Everybody does it. It's like I've grown up on it. It's like how you felt about stuff when you were growing up.-Sam am, a 14-year-old girl, was one of seven participants in this study of young people's uses of Instant Messaging (IM). We want to take a moment to consider Sam's comment as a way of providing a conceptual framework for this study. To Sam, IM did not feel like technology, a term associated in many people's minds with objects that are complicated and difficult to understand or operate. When technology becomes "normal" in this way, it is no longer complicated, nor is it notable to its users. It is a fact of life, a way of being in the world, a producer of social subjects that find it unremarkable-so unremarkable that it seems "everybody does it." The social subject that develops in relation to this invisible technology is one who expects access, expects to be connected to friends at the stroke of a key, and expects to read and write in particular ways that lead to fulfilling connections with those friends. As Bourdieu (1997) put it, "The experience of a world that is 'taken for granted' presupposes agreement between the dispositions of the agents and the expectations or demands immanent in the world into which they are inserted" (p. 147).Sam's dispositions and the expectations placed upon her were in agreement. But it is important to note that these expectations did not emanate from her world at home. We suspect that because of Sam's assumption that "everybody does it," readers are imagining Sam to be middle class with economic resources that would locate her on the advantaged side of the digital divide. This was not the case. Sam happened to live in a community that had very inexpensive, municipally owned cable access, making home Internet access possible across class lines. Sam's parents 470 471 THIS STUDY examined the functions of Instant Messaging (IM) among seven youths who regularly used this digital technology in their daily lives. Grounded in theories of literacy as a social and semiotic practice, this research asked what functions IM served in participants' lives and how their social identities shaped and were shaped by this form of digital literacy. To answer these questions, we conducted interviews and videotaped IM sessions, adapting a verbal reporting procedure to document the IM strategies used. Data analysis involved using qualitative coding procedures informed by grounded theory (Strauss, 1987;Strauss & Corbin, 1990), which led to three patterns related to the functions of IM: language use, social networks, and surveillance. On the level of language use, participants manipulated the tone, voice, word choice, and subject matter of their messages to fit their communication needs, negotiating multiple narratives in the process. On the level of social networks, they designed their practice to enhance social relationships and statuses across contexts. And on the level of surveillance, they circulated texts across buddies, combated unwanted messages, assumed alternative identities, and overcame...
Telecommunication exchange projects are currently marketed as curriculum supplements that conveniently satisfy three key K-12 educational reform objectives: better writing skills, enhanced multicultural awareness, and better job preparation for a rapidly expanding global economy. This paper analyzes the educational discourse surrounding telecommunication exchanges, and argues that much of the current research is contradictory, inconclusive, and possibly misleading. The paper also illustrates how the often overly optimistic claims about technology-based projects are problematic in light of the larger, exceedingly complex role of technology in society.As more and more schools achieve Internet capabilities and as educational technology discourse increasingly promotes the necessity of technological com petence and celebrates the promise of global connectivity, educators have been exploring ways to use-and rationalize the use of-the Internet in their class rooms. A growing trend during the past decade, beginning with the advent of email, has been the practice of global telecommunication exchange projects that encourage classroom connections between distant schools, oftentimes in differ ent countries. As Berenfeld (1996) writes, "the ability for one class to easily and cheaply communicate with either another or many throughout the world was so powerful that educators developed a number of successful learning projects around email" (p. 76). Telecommunication exchange projects are often coordi nated by individual teachers who locate distant partners on a number of educa tion-oriented Internet sites. The majority of these projects occur in the public domain, where teachers are the sole organizers, but telecommunication exchanges are also sold to schools as hassle-free educational services provided by wellknown corporations such as AT&T. Those who herald distant e-mail exchanges see them as an optimum way to satisfy three critical educational objectives inThe authors gratefully acknowledge the invaluable suggestions and com ments from Jim Marshall, Cynthia Lewis, and three anonymous reviewers.217 focus tends to be limited to the possible writing benefits of distant e-mail exchanges.Cohen and Riel (1989), Spaulding and Lake (1991), and Gallini and Helman (1995) all conducted audience-related experimental studies that looked at the impact of distant audiences in student writing and included treatment groups, 218 at TEXAS SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY on December 1, 2014 http://rer.aera.net Downloaded from Telecommunication coding, and regression analysis in their methodologies. Cohen and Riel studied two groups of seventh graders, with group A writing an essay exam for their teacher and group B practicing their topic online with distant peers before writing the same exam. Students from group A then were asked to write to distant audiences about their exam topics. Spaulding and Lake analyzed high school remedial writing students' essay writing before a telecommunication exchange project and then again after the work from that project w...
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