MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Recently, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, blogging, and digital storytelling have altered the landscape of not only of narrative, but also of online identities. Though social media, one can enter into different discourse communities in a way that had previously been unattainable. For instance, through Twitter, I got to know Neil Gaiman and Alexander Chee, who began to follow me in 2009, and through Facebook I began to connect to artists and writers such as Jeff VanderMeer. Amid these interactions, my profile identity changed as I needed it to: from academic to art critic to fiction writer to reviewer for the Washington Post. Social media allows for a fluidity of self re-creation that in turn provides validation from engaged discourse communities. Likewise, with Web 2.0 technology and such genres as interactive fiction and transmedia storytelling, these platforms acknowledged readers as active participants in public narratives. But despite this steady growth in social media participation, the concept of establishing a coinciding media literacy did not gain as much momentum in higher education. In 2008, Cultural critic Howard Rheingold noted that “much of the resistance to embracing media literacy training come from the sense that the school day is bursting at the seams, that we cannot cram in any new tasks without the instructional system breaking down altogether…we should see [media literacy] as a paradigm shift, one which, like multiculturalism or globalization, reshapes how we teach every existing subject” (100). There is no time better than the present to address the game-changing surge of digital natives who are entering the ranks of the creative and globally inclusive workforce. My presentation will show why we need to be teaching students not only digital writing skills, but show them how to participate in interactive digital media.