Abstracts

In a three-article format, this dissertation investigates the literate identities and practices of 40 multilingual, dispersed adolescents engaged in production within the newly popular story-sharing apps. Exemplifying the logic of the networked web, these apps foster literate engagement that is mobile, social, multimodal, and public. Story-sharing apps serve as literacy sponsors (Brandt, 2001) for these youth, furnishing a literacy infrastructure that provides affordances and constraints for literate development and participation. Involved youth, on their end, variably take up, contest, and negotiate with these affordances and constraints, leading to new forms of practice in the digital extracurriculum (Shultz, 2010). Data collected for this project over a three-year period include surveys, semi-structured interviews, sustained observations, literacy artifacts, screen captures, and public relations materials. Applying multiple methods of data collection and analysis, this project comprises a mixed-method instrumental case study (Stake, 2005; Tashakori & Teddlie, 2003), offering a telling case of adolescent networked literacy practices. Findings are presented in three articles that vary in lens, method, and unit of analysis. The first article presents an in-depth content analysis that queries the available print literacy and new literacy affordances of the most popular story-sharing platform, Wattpad. Findings show that hybrid print and new literacy affordances were built into the site infrastructure and that users innovated upon that infrastructure to develop a wide array of practices. The second article focuses on results from the background surveys of 40 purposively sampled story-sharing app users, which examined users demographics, identity stances, device use, and practices. Although adolescents and users get painted with a broad brush, findings from survey analyses show variance in participants practices, patterns of use, and identity stances with respect to engagement on these platforms. The third article analyzes youth narratives of participation on story-sharing apps. Young authors discourses reveal that they consider reading, writing, and communicating on these apps as simultaneously self-initiated, audience-centric, and in conversation with the rules of engagement of the specific platform. This article presents a model of syncretic sponsorship to study the digital extracurriculum in a nuanced and power-laden way. Together, the three studies attend to key debates in literacy and media studies and gain new ground in conceptualizing contemporary adolescent literacies. Implications for future research and practice are provided