The near-ubiquity of social media on a global scale allows scholars studying the impact of these technologies a fascinating glimpse at emergent composing practices. There are a myriad of composing activities taking place in social media and a rich variety of genres, audiences, stylistic choices, and pedagogical possibilities
represented.
Thus in this collection, we call for increased scholarly attention to the intersections of writing and social media platforms and tools in higher education. As Andrea Lunsford (2010) compellingly argued in an op-ed piece, these changes alter the very grounds of literacy as the definition, nature, and scope of writing are all shifting away
from the consumption of discourse to its production.” Because of this constantly changing landscape of social media, scholars in the field of writing studies are afforded rich sites for analysis, sites that offer us compelling questions, too, about the role of research and ethics in digital technologies such as these, the potential place of social media technologies in our pedagogy, and the future of activism and community-based efforts connected to social media.
In this respect, our collection, Social Writing/Social Media: Public Presentations, and Pedagogies, builds on previous work articulating the role of multimodality in composition studies by extending ongoing conversations that have asked readers to expand notions of networked literacy in the twenty-first century.
Our collection also offers something new to the field. It offers a more narrowly defined focus on social media and its platforms by examining the impact of social media on three writing-related themes: publics and audiences, presentation of self and groups, and pedagogy at various levels of higher education.
The sixteen chapters in this collection pay attention to an undertheorized aspect of writing online—that is, the acts of composing that occur specifically in social media spaces an aspect of writing that is both
timely and compelling.
There are many ways that social media have impacted societies at a global level, but one of the more compelling moments in 2016 stands as an example of why examining social media composing is crucial moving forward. However, the elections showcased social media’s role in political campaigns
today, illustrating that candidates today can tap into the networks of Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and other social media technologies in ways that can upset traditional approaches to understanding political campaigning.
Participants in social media technologies enact a variety of literacy practices: Writing and composing more broadly through practices like hash tagging, captioning, constructing personal profiles, and other ways of writing oneself into being comprise a large amount of users’ time in a social media site.
These kinds of composing practices as reflecting the “rhetorical complexity of our social lives as they have become increasingly mediated. by writing technologies. Through the writing activities they perform in
social media technologies, students actively create literacy ecologies and thereby shape their social and personal lives . Today millions of users giving way to the widespread and pervasive use of social media among billions of users worldwide today.