Imagined Readers and Hospitable Texts: Global Youths Connect Online

Abstract

n our radically interconnected world, with its global and digital flows of people, capital, and information, texts can rapidly circulate far and wide, across cultural, geographic, and linguistic borders. These texts require of those who would communicate effectively the flexible capacity to make meaning across an increasingly complex range of textual forms that integrate multiple semiotic modalities (

Remix as Professional Learning: Educators’ Iterative Literacy Practice in CLMOOC

“…Each of these replies expanded thematically from the previous Zeegas by using selected components, such as the images, music, and sequencing patterns. Across the week, remixing as reply functioned in similar ways to the "reciprocity stance" witnessed by Hull, Stornaiuolo and Sterponi [54] in their studies of youths' reading and writing orientations in an international social network. With a reciprocity stance, authors assume collaborative relationships of shared texts and abilities, and position compositions as extensions of ongoing conversations, or connections to common understandings across people.…”

Cosmopolitan Literacies, Social Networks, and “Proper Distance”: Striving to Understand in a Global World

“…We analyzed these participation and multimodal records as well as the ethnographic data by means of the qualitative data analysis software Atlas.ti, engaging in multiple rounds of open‐ended and thematic coding (Saldaña, ; Strauss & Corbin, ) as we endeavored to understand how our participants traversed multiple semiotic systems and engaged with interlocutors distant from themselves. As we detail below, we identified several significant patterns in how composers took their audiences into account, building on our efforts to identify audience‐sensitive textual strategies in creating hospitable texts (Hull et al., ). Specifically, we found that authors took up three primary rhetorical stances (cf.…”

“…In Emilio's video and in his subsequent blog, he paints himself as an open and inviting interlocutor who would be willing to hear responses to his work should anyone choose to provide them. We have argued elsewhere that this stance of openness is a fundamentally hospitable disposition, one crucial for authoring in networked contexts in the 21st century (Hull et al., ). We also suggest that it is a fundamental element in negotiating proper distance, part of locating oneself as an ethical participant in relation to others.…”

“…Thus, the viewing guide was intended to contextualize those rhetorical decisions for their audience and help the Prayas students understand the different textual and symbolic elements (e.g., RIP, the names of loved ones killed, the positioning of the names, the handwritten image of the names). These efforts of young people to represent themselves to others, to employ a multiplicity of semiotic tools sensitive to the meaning‐making context, was part of negotiating proper distance; that is, by representing their experiences with gang violence so that those experiences could be read by their Prayas interlocutors as meaningful, the Arts Collective students worked to create an “open text” that was welcoming to others (Hull et al., ). In this way, the Arts Collective students engaged in aesthetic, creative, productive activity—what we might call audience‐alert literate arts—to represent their world in relation to the Prayas context and to bring the two worlds closer together.…”

“…Yet, most of this scholarship has been rooted in a typographic age and understandably did not anticipate the radical reconfiguration of writers' and readers' relations in the digital multimodal era. We are in the midst of profound transformations that require reconceptualizing the role of audience (e.g., Ede & Lunsford, ; Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sterponi, ; Magnifico, ). The compositions of young people, and all of us, have a much wider reach than ever before in human history, conceivably addressing hundreds, even thousands of people, expanding not just numbers but diversities.…”