She starts with Jill Walker’s definition – “network literacy as ‘writing in a distributed, collaborative environment’” – and expands on it in the following ways:
- “networked writers pay attention to, respond to, and reiterate those practices they witness in other writers’ spaces—especially when those other writers identify themselves as part of a community based on interests.”
- “blurs the lines of reader/writer. Collaboration within a network is not coauthoring; instead, it refers to a kind of collaborative construction of the network or community itself, where the rhetoric of the community is both preserved and developed in the ways the members adopt and adapt those practices, transforming themselves, their writing, and the network in the process.”
- “Network literacy does not comprise a static, manageably compartmentalized skill set. Instead, network literacy implies sustained participation in a community where both subtle and major changes in technology and generic structure continually are both made by the user, and simultaneously shape the user herself.”
- “Network literacy …requires sustained participation and interaction as the conventions of networked communities shift to accommodate (and shift because of) constant change in membership. Therefore, network literacy requires of writers a new authorial positioning …an identity that can no longer ignore the intertextual nature of who we are and what we’re writing.”
- “Network literacy requires that we revise the traditional rhetorical triangle yet again, this time accounting for the cyclic, constantly iterative nature of writing within a community of other writers, and the ways that the writer/reader (or prosumer) both generates the network and exists because of the network.”
Key Term
- Web 2.0: “Web 2.0 ‘harnesses collective intelligence’ and acknowledges users of applications as ‘codevelopers’ (O’Reilly, 2005). Web 2.0 made the beta version king; monolithic releases are eschewed for periodic updates that take user experience into close consideration. The traditional producer/consumer (or writer/reader) dichotomy was conflated; questions of audience and genre were further complicated; and writers/readers have had to revise their conventional rhetorical approaches based on their new, dual direction role.”
For Younker, networks seem to be more concerned with the connections among participants; these connections can be one way, two way, direct, or indirect (such as two people involved in the same network, but not directly associated with each other). She specifically writes, “Participating as a networked writer requires material connection-building.” Though Younker recognizes that communication is mediated, she does not look to tools or technologies when thinking about connections. Therefore, networks seem to be centrally about people. Also, networks have “a distinguishable set of shared practices”; this is not necessarily true for ecologies.