A GENRE THEORY PERSPECTIVE ON DIGITAL ... - ETD

meme that has widely circulated on youtube.com) when fecundity (a meme’s capacity of being
taken up by multiple individuals, with new meanings added each time) lies at the heart of the
digital phenomenon (2007)? Also, social structures and boundaries that used to separate the
novice from the expert, or the consumer from the producer, no longer hold fast. For instance,
Silence Speaks (an international digital storytelling initiative) offers equally valid, if not more
empowering, venues as its mainstream counterparts in supporting the uncovering of stories about
violence, discrimination, abuse, inequality, and conflict. In the same vein, what we once
conceived as valid textual meaning is under question when remix, hybridization, and
experimentation of multimedia and multimodal resources have become cultural norms. For fans
of popular cultural genres, such as Pokémon or the Harry Potter books, fanfiction sites are
interest-based virtual communities that support their creative productions of derivative fictions
and multimedia fan arts. In fanfiction writing, fans creatively remix plots, characters, and
relationships found in the canonical work with experiences and knowledge found in their
everyday lives to create stories and arts that are equally engaging and interesting as the canonical
works (Black, 2006; Thomas, 2006). To be literate in terms of such emerging cultural practices,
one needs to be a selective user of literacies and technologies, to constantly adapt to and initiate
redesign of evolving cultural technologies, and to engage in contingent, often self-initiated
learning. As such, received notions of literacy do not provide for adequate accounts of the
multiplicity, complexity, contingency, fluidity, and plasticity of people’s cultural and literacy
experiences in digital spaces.
On the other hand, what we have come to appreciate as literacy skills still manage to
travel into the messy and chaotic digital discursive scenes. Literacy skills that are acquired
through schooling often work in concert with a repertoire of technological, cultural, semiotic,
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