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Digital Literacy Practices
Scholarship in science and technology studies (STS) has shown that investigating how users perform identities on the Internet requires considering how artifacts and practices of the self mutually shape each other (Siles, 2012, p. 409). Scholars have drawn upon the Foucauldian notion of technologies of the self to explore a variety of practices of computer-mediated communication (Abbas & Dervin, 2009; Bakardjieva & Garden, 2007). From this perspective, as pointed out by Siles (2012), materiality refers to “the physical features of technology that are mobilized by its producers to create meaning” (Siles, 2012, p. 409). However, little work exists on the role that artifacts play in the production of certain modes of identification.
The student participant’s posts showed how he implicitly created a serious graduate student image as well as a humorous image on the social media, by relying on the complex and multimodal nature of posts, images, links that he shared on Facebook and the multimodal textual artifacts that he used. This conclusion drawn from on-line participation observation, and interview data, adds to the implications suggested by Schreiber (2015). For these reasons, I argue that the identity construction of an adult Spanish-Catalan bilingual graduate student through digital literacy practices possibly points to the assumption that the division of identities by first, second, and even third or more languages is too strong to account for the complexity of linguistic and semiotic resources on online social networks. Specifically, the heterogeneous nature of identities relies on the social factors of each individual, such as social status, age, and educational backgrounds.
Multilingual Identity
It has been generally accepted that digital writing, particularly on social network platforms, offer significant spaces for second language practices and identity work, in which people have “the means and the motivations” to write in multiple languages (Androutsopoulos, 2013; Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe, 2012; DePew and Miller-Cochran, 2010; Klimanova and Dembovskaya, 2013; Lam, 2000, 2004; You, 2011). While recent studies started to focus on the dynamic and fluid nature of these students’ linguistic identities, traditional views have focused on conceptualizing them as fixed to particular language (Chen, 2013; DePew and Miller-Cochran, 2010). While these perspectives have captured general tendency to characterize how adult second language learners use their languages to communicate and form identity, the rigid division of identities by first and second languages may not account for the complex ever changing dynamics of language resources in online spaces.
The concept of identity by scholars in the second language field has been illustrated by its dynamic, post-structuralist nature (Norton, 2000). According to Block (2007), identities can be viewed as “socially constructed, self-conscious, ongoing narratives that individuals perform, interpret, and project […] identities are about negotiating new subject positions at the crossroads of the past, present and future” (p. 27). This stance aligns with the social constructivist perspectives that have focused on the constructed and dynamic nature of identity. According to Mead (1934), the self can be understood as the result of symbolic interaction with significant others.
The Role of Language
Language plays a pivotal role in the process of identity construction as it serves as a medium through which people can constitute themselves (Belsey, 1980). Gee (1990) has argued that language can be viewed as an “identity kit” that signals a membership in particular groups rather than a set of discrete skills or rules.
Bakhtin (1981, 1986) argued that inner speech is based on social discourse. “Bakhtin’s dialogism begins from the premise that people are engaged in dialogue (dialogic selves): they are always in a state of being addressed and in the process of answering (Holquist, 1990). The very acts of being constantly addressed and responding mean that people are always actively interacting with the environment. The active interaction (or active dialogue) between the individual and the environment is made through his/her activity or practice. Hence, the idea of always-engaged-in-dialogue can be interchangeable with the idea of always-engaged-in-practice (or activity)” (Min, 2010, p. 30).
It is important to understand that since several factors, such as gender, culture, and social class, influence the social context in the process of identity construction, the ways that individuals can make sense of world rely on their relative position in that social structure (Lemke, 1989). This does not mean that individuals respond to mainstream discourse without autonomy. They can rather react, as agents, to the dominant discourse by adapting speech patterns to the dominant class (Foley, 1990), or by resisting, yet also reproducing existing structures (Willis, 1977), or by reconstructing themselves within particular spaces (Dressman 1997).
Multimodality
With the advancement of technology and globalization, different modes, such as gestures and writing, are widely used in representation and communication, and multimodal production has resulted in new environments for meaning-making. Kress (2010) proposed a unified multimodal frame that accounts for different social semiotic practices. Kress argued that signs are motivated conjunctions of form and meaning based on the interest of the sign-maker, using culturally available resources: communication can be understood as joint and reciprocal semiotic work and as a complex interaction. The key argument by Kress is that he refutes Saussurean idea of the arbitrary relation of signifier and signified, and makes links between signs and motivations; mode depends on a community’s representational needs, and the capacity to represent ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning.
Translanguaging, Codemixing, and Codemeshing
Scholarship in bilingual education has produced a fruitful discourse on translanguaing and conceptualized it as the hybrid practices of languages in which bi-/multilingual speakers draw on all of the linguistic repertoires to communicate. The concept of translanguaging is an unbrella term (Baker, 2017) that includes code-switching and language mixing (Androutsopoulos, 2013): it focuses on how bilinguals actually use their two languages in their everyday lives and make sense of their worlds. As pointed out by Baker, code-switching and code-mixing are often used interchangeably, both generally referring to any switches between languages that occur within or across sentences during the same conversations or discourse” (p. 98). In this way, trasnlanguaging emphasizes bilinguals as language “users” and the ways that they use their linguistic resources, whereas codeswitching tends to focus on the “code”, i.e., the language itself (García and Wei, 2014).
Canagarajsh (2011) has proposed the term codemeshing to refer to “the realization of translanguaging in texts” (p. 403), which includes the use of “registers and dialects within languages, as well as nonlinguistic resources”, such as symbols and multimodal mediums (Schreiber, 2017, p. 72). Fraiberg (2010) delineated the use of these practices in digital world as codemeshing, “the complex blending of multimodal and multilingual texts and literacy practices (P. 102). The concept of codemeshing can be illustrated by the digital literacy practices on social networking sites, such as facebook, instagram, and twitter. Building on these concepts, Schreiber (2017), for example, analyzed digital literacy practices of a university student from Serbia, and emphasized the modality of his digital practices. Schereiber (2017) argued that the adult second language learner integrated diverse linguistic and semiotic resources into the construction of the self on the social networking platform, facebook, and that his digital literacies greatly rely on translanguaging practices. Building on interviews, online participant observation, and rhetorical analysis, the scholar suggested re-evaluation of “what it means to have a second language-mediated identity” (p. 69).
