Introduction

In 2004, Kathleen Yancey warned that “Literacy today is in the midst of a tectonic change. Even inside of school, never before have writing and composing generated such diversity in definition” (p. 298).  She explored the changing landscape of writing in the world today and explained how it had shifted from a private practice to a public experience, addressing the various forms of writing that students do outside the classroom (e.g., blogs, emails, instant messaging, etc.).  As Yancey noted, not only is writing no longer limited to mere alphabetic text on blank pieces of paper, but it is also not limited to a single audience as writers are able to post their thoughts and experiences online for people all over the world to see.  To help students prepare for this multimodal, multi-audienced experience, writing instructors have been examining their students’ literacies in an attempt to find ways to bridge what a student already knows about writing (especially in the online world) and what he or she should learn about writing in the composition classroom.

This distinction between private and public writing is even more important to make now that online writing has become so ubiquitous.  Citing a 2008 Pew Internet Research study, Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks (2010) noted that “it’s hard to get teens to talk about writing with technology because technology so suffuses their lives that it is often invisible to them and, in turn, they do not consider what they do to be ‘writing’” (p. 7). While students compose countless posts, updates, and tweets online, they fail to see themselves as “writers.” And while the online composing they do is certainly different than the writing they do in the classroom, students can still benefit from this kind of public composition as these writing experiences can translate into familiarity and comfort with literate practices.  To help make these skills visible and best serve their students, composition instructors in the 21st century need to create a space for students to utilize their literate practices in ways that help develop their composing ability and extend their 21st-cenutry literacy skills.

For the past 20 years, New Literacy Studies (Gee, 2012; Street 1995) has been examining these kinds of pre-existing literacies by looking at the identities of writers and exploring what James Gee (2001b) referred to as “social languages” (p. 718), or the communication patterns that specific communities use with one another.  With the rise of social networking sites and Web 2.0, many communities in the 21st century are taking form in virtual worlds and over internet connections—requiring social languages that continuously adapt to the diverse audience members they attract.  As Yancey continued in her address, “writers in the 21st century self-organize into what seem to be overlapping technologically driven writing circles, what we might call a series of newly imagined communities, communities that cross borders of all kinds—nation state, class, gender, ethnicity” (2004, p. 301). One’s online writing identity, therefore, can include a myriad of these social languages as he or she negotiates places of interest. Furthermore, these social languages help us identify a variety of “discourse communities” as more and more people begin to organize themselves into specific groups based on their shared experiences and pursuits.

To help foster this growing enterprise of identity-driven literacy studies, this webtext will examine the literacy practices of a specific community (i.e., gamers) and explore how those practices can be enhanced by an immersion in an online writing community (i.e., fan-fiction).