The Spaces Between Us

Despite having one of the highest per-capita incomes of the world, social and political changes in Qatar have not kept pace with the country’s economic development. The expatriate and national population of the small emirate have access to luxury brands and a variety of Western goods including food as well as hotels. The high level of commercialization, however, does not mean that cultural differences between the various nationalities have been erased. Online forums and social media have provided neutral public spaces where debate and dialogue about identity and values can take place in a way they do not occur in public. This chapter examines a variety of examples through comments by expats and nationals on a number of media sites as well as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Digital is Dead

This chapter draws from a 6-month participant-observation with an Occupy Wall Street group in Richmond, Virginia—Occupy Richmond—to deliver an ethnography of public discourse in postcolonial, queer, and multimedia contexts, as part of a critical analysis of imperialism in the digital age. The author develops techno-seduction as a term to deconstruct the lure of technological determinism that promotes static interpretations of democracy, participation, and the digital, in addition to considering how these interpretations impact intrapersonal and group identity formation. Finally, the chapter asks that we suspend our conception of the digital/non-digital dichotomy by thinking of the digital as dead, as a force that guides and influences our sociopolitical interactions, rather than as an isolated concept wholly separable from the non-digital.

Constructions of Banksy

This chapter examines how multiple, often competing, identities of the street artist Banksy are constructed through a variety of media. It uses actor network theory and activity theory to trace and analyze the contexts, or networks, wherein Bansky’s identity is constructed. Banksy’s identity is of particular interest because he is an anonymous figure, and he actively abstains from social media. This examination of how he is constructed online sheds light on the agency that individuals have in constructing their identity in digital spaces. The insight from this investigation should be of great relevance for all professionals as they consider the non-professional writing they do, or chose not to do, beyond their office walls, within the public domain.

Turkish Youth’s (Re)Construction of their Political Identity in Social Media, before “Resistanbul”

This chapter explores the political potential of social media widely used as a means of communication by Turkish young people and examines how they perceive social media as alternative social environments, where they can manifest their political identities. In addition, the study conducted aims at understanding whether the political situation in Turkey before the “Resistanbul” events, beginning toward the end of May 2013, created fear among young people that could cause them to hesitate to express their political thoughts or feel the need to veil their political identities. The results of the survey reveals that Turkish young people, despite having a high sense of freedom, tend to be politically disengaged in social media, and they seem to be hesitant to reveal their political identities in this alternative democratic social space, but they do not mind “others” manifesting their political identities.

Supporting Visibility and Resilience in Play

Scholars have highlighted the learning opportunities afforded by online gaming communities of practice, which include providing authentic and meaningful contexts for engaging in and learning 21st century skills and digital literacies. However, lesser attention has been paid to how these environments can be inequitable in including and supporting members across gender. This chapter highlights the importance of gender supportive online gaming communities and their role in increasing the visibility of and resiliency necessary for equitable online play and learning. The history of a gender-supportive community and its structures are explored. The chapter further provides recommendations for educators, based on the social structures of this gender-supportive community and related research on educational climates and equitable learning.

Moving Mountains

Moving Mountains is a collaborative venture by eight art educators who explore the notion of distributed leadership to transcend boundaries of proximity, ideation, and artistic production. Their distributed leadership, enacted through both human and non-human performers, involved sharing knowledge and skills to create a cyberformance and machinima. They completed these projects from conceptualization to artistic production without a designated leader and without hierarchical constraints. In this chapter, the authors view distributed leadership in Moving Mountains collaborations through actor-network theory, crowdsourcing, and transformative potential. Moving Mountains collaborators continue to create video art, written work, curriculum, and virtual world performances, through distributed leadership, in order to challenge oppression and transgress borders.

Firepups at the Lake

This chapter examines how a social community was created and developed on a left-leaning political blog, Firedoglake; in particular, it explores how readers, as commenters, engaged each other, establishing credibility, or rhetorically speaking, acquiring and enhancing their ethos and attaining the status of a respected member of the blog’s community. All excerpted threads include pseudonyms or screen names of users and all material from the designated blogs is, of course, in the public domain. In part 2, the chapter describes how the character of the blog itself, Firedoglake, changed over time as it grew to include an increasing number of front-page posters, became generally identified as hypercritical of the Obama administration, and became an umbrella site for smaller blogs under its banner. The discussion in both parts explores identity creation and the question of community in computer-mediated communication.

Friends and Rivals

This chapter explores how through both narrative and gameplay mechanics, BioWare’s 2011 digital role-playing game Dragon Age II seeks to help players redefine their understanding of ethics in terms of human emotion and interaction. These interaction-based ethics are the product of our desire to situate ourselves within a social community rather than on an abstract continuum of universal “right” and “wrong.” The ambiguity contained within the friendship-rivalry system factionalizes Hawke and his/her companions, forcing the player, as the group’s leader, to ally with one of the two sides in the game’s overarching conflict. This coercive mechanic produces awareness in the player of the way in which interpersonal relationships form our responses in ethical situations, and causes the player to question whether their decisions are the product of “pure” ethics, or the consequence of deliberate or unconscious submission to the ethical mores of others.

Faculty Users on Facebook

Within the rhetorical spaces of the physical institution and the online realm of Facebook, faculty must negotiate community norms and expectations when self-presenting to their audiences. Given the pervasiveness of Facebook and the commonplace intersection of personal and professional audiences on this site, faculty users need to carefully consider how they construct their online identities, particularly in terms of their visual self-presentation through the profile picture. This chapter presents data from a survey that explores the rhetorical approaches of one group of Facebook users, women academics who are also mothers. Participant responses reveal that a majority of these users demonstrate audience awareness and a deliberate rhetorical process when visually self-presenting on Facebook. The insight garnered from this survey can assist faculty Facebook users, both men and women, in thinking more critically about how they navigate the rhetorical landscape of this site when visually self-presenting to their own audiences.

Going Digital

The author reflects on an exploration into the genre of multimodal writing, examining issues of the genre’s accessibility for herself and her students and its relevance to writing pedagogy. She examines, too, the need to establish a broadly accessible digital community in sites that seek to foster rich and purposeful multimodal abilities.