To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Digital Citizenship, Amanda Mooney

acmooney@millersville.edu

Empowered Use, and Prescriptive Pedagogy @amandacmooney

Introduction Results Conclusions

For faculty and teachers to extend the arguments from works like
Renee Hobbs’ Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Culture and
Classroom, faculty/teachers/researchers need a better understanding
of the existing digital practices surrounding offline practices like
reading and writing. As a student, researcher, and tutor, I have
observed college students struggling to write on provided text,
transferring student practices related to textbooks practices. When
students attend an interactive session and struggle to interact, how can
faculty/teachers be expected to create interactive learning
environments that empower digital practices? As digital citizens, it is
important that we are empowered to engage through media. However,
many students are reluctant to perform in these settings. By
teaching students how to engage with digital platforms, are we limiting
their performance? Are we creating a generation of disempowered
users?
To begin to address these complex questions, I draw from Abigail De
Kosnik’s existing digital feminist methodologies to explore the Twitter
practices of an existing, public reading community- Emma Watson’s
#OurSharedShelf book club. This allows for an exploration of
what practicing, doing, engaging, playing, and performing look like
when users choose to participate. I then discuss the implications for
supporting empowered digital citizenship in classrooms.
Trends in reading community Twitter use
• As shown in Figure 2, users are much more likely to engage with
@OurSharedShelf versus #OurSharedShelf. Additionally,
50.1% of the total tweets in these two groups shared links
to outside sources. In fact, tweets, retweets, and replies about
assigned reading made up a minority of the content. Engagement
increases when users tweet about non-assigned topics or are able to
share related information.
Fandom as empowered digital citizenship
Figure 2. Total numbers of tweeted responses in both @OurSharedShelf and • As shown in Figures 3 and 4, retweeted content makes up the
#OurSharedShelf. majority of data in both settings. For @OurSharedShelf,
retweets make up 72.8% of total tweets, while they made
up 47% of tweets in #OurSharedShelf. Additionally, shown in
Figure 3, 9.3% of tweets could be considered “fan” messages. In
both cases, Emma Watson’s celebrity is likely a main motivator for
the activity. Still, despite the performance of fandom, the users in
these communities were actively engaged and there was little to no
“trolling.”
Future studies

• Investigate fandom performance as empowered digital citizenship.

Figure 3. Data showing number of
1 cm
tweets in the handle broken up into
categories. 54.9% of the tweets
including @OurSharedShelf consisted
of tweets, retweets, and replies that
shared links, while 9.3% were fan
messages. This data indicates the
importance of fandom performance in
this community.
Figure 4. Data showing number of
tweets in the hashtag broken up into
categories. 30.1% of tweets, retweets,
and replies were about the assigned
book, while 37.3% were about another
related text.
Who tweets to celebrities? Who doesn’t? How does the interaction
change media use?
• Question the lack of ”trolling” in this feminist community. Are book
clubs really that boring?
• Determine whether handles are more friendly to readers and
students than hashtags. If so, why? How does this affect classroom
practices?

• Investigate transferring the engaged practices of this community to

Figure 1. Logo for #OurSharedShelf reading community. The community, formed in a classroom setting. What needs to change? Do students need more
conjunction with UN Women, acts as an online book club where readers can discuss a freedom in what they can discuss?
common feminist text chosen monthly or bimonthly.

Methods
Figure 5. Total tweets about Our Figure 6. Total tweets about Research performed under the direction of Dr. A Nicole Pfannenstiel
Shared Shelf assigned books in both unassigned books in both
As a work-in-progress, the first phase of this project was to examine the hashtag and the handle. 82.4% of #OurSharedShelf and
the Twitter use practices in the Our Shared Shelf community. Do media about assigned books were @OurSharedShelf. 82.5% of media References
members engage thoughtfully with the assigned text? Do they extend retweets and replies, possibly about unassigned books were tweets, 1) De Kosnik, A. (2016). Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
indicating a reluctance to engage with while there were limited retweets and 2) Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
their engagement beyond ”assignments”? The data presented here assigned texts. replies unlike in other categories. This 3) Hobbs, R. (2011). Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Culture and Classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
4) Selfe, C. (1999). Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention.
demonstrates interesting trends in engagement and online response to indicates the engagement made Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
text. possible by allowing interaction with 5) Selfe. C & Hawisher, G. (2004). Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy From the United States.
outside material. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

I used TAGS to pull all tweets posted to both #OurSharedShelf and

@OurSharedShelf every day for a two week period. I then sorted the
data from each thread into the following categories: Assigned Book,
Another Book, Links, and Fandom. Each category was further
subdivided into tweets, retweets, and replies.