ABSTRACT

A number of literacy theorists have worked to describe what is new and different about youth enactments of literacy in the digital age. In doing so, many invoke “digital dichotomies,” or oppositional framings meant to differentiate among various enactments of literacy (i.e. digital vs. analog, online vs. offline, out-of-school vs. in-school). We argue that digital dichotomies do not adequately convey the creativity, permeability, messiness, and movement of youth literacies in practice. In this article we employ a transliteracies framework to examine youths’ textual production and identity mediation across physical and virtual domains. Focusing on two telling cases of student participation in affinity spaces (one dedicated to manga, the other skateboarding), we find that adolescents traverse spaces and employ tools with creative and agentive fluidity to participate in transliterate affinity communities. Youth do not consider tools and spaces to be dichotomous or determinative of their literate engagements. We encourage researchers and educators to move beyond using dichotomies to theorize literate phenomena in the digital age. Identity and youth culture are anything but static and neither should be the lenses researchers use to study them.

摘要

许多扫盲理论家致力于描述数字时代青年扫盲活动的新变化和不同之处。在这样做时，许多人援引“数字二分法”或对立框架，旨在区分各种扫盲行为（即数字与模拟、在线与离线、校外与校内）。我们认为，数字二分法并没有充分传达实践中青年识字的创造力、渗透性、混乱和运动。在本文中，我们采用音译框架来检查青年跨物理和虚拟领域的文本生产和身份中介。专注于学生参与亲和力空间的两个有说服力的案例（一个专门用于漫画，另一个用于滑板），我们发现青少年穿越空间并使用具有创造性和代理流动性的工具来参与音译亲和社区。青年人不认为工具和空间是二分法或决定他们识字活动的因素。我们鼓励研究人员和教育工作者超越使用二分法来对数字时代的文学现象进行理论化。身份和青年文化绝不是静态的，也不应该是研究人员用来研究它们的镜头。