New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders ed. by Bronwyn T. Williams, Amy A. Zenger (review)

Reviewed by: New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders ed. by Bronwyn T. Williams, Amy A. Zenger Jessica E. Slentz New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders Bronwyn T. Williams and Amy A. Zenger, eds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2012. 219pp. When Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe published their collection Global Literacies and the World Wide Web (2000), they set out to challenge a prevailing cultural narrative of the time—the “global-village narrative” (Hawisher and Selfe 1). This narrative naively saw the Internet as an equalizing force capable of “[transcending] current geopolitical borders” to create a “connected global community”(2). The essays of that collection focused on “local” and culturally specific literacy practices affected and necessitated by the worldwide web in different communities throughout the world. In doing so, they demonstrated the “internationalness” (3) of digital literacy practices, while at the same time showing that, rather than the Internet being a tool of global connectedness, it more often “ensures that differences based on socio-economic status, color, and power are maintained, exacerbated, and reproduced, rather than eliminated” (13). As such, they demonstrated how the sites and contexts of online literacy practices are “sites of social struggle and change” (13). More than a decade later, Bronwyn T. Williams’ and Amy Zenger’s edited collection New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders (2012) offers a return to international sites of web-based literacy practices, this time examining how, in spaces of participatory reading and writing online, popular culture—most specifically western/American popular culture—“provides an obvious opportunity for far ranging and more democratic contact across cultures” (Williams 25). While the significance of this “contact across cultures” is the motivating force behind this collection, it does not denote a turn towards a sort of “global-village narrative.” Instead, by using popular culture as the focus of inquiry, New Media Literacies investigates the myriad ways in which digital technologies, multimodal literacy practices, and popular culture together affect how people read, write, construct identity, negotiate power, and [End Page 104] create meaning through texts, both within and across specific cultural contexts and sites of social change. New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across Borders is Bronwyn Williams’ third volume on digital literacy practices, and the second that he and Amy Zenger have edited together (their first being Popular Culture and Representations of Literacy in 2007). New Media Literacies expands on current scholarship in the disciplines of New Media and New Literacy Studies to examine what exactly is happening when popular culture is not only read and internalized, but also when it is experienced and appropriated globally. Williams and Zenger, joining conversations on digital literacy set forth by Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel, hold that the “autonomous” model of literacy as a collection of skills that must be acquired for one to read and write is inadequate as it does not take into account the social processes, power structures and performances of identity that the practices of reading and writing are connected to. Organized into two parts, New Media Literacies first explores how popular culture texts are read, watched, listened to, rewritten, remixed, and appropriated by young people transnationally, and then examines the ways in which the appropriation of popular culture affects how identity is constructed and performed in online spaces. In part one of New Media Literacies, “New Media Literacies Across Cultures,” the authors address the importance of online literacy practices in the lives and educations of young people, often focusing on educational environments. In his chapter, “The World on Your Screen: New Media, Remix, and the Politics of Cross-Cultural Contact,” Williams highlights the prevalence of media convergence in the development of adolescents’ literacy practices. Williams cautions against a naïve idealization of the participatory practices—that is of re-mixing and textual poaching on the one hand and the unrealistic vilification of them on the other. New literacy practices, he argues, should be approached critically since “the connections between literacy and participatory popular culture has important implications for how literacy scholars think about language, literacy, rhetoric, identity, and pedagogy in an increasingly mobile and cross-cultural world” (19). Jessica Schreyer, in “Adolescent Literacy Practices...