The Role of Affect in Adolescents’ Online Literacies: Participatory Pressures in BookTube Culture

Abstract

Outside of compulsory schooling, adolescents become more responsible for maintaining their reading lives together, which is consequential for educators wishing to foster student identities as lifelong readers, writers, and digital designers. The authors describe the role of affect in a youth‐driven, online participatory culture, BookTube, in which participants are largely young adults just beyond compulsory school age. Analysis draws on poststructural conceptions of affect as distinct from emotion to develop the concept of participatory pressures. Participatory pressures complicate understandings of youth‐generated online cultures, showing specifically how BookTube's aesthetic norms create and maintain feelings of pressure about what style and content count. At the same time, participatory pressures contribute to BookTubers’ development of individual styles that attract viewers, such as using humor in playfulness and social critique. Implications consider how literacy educators may better prepare youths for affective experiences of maintaining shared reading lives in online participatory cultures.

Improvisational Teaching as Being With: Cultivating a Relational Presence Toward Justice‐Oriented Literacies

“…Together, we codesigned curriculum to support students' responses to diverse picture books depicting activist-oriented events (Zapata, Fugit, & Moss, 2017).…”

“…As a result, Misha and Daryl planned to center their teaching around the following major curricular resources: justice-oriented picture books, images, media, and other relevant texts reflecting current local and global activist efforts; community mentors who joined classroom discussions to share their perspectives and responses to the texts; and multimodal literature response invitations, in which students entered into small-group collaborations with different art media to discuss and produce response texts. (For more information on the curriculum, see Zapata et al, 2017). We intentionally integrated visual texts given their high-interest accessibility for all readers.…”

“…I displayed a social media photograph of the entire university football team: players, staff, and coaches (see Figure 1). Using Visual Thinking Strategies (Zapata et al, 2017) to read the photo, students focused on the details in the image before sharing their inferences.…”

Adolescents' navigation of linguistic and nonlinguistic modes when reading a digital narrative

“…Music, voice, still and moving images evoke feelings in ways that written language alone does not (Massumi, 2002). Ehret, Boegel, and Manuel-Nekouei (2018) called this 'affective digital encountering' (p. 154), when modes make readers feel 'awkward, ambivalent, or disconcerted' when engaging with digital narratives. Leander and Boldt (2013), for instance, observed a 10-year-old boy reading a graphic novel and found the child was not focused on the activity of reading written language but on how it felt to be part of the story.…”

El análisis de discurso en influencers literarios para el estudio de la comunicación no verbal

“…Los autodenominados booktubers son los integrantes de una comunidad digital establecida en la página web de Youtube, surgida alrededor de 2009 en los países anglosajones (Pates, 2016) y cuyas prácticas no se establecieron en nuestro país hasta los años 2012 y 2013 (Rovira-Collado, 2016;. Los integrantes de esta comunidad son personas jóvenes que se dedican a grabar vídeos sobre literatura con cierta periodicidad y a subirlos a Youtube con el fin de compartir su opinión sobre los libros que leen, que normalmente pertenecen al género de la literatura juvenil, con otros usuarios, fomentando así la afición a la lectura entre sus jóvenes espectadores (Albrecht, 2017;Álvarez y Romero, 2018;Ehret, Boegel y Manuel-Nekouei, 2018;Filippi, 2017;García, 2016;Pates, 2016;Ravettino, 2015;Rovira-Collado, 2016;Sued, 2017;Usón y Plasencia, 2017). Con el tiempo estos influencers literarios han alcanzado miles de seguidores y han captado la atención de los medios y de algunos académicos, estos últimos sobre todo en el ámbito educativo, al fomentar el uso de las nuevas tecnologías como herramienta para fomentar la lectura.…”