resistance" (195). He suggests that (1) "we find out what students know, listen to them, learning from them, and connect our language with their knowledge." This is done by "hav[ing] an extend and respectful dialogue with them about what practices they enter in online, what they think about the work they do, what they find valuable, and what more they would like to learn" (195); (2) "we should think about how the self-motivated, self-directed learning that students accomplish online takes place" and adapt these wats into our classrooms (196); (3) "We can then work collaboratively with them to bring our knowledge of rhetoric and literacy to help them achieve their goals, and to understand how the same rhetorical conceits and knowledge are the foundation for other reading and writing endeavors they encounter in school and in their daily lives" (198).
Key Terms
- Traditional popular culture: “the activities that people took part in with their communities, such as playing music or dancing or quilting bees” (5)
- Mass popular culture: “the era of mass production, distribution, and consumption of popular culture begun with printing and continued with electronic media such as radio, television, and movies. [It] is defined by the industrial model of production, where large amounts of capital necessary for producing and distributing the content and it is consumed by large audiences unable to alter the material” (5-6)
- Convergence culture: “computers and online technologies have transformed the era of mass popular mass popular culture into one of participatory popular culture where the boundaries have been blurred between media and between producer and audience” (6)
- Text: “any work produced and distributed broadly, including books, magazines, newspapers, television, movies, and computers games, music, and online content of media producers” (6)
- Collective intelligence: “the phenomenon where members of a community, even a temporary online community, are able to poll their information and experiences in ways that create new knowledge available to the entire group” (43)