The Matter of New Media Making

Abstract

Representational logic cannot account for the entanglements of all that matters in making new media: feeling bodies, vibrant matter, feeling bodies and vibrant matter all moving and at different rates. In the currently shifting communicative landscape, where mobile technologies are the primary means for youths' digital production, all this movement, all this moving matter, is integral to generating fuller, more (than) human expressions of youths' new media making. This article therefore develops a non-representational theory of new media making through an intra-action analysis of five adolescents making a digital book trailer while moving within and across three locations. As guiding poststructural methodology, intra-action analysis attuned the authors to moments when bodies-materials-place became perceptibly entangled in the drawing of boundaries and exclusions. Analysis expresses how emergent (re)shapings of boundaries and exclusions across production settings were concurrent with a process of privileging text-based/media-based ideas and thereby various students' becoming agencies and capacities to act as new media makers. The article concludes arguing that poststructural attention to literacy in the making matters as an ethical imperative for researchers and educators. Literacy in the making enacts boundaries and exclusions that participate in ongoing discursive-material practices, which have potential to produce histories differently in as yet unimagined futures.

Returning to Text: Affect, Meaning Making, and Literacies

“…Some studies, for example, have drawn attention to how literacies are felt, how they produce or are produced by affective intensities as people, things, places, and the histories and potentialities folded into these come into relation from moment to moment (e.g., Ehret, Boegel, & Roya, 2018;Hollett & Ehret, 2015;Levine, 2014). Others have emphasized the process through which meanings crystallize, take off, and dissipate, understanding meaning making as an embodied process compelled by being together with other people and things (e.g., Ehret, Hollett, & Jocius, 2016;Leander & Boldt, 2013;Lenters, 2016;Smith, 2017). Still others have explored how literacy can be both colonizing and transformational, explaining why inequitable relations persist as they are produced by and play out in literacy activity (e.g., Kontovourki, 2014;Lagman, 2018), as well as how activity can escape from commonly understood power structures to generate new kinds of activity (e.g., Catchings, 2016;Cole, 2012;Harding, Pauszek, Parks, & Pollard, 2018;Tanner, 2017).…”

The (im)materiality of literacy in early childhood: A socio-material approach to online and offline events

“…Our conception of screen-mediated spaces implies knowledge of a logonomic system, which determines the children's negotiations around social, digital spaces. Screens are the means by which the digital literacy of children is established, and mobile technologies have become the main source of digital productions among children and teenagers (Ehret et al, 2016).…”

Gaming Literacies: Spatiality, Materiality, and Analog Learning in a Digital Age

“…Understanding how materials shape literacy practices requires looking across "interactions of bodiesboth human and non-human"-and exploring "how this entanglement of agencies constantly produces and reproduces boundaries and exclusions" (Ehret, Hollett, & Jocius, 2016, p. 348). The entanglement that Ehret et al (2016) described is one that is contextually bound to a specific place and within a specific time. As such, understanding the role of materiality within literacy research is inherently tied to spatial conceptions of how individuals draw meaning from the environment around them (Leander & Sheehy, 2004).…”