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.