4.3 Considering Digital Publics

Considering Digital Publics

Today, we encounter much of the public writing we read in digital public spheres. Digital writing offers writers a unique set of affordances and challenges when communicating your message. You have the opportunity to compose in multiple modes, incorporating visuals or audio with your writing. Many multimodal texts allow for experimentation, creativity, and even disruption of the status quo in ways that may be compelling for your argument. In our classes, students have created Google Maps, posted to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, composed blogs, and circulated online petitions. For example, in a Digital Writing and Publishing course Holmes teaches, one student paired a Google Map of the best skateboarding locations around town with a blog that made a public argument for transforming vacant parking lots into legal skating locations. Digital public writing can present new opportunities to communicate our messages in ways that challenge traditional styles of knowledge production and circulation.

However, these new opportunities come with a set of expectations, such as being intentional with issues of visual design and layout. Alex Reid notes in “Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web” that we should consider issues of “design and layout” as interrelated to “questions of content” when composing a blog post (315). Effective digital design often means embedding media or incorporating hyperlinks to external sites (Carroll). Savvy online readers expect well-designed, interactive online content.

One of the benefits of situating your writing in digital online publics is the opportunity you have to reach a broad and diverse set of online readers and connect with broader social movements. In her research about a digital campaign to stop violence against women, Jennifer Nish concluded that digital publishing increases the reach of activism, making the spread of material “more visible than some print-based forms of activist communication” (240). Similarly, you can increase your reach on social media platforms through the use of hashtags to more effectively reach a specific audience. When used effectively, the hashtag itself carries rhetorical weight and can help communicate a host of positions within just a word or phrase (Langford and Speight).

Digital publishing often allows for a multimodal mix of genres to help you communicate your public message effectively. In one of the classes Holmes taught on civic writing, a student researched a series of state-level education bills. For her final public project, she created infographics that helped break down the education bills in accessible terms, explaining how they would impact the state if passed. To follow through with circulating her message, this student posted a series of tweets with links to her online infographics. Here’s one example tweet: “For anyone interested in #EducationPolicy, here are 5 bills that are currently sitting on @GovernorDeal’s desk waiting to be signed into law. #GaEdYouthCmte #GaHigherEdCmte.” Here you can see how the student used a mix of hashtags to connect with public audiences that might have been interested in her issue. She also tagged the Governor, who ultimately would make the decision of whether or not to sign them into law. Lastly, she effectively used exigence by noting that the bills were sitting on the Governor’s desk waiting to be signed.

While this section barely scratches the surface of digital public writing, we hope it gives you some sense of the opportunities and additional expectations that arise when you situate your writing online.