Skip navigation, view current journal content

The Ohio State University

www.osu.edu

  1. Help
  2. Campus map
  3. Find people
  4. Webmail

Link off site to Elsevier

New Dimensions in Computers and Composition Studies

Image of Digital Youth book coverImage of Digital Youth

Jonathan Alexander

In Digital Youth the author argues that many youth are using the Web to experiment with and deploy a number of surprising rhetorical strategies that tell us much about their vision for the new communications technologies and the emerging literacy practices they are using to engage that technology.

The volume examines both the politics imbedded in the representations of youth and technology and the actual practices of communication and meaning making of these "digital youth." To approach this subject, the author draws on the work of three fields of critical inquiry-cultural studies, subcultural studies, and the emerging field of cyberculture studies-to generate a series of questions for critically analyzing various literacy practices performed on and with the Web. Methodologically, the book proceeds as a series of a "confrontations" between youth and their representation, particularly with regard to how "digital youth" are figured in relationship to and use technology. Then the author examines, through a series of case studies, how some of these "digital youth" actually use technology to refigure themselves-often in contra-distinction to their "mythological" representation by others. In the process, the book offers a complex but telling portrait of the use of communications technologies, particularly the Web, and the kinds of Literacies that some youth are developing with those communication technologies.