Ways Forward
Viewing digital writing as a centrifugal cultural force for young
people’s engagement as global citizens emphasizes its dynamic and
emergent qualities, especially when it comes to the unfolding nature of
the comment sections attached to much online content. For many online
publications with active commenting communities, the commenters’
contributions become a published extension of the content itself such
that the content remains in a continuous state of emergence—constantly
amplified, clarified, and undermined by the interactions in the virtual
public sphere. Although Cosmopolitan Critical Literacy offers a useful
framework for theorizing young people’s cosmopolitan dispositions, we
wonder how young people’s engagement as global citizens through digital
writing might benefit from a nonrepresentational approach that explores
the potential for developing youths’ “everyday cosmopolitanism”
(Stornaiulo, Hull, & Sahni, 2011) via platforms like comment sections.
In their critique of the New London Group’s “A Pedagogy of
Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” (1996), Leander and Boldt
(2012) caution against over-rationalizing literacies such that
researchers and educators “subtract[ ] movement, indeterminacy, and
emergent potential from the picture” (p. 24). To avoid such
subtraction, researchers and educators might add to the CCL framework
the “Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective [that] texts are not ‘about’
the world; rather, they are participants in the world” (p. 25). The
understanding that texts are “about the world” suggest centripetal
cultural force, whereas the understanding that texts are “participants
in the world” creates centrifugal cultural force. When readers add
comments to online content, their relation to the text shifts such that
they are readers-becoming-writers, and in the context of digital media
related to global issues, they are
readers-becoming-writers-becoming-global citizens—participants in the
world’s raucous chorus of voices.