“Rethinking writing in digital times means focusing on practices over tools…New technologies afford new practices, but it is the practices themselves, and the local and global contexts within which they are situated, that are central to new literacies. The logical implication…is that schools would accomplish more if, like new literacy users, they [are] too focused on practices rather than tools” (230). She explores practices through agency, performativity, and circulation.
Agency
“New literacies tend to allow writers (users; players) a good deal of leeway to be creative, perform identities, and choose afflictions within a set of parameters that can change through negotiation, play, and collaboration” (231). At the same time, writers “need to understand the codes, conventions and values…that align with particular ways of thinking, being, and acting…[T]rue agency is arrived at through a mixture of process and product, learner control and imposed limits. The most important ingredient, however, is a meta-awareness of how the domain works and how one might work the domain” (231).
Performativity
Writers’ “performances are, at times, rehearsals, as in the role plays that lead to their narratives, and at other times more conventional performances in the sense of working within the genre-specific conventions of narrative. They continually perform a version of self, shifting voices, drawing on the intertextual chains that exist through the textual history of each exchange and their larger social and textual networks. They interpret, invent, revise, inflect, and so on, moment-to-moment’ (231-2).
Circulation
The “new practices of circulation…depend on the cut and paste style of bricolage and juxtaposition for production and exchange. Digital texts, in part of their simultaneity, circulate widely across time and space, are cut and pasted, edited, revised, and juxtaposed in ways that cannot be as easily accomplished in print…Also, ‘reading’ [digital texts often] involves knowledge of how they have circulated – a deep understanding of cross-references and intertextuality – where the [texts] have come from, what they refer to, and where the language or images have been before they become this particular [text]…Writers of digital texts must be aware of their circulatory routes to accomplish their goals” (233).
Key Terms:
- Big L Literacies: “connected with identities, patterns, and ways of being in the world rather than solely with the acts of reading and writing” (230). (adapted from Gee’s big D Discourses)
- Performativity: “the individual and group identities that are constructed through repeated performance of self and in anticipation of the expectations, social codes and discourses available within a given context” (231).