“yeet nitro boosted”: A Postdigital Perspective on Young People’s Literacy Engagements With the Discord Platform

Abstract

While the influence of digital technologies on literacy expression has long been a central concern of literacy studies, the proliferation of digital platforms across contemporary life has prompted increased scholarly attention to their influence on literacy. How, this scholarship asks, do platforms’ interfaces, algorithms, and business models produce particular formations of literacy, and what do those formations mean for ethical and equitable literacies learning and living? To reckon with these questions, this article brings a postdigital literacies perspective to data collected at the Giga-Games Camp, a video game design summer camp, where young people interacted with each other using Discord, a social media platform. The author describes how the Giga-Gamers and the Discord platform engaged in the mutually articulated platform practice of economics and argues that attention to such platform practices can help educators and researchers respond to the economic forces (re)shaping literacy in the platform society.

Actually existing vitality rights: resisting neoliberal affects at a video game design camp

“…We then came together to share memories, insights and wonderings, and it was through those transversal conversations – bouncing across years and spaces and concepts – that a discernible series of movements began to cohere. And so, to tell the following story of the Giga-Games Camp, we mobilize different methodological impulses across a number of different registers, using interview data to trace institutional arcs, focal frames from a GoPro camera to see vitality in action and descriptions of platform events (Robinson, 2022b; 2023) to follow these lines through the shift to online instruction (see Figure 1).…”

“…Four of the campers can be seen engaging with the camp’s Discord server, which Brad created to facilitate collaboration and resource sharing during the camp, while the other campers are focused on their projects. Very quickly, however, campers began using the Discord server to engage in the playful sharing of memes, moving between their projects and the server fluidly and spontaneously (Robinson, 2022b; 2023). Giggles and guffaws filled the room as campers engaged in a sort of call and response exchange of memes – celebrity memes, political memes, video game memes, surrealist memes and so on – all merging in a chaotic stew alongside campers’ original pixel art creations, questions and jokes.…”

“…In this final “Pandemic Movement” we explore how the playful vitality of the Giga-Games Camps both endured and was made more complex during the shift to online instruction. To this end, the section is organized around three descriptions of “platform events” (Robinson, 2022b; 2023) – or “occasions when platform infrastructures (e.g. algorithms) [become] integral to the nature of individuals’ literate expressions and interactions” (p. 5).…”

Critical literacies in algorithmic cultures

“…Robinson (2023) argued the particular need for relational, sociomaterial perspectives as digital infrastructures come more and more to co‐shape literacy practices on digital platforms. Through studies of youth literacy practices that were shaped in relation to Discord's platform governance and economic logics (Robinson, 2022a, 2022b), he demonstrated how sociomaterial perspectives foreground processes through which “human agency and subjectivity produce and are produced coactively with and through texts and technologies” (Robinson, 2023, p. 121).…”

Productivity Versus Sustainability: A Tale of Two Authors’ Engagement in Participatory Culture

“…Fueled by exponential technology development, the influence of digital technologies on the practice of literacy has been a preoccupation of literacies studies since the 1990s (Robinson, 2022). A seismic shift in literacy occurred with the digital turn (Mills, 2010) when the once-clear boundaries between different forms of media were dismantled, the speed of media proliferation increased, and the affordability and accessibility of technology allowed youth to shift from consumers to producers of digital media (Mills & Exley, 2014).…”