Expanding Conversations: Cultivating an Analytical Approach to Collaborative Composition in Social Online Spaces.

Abstract

Social media—such as Facebook, blogs, and comments sections popular on many websites—are widely used by students outside of the classroom as a means of informal communication. Much of this communication requires users to write and co-construct meaning with other users. In formal learning contexts, however, curricular usage of such social media tools may be less prevalent, despite the highly collaborative writing practices present on these sites that reflect writing practices valued by composition scholars. In fact, the discipline of composition and rhetoric predicted the value of some of these practices nearly thirty years ago. This study examines the role that writing plays in social media usage, and explores ways in which writing behaviors may be studied as collaborative in nature by first exploring how online writing reflects previous understandings of collaboration, and then identifying ways it expands these understandings. To accomplish this, I contribute an original heuristic, the Collaborative Triangle, composed of points addressing authorship (behaviors related to text production), community (behaviors related to interaction), and textuality (the nature and affordances of online text.) I applied this heuristic to interview data and online writing samples, as well as employed methods of rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis, and computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) in order to identify and explore writing behaviors that appear to be collaborative in nature. Doing so allowed me to note where online writing practices may inform previous understandings of collaboration and modern pedagogical application. I identified writing behaviors that mirror previous understandings of collaborative composition including use of evidence to advance an argument and taking responsibility for a text’s creation, as well as twenty behaviors, including identity maintenance of profile photos and attention to temporality and newness, that have not yet been recognized in collaborative composition literature. The study’s contribution is a systematic approach to understanding both the similarities between academic and online writing, and ways in which online writing can be considered collaborative in nature. These findings have implications for both composition theory and instruction, as well as for fields where interactive technology and communication is valued.