Welcome to this guest lecture with Dr. Christian Ehret. The title of the lecture is «What do adolescents do with the affects of digital media? Developing more affectively attuned approaches to context and text».
Much public discourse is concerned with the potentially negative impact digital media may have on adolescents’ everyday lives and learning, especially their social and emotional lives. But how to adolescents themselves describe the ways in which digital media move and affect them? And what are adolescents actually doing with these everyday affects and feelings?
This talk argues that to address such questions, researchers must complicate how they think about the emerging digital contexts and texts that are increasingly designed—for example, by corporations and influencers—to gain and sustain youths’ attention through affective and emotional appeals. It considers how two shifts in perspective on digital contexts and texts enable new questions and insights into the role of affect in adolescents’ digital lives.
First, online social life has seen a shift from human-driven participatory cultures to human-machine co-produced algorithmic cultures. What does it feel like to write, read, and produce culture when these processes are inextricably entwined with non-human agents, such as bots and algorithms? Examples from one adolescents’ uses of her literacies to ‘work algorithms’ across social media platforms illustrate the potential in this shift of perspective on context.
Second, a primary design focus of interactive and immersive texts—such as videogames and extended reality texts— is to train, engage and impact users’ bodies and feelings. Understanding how these texts actively entangle with and entrain human bodies requires a shift from thinking about multimodal reading to analyzing format-specific, socio-material experiences of textual intra-action. Examples of two adolescents critiquing representations of adolescence in relation to the affects of a videogame’s designed ludonarrative illustrates the potential in this shift of perspective on texts.
These examples come from an ongoing multi-year design-based research project in an urban youth centre in Montreal, Canada. The project has focused on working alongside adolescents to create opportunities for cultural production with digital media that foster connection, community, and well-being in addition to economic opportunity. Participants’ experiences shared in this talk suggest some of the ways in which adolescents are using use their literacies in relation to the everyday affects of living and learning with digital media: from producing more diverse and inclusive online cultures, to taking time to guard their own well-being, to developing improvised arguments on flattened or problematic representations of adolescence in videogames. New questions for research on adolescents’ digital literacies follow from these examples and the proposed shifts in theoretic perspectives on contexts and texts.
This research has been funded by successive grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Bio
Dr Ehret is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University. His academic interests focus on developing social theory toward more affective, material, and embodied understandings of literacy and learning with digital media.
His research responds to emerging, global dynamics of sociotechnical change that continue to complicate our emotional experiences of literacy and learning, especially what it means and feels like to be human when our communicative practices are augmented with more-than-human technologies, platforms, and algorithms. Dr Ehret is therefore particularly interested in affective dimensions of learning and literacies in relation to emerging technologies such as extended and virtual reality and artificial intelligence, especially as to how they impact literacy education for adolescents. Dr Ehret’s interest in these areas is equity-driven and includes the co-design of opportunities to learn with emerging technologies alongside communities where such opportunities have been institutionally and systematically constrained. These projects have involved funded work across the US and Canada in contexts such as children’s hospitals, public schools, and public libraries.
His current research includes projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada on learning and critical literacies in relation to algorithms, algorithmic cultures, and in the context of livestreaming and Esports, or competitive videogaming, in urban youth centres.