Williams uses this book to “explore how the discourses and rhetorical forms of popular culture are significant in a culture of multiliteracies in shaping students’ perceptions of reading and writing and their conceptions of audience, authorship, text, and identity” (3).
“Such abilities have changed both the reading and composing practices of young people. Not only do they read popular culture texts with the possibility of appropriation and remix always nearby, but the composing using practices 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).
Literacy
“Approaching literacy as situated by historical and cultural forces makes clear that our conceptions of and attitudes toward how we read and write have a direct influence on our ideas of what constitutes popular culture, as well as what constitutes concepts of traditional print literacy such as literary and academic texts” (17).
“For me, 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
In chapter 1, Williams “explore[s] how this shift in the definition of audience to a more interactive model affects the intersection of popular culture and literacy practices by focusing on three specific phenomena. First, the ability of individuals to share knowledge and ideas about popular culture with others online theory…’collective intelligence’ has created new opportunities for people to interpret and analyze popular culture…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…[The third focus is] how popular culture and identity shape the choices of audience members before they enter affinity spaces” (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
“What is significant in terms of literacy practices is the way in which individuals, by writing about the text and reading and responding to the ideas of others, take ownership for the meaning of the texts” (40).
Identity
“Other scholars have similarly illustrated how other elements of identity such as gender, race, and sexual orientation also shape and are reproduced through popular culture Consequently, identity concerns influence who chooses to enter an affinity space as an initial move before contact is made with others in that space” (59). “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 htey not to reveal explicitly personal information, the audience then reads the text to a default identity according to the cultural context” (92).
“Unlike some forms of cultural expression, however, popular culture engages in and celebrates the routine appropriation and reuse of material. Because popular culture texts are usually not considered to be the high art creations of individual genius, it has long been culturally acceptable to use them and re-use them in playful ways” (66). “Rather than experiencing texts as autonomous written products, in participatory popular culture texts are flexible and impermanent collages that are only one link in a larger network” (64). 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).
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)