There has been a trend for studies to examine the digital literacies of online reading, writing and communication in the literacies field in the last few decades (e.g.
Baron, 1984; Gee, 2001; Leu, O’Byrne, Zawilinski, McVerry & Everett-Cacopardo, 2009; Barton & Lee, 2013). While much has been said about the prevalence of literacies in the lives of the ‘digital generation’ (Buckingham, 2006), ‘digital natives’
(Prensky, 2001; Palfrey & Gasser, 2008), the ‘Net generation10’ (Tapscott, 2005) and the ‘digital generation’ (Davies, 2006), e.g. seventh-grade students aged approximately 12–13 (Bryant, Jackson & Smallwood, 2006), low-income high school students aged 17–19 (Greenhow & Robelia, 2009), secondary school and university students aged 13–25 (Lee, 2002), undergraduate and postgraduate students and graduates aged 20–28 (Lee, 2007; Barton & Lee, 2012) as well as the elderly, aged 60 and over (Gatto & Tak, 2008), little is understood about the kinds of writing and reading of adult volunteers aged 21 or over11 who start immersing themselves in the digital life, or how the social practices around these digital as well as print-based texts constitute professional practices within a unformed group as a nonformal education
10 Generally this generation of people was born in or after 1980 and is immersed in digital technologies.
11 Minimum age (as one of the admission requirements): Applicants have to be 21 years old by the time they are officially enrolled as adult members of uniformed groups in Hong Kong.
context. The space constraints of this chapter prevent me from detailing all aspects of my analyses and conducting a critique of all digital literacies, so the key aspects are inevitably selective.
To emphasize the dynamics of digital literacies in my research, the forthcoming chapters will highlight a new perspective in the current new social networking era.
People nowadays, in particular adult volunteers, go through a process of creating, exchanging and perceiving information using networked telecommunications (December, 1996) more frequently. Because of the growth in CMC, adult volunteers incorporate communication technologies into their volunteering life and their interactions extend from face-to-face settings to the virtual world. As Romiszowski and Mason (1996) note, such communications mediated by digital technologies can be both synchronous and asynchronous, and thus in ‘real-time’ and ‘delayed time’, respectively.
2.2.5.1 Social Media
Social media, as ‘Internet-based sites and services that promote social interaction between participants’ (Page, Barton, Unger & Zappavigna, 2014, p.5), are one of the vital research foci in my research. The extent of language-related research on social media platforms has been increasingly rapidly in recent decades. The findings of some key studies have contributed to the development of my own theoretical and methodological ideas, as I shall show in this section.
First of all, weblogs, commonly called blogs, share one of the common functions of a Facebook page — a place for informal discussion. Some blog studies are relatively influential on my empirical work. For example, teenage girls maintain strong social ties and transfer this kind of relationship to their online blogs with an informal style. Blogs ultimately connect both online and offline worlds (Bortree, 2005). Though the ethnographic studies of Davies and Merchant (2007) and Huffaker (2004) focused on academic blogs, the way the former conducted autoethnographic research which serves as a good reference in terms of research methodology. The latter also enhanced my understanding of the characteristics of blogs.
Next, in view of the similar message posting and commenting functions of Facebook, as the most popular social networking site in Hong Kong, Ferdig and Roehler’s (2003) observations of online discussion forums also serve as a good reference. Their work has let me critically reflect on the pros and cons of asynchronous and synchronous conversations in an online commenting environment.
In addition, another online social networking service, Twitter, in spite of its relatively low usage in Hong Kong, still offers certain insights for my research. For example, the original hashtag function (the # symbol) has now extended to the Facebook community and is widely used by Facebook users to indicate key topics.
Another insight comes from the reflexive accounts of two Twitter users (Gillen &
Merchant, 2013). My own autoethnographic data are presented to justify my claims throughout this thesis, including the findings chapters.
Finally, a couple of local and international studies on Facebook further influenced my theoretical and methodological framework. Doing Facework on Facebook as a new literacy practice investigated by Davies (2012) and the comprehensive and influential study on Flicker (another image and video hosting website for social use) done by Barton and Lee (2013) further shaped my conceptual framework and laid the foundations for me to depict some of the substantial elements in my Facebook chapter. I also critically review some of Barton and Lee’s (2013) key notions, such as techno-biography, and redefine its meaning.
There are essentially two reasons for choosing Facebook as my research site, despite its relatively short history. The first reason, needless to say, is its unprecedented popularity across a number of countries, including Hong Kong.
Moreover, Facebook is a contemporary site that demonstrates a substantial amount of user-created content, which is also a distinctive feature of other social media platforms, such as blogs, discussion forums, content-sharing sites (including text-sharing, photo-sharing and video-sharing), and, most importantly, social networking sites.
The rise of Web 1.0 in the 1990s and Web 2.0 in the 2000s has been changing literacy practices around the world. Compared with Web 1.0 as a ‘read-only medium’
(Thompson, 2007) full of content only for consumers, Web 2.0 is noted for having more content creators because of its reading and writing nature. In spite of the fact that teenagers and young adults label e-mail as an old-fashioned communication tool (Carnevale, 2006), e-mail communication still preserves its core official role in business and voluntary organisations. Dehinbo’s (2010) study also takes a step in the direction of justifying other Web 2.0 technologies, such as Weblogs and SNSs, which make more contributions to knowledge management than the first generation. I argue that the two types of communication technology are of equal importance in terms of enhancing mutual communication and understanding between fellow adult volunteers, regardless of their ages. Meetings and discussions of adult volunteers, for example, are increasingly being replaced by digital literacy practices in e-mail messages, Facebook chats and/or Facebook private messages. Talk hinging on both e-mail texts and Facebook posts is a common literacy event among the volunteers.
2.2.5.2 Research on Facebook
From a digital framework within NLS, texts can be multimodal: “meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalities (images, texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound etc.) not just words” (Gee, 2003, p.210.). Ivanič et al. (2009) also capture the essence of modes and technologies by describing how
“Modes refers to the range of semiotic resources which can be employed to make meaning: spoken language, written language, visual, material and/or animation.
Technologies includes not only electronic media but also the material media and resources of ‘old technologies’ such as books, newspapers, magazines, pens, chalk and different types of paper” (p. 61). As can be seen in later chapters, these candidates’ Facebook practices are multimodal with frequent sharing of links to local and international news websites or Youtube videos, for example.
It has also been generally agreed that both students and educators from HE recognize the importance of Facebook in countries like the United States (Barczyk &
Duncan, 2013; Hurt et al., 2012; Roblyer et al., 2010), the United Kingdom (Davies, 2012) and Hong Kong (Wong, Kwan & Leung, 2011). On the other hand, in spite of the dominance of investigations on student populations (Ryan & Xenos, 2011), in fact, Facebook usage has no language restrictions but just a restriction on age, which is users have to be at least 13 years old. Facebook users can be monolingual teenagers
(Davies, 2012), adults (Harper et al., 2012) or Cantonese-English bilinguals (Lee, 2011). However, there have been no previous attempts to relate Facebook interactions in the FE and adult volunteering settings. This research attempts to do just that, with a particular emphasis on affordances relating to Facebook interactions.