Swartz.+Multimodal+Literacy

=**Swartz, Jennifer. "MySpace, Facebook, and Multimodal Literacy in the Writing Classroom //."// **=

//Kairos.// 15.2 (2011): n. pag. Web. 19 Mar. 2011.

** Abstract ** Introduction

With the increased presence of social media, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and texting, the way students communicate with others has changed significantly. These rapid new developments have also influenced the way people write. To help students see the ways in which writing is relevant to their everyday lives (and to make them think critically about their frequent lament that “I’ll never use writing anywhere but English class,”) I introduce Facebook and MySpace to the classroom where we look at these social networking sites as rhetorical texts. Since language is a means of constructing ourselves to the world, thinking about the ways in which we do so helps students to more fully engage in the composition process and understand how writing is a skill they will use more often and in more arenas than they initially can imagine.

** ﻿Argument **

Jennifer Swartz, combating the sentiment that “’I’ll never use writing anywhere but English class’” (1), incorporates social media into the classroom to enlighten her students that writing and literacy are involved when they update their status pages. She discusses how her student’s choice of words and images communicates to a much wider audience than what was anticipated and how they serve as a representation of ourselves online.

** ﻿Key Passages **

Swartz wisely point to the fact that:

“Students often do not realize that once an image or status update has been posted to cyberspace, someone very clever could access former versions of their pages by working around the privacy settings, and that old data could come back to haunt them” (3).

** ﻿Selected Works Cited **

Goodings, Lewis, Locke, Abigail, & Brown, Steven D. (2007). Social networking technology: Place and identity in mediated communities. //Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 17,// 463-76. Tufekci, Zeynep. (2008). Can you see me now?: Audience and disclosure regulation in online social network sites. //Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society,// 20-36.

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