Publics and Audiences

Chapters in Part One discuss broader contextual frames of using social media including: privacy and surveillance, the far-reach of hash tags, and insight on those who abstain or choose not to be on social media. Considerations of the underbelly of social media and the darker consequences of common social media practices are spelled out for readers to challenge perceptions of its widespread use in personal and professional settings and the writing classroom. For instance, in “Sustaining Critical Literacies in the Digital Information Age: The Rhetoric of Sharing, Prosumerism, and Digital Algorithmic Surveillance,” Estee Beck prompts readers to consider how to support critical literacies and civic education by sustaining conversations about the rhetoric of sharing and market-driven prosumer culture of social media. As a reader, I appreciated Beck’s discussion surrounding the prosumer/sharing culture of social media while considering the reality that in order to participate we freely give away data and provide unpaid labor in creating content. Similarly, Caroline Dadas calls into question the popular practice of hash tagging in social media, writing about the unintended consequences and appropriation of hash tags with real-life repercussions. Her call to think about Twitter as a composition platform requires deeper consideration of thinking about who our intended and imagined audiences are and how misunderstandings occurs across these spaces, a central theme of many of the chapters in this section.