…Multiple identities exist within a social community but not all identities are relevant simultaneously.
Innovative instructional designs recognize how students use technologies to present multiple identities. This process of constructing different identities involves skills such as synthesis and critical analysis (of the context). Through a critical analysis of the audience and purpose, they decide what kind of identity will help them be recognized (e.g., Gee 1999) by that Discourse Community from which they seek recognition.
Digital spaces have opened opportunities for further situated identity construction and provide affordances that have not existed before. Members of these online networks must learn the recognizable patterns of meaning making and interactions common to Gee’s notion of a Discourse community defined above. For example, when people use social media tools (e.g. Facebook or Twitter), successful membership in the situated context directs them to use language in more truncated, abbreviated styles than would be used on other written language contexts. The constraints (or implicit rules guiding the use of the tool) conveys to the individual that if they want to achieve their desired impact or communication goal than they need to use fewer words than they would have if they were talking to someone face-to-face or writing a long-form communication (academic essay, research article, book).
However, recognizable membership usage for these situated identities is defined not only through the interaction of other members of the Discourse but also through the sponsor establishing the context for the communication. Even though individuals may gather and communicate via Facebook or Twitter, those individuals have to work within the constraints established by the sponsor of that literacy tool/medium. Groups may further define their patterns but the frame is often guided through the sponsor to a great extent. Whether an individual who seeks to adopt or construct an identity that includes a chosen Discourse has access to resources to make this connection is not fully explored in the readings.
Implicit in Discourses is the potential for varied access to what Gee calls social goods (p. 22). Although Gee does not specifically use the term ‘power,’ levels of status and roles of representation are addressed and include institutions as well as people. For example, the teacher speaking to parents speaks for her/himself as classroom teacher but also speaks as a representative of the school in the eyes of the larger local community. Yet whether the students who enter that classroom have the life experience or access to tools to enter a new Discourse is of great debate in educational circles.
“In the end, a Discourse is a “dance” that exists in the abstract as a coordinated pattern of words, deeds, values, beliefs, symbols, tools, objects, times, and places and in the here-and-now as a performance that is recognizable as just such a coordination” (Gee, 1999, p. 28).
Discourse membership is a social contract of sorts. To claim and successfully be a part of a Discourse you and the others in that Discourse community must recognize your ability to make and understand meanings in ways consistent with the community’s communicative practices, values, and beliefs. Gee emphasizes the importance of this recognition as a means of successful membership (“sometimes… conscious, sometimes not” (p. 29)).
“The point is not how we “count” Discourses; the point is the performance, negotiation, and recognition work that goes into creating, sustaining, and transforming them, and the role of language (always with other things) in this process” (Gee, 1999, p. 30). As we engage in discussion of digital technologies and the language, texts, and ways of knowing in digital spaces, issues of access to construct or explore multiple identities is like to feed the discussion in future research.
“Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view-the witless repetitive response to the unperceived” (McLuhan, 1967, p. 4).
MJ says
A couple questions come to mind as I read through this post. In the third paragraph, it talks about “sponsors” establishing constraints and guiding the frame. I’m not sure I understand exactly what that means. Can we talk more about the “sponsor”?
Discourse membership as a social contract makes sense to me. But how do you know exactly what the contract requires and where you need to sign on the dotted line? These are still wonderings that I have. I guess there may not be an explicit answer, but instead it is more of a sense of whether you’ve made the cut or not. Or maybe I need to think more about the “dance”.
Laura March says
When reading your comments on Discourse Analysis and social networks, I remembered last year’s uproar about Facebook leading to depression. It’s really interesting (and a bit frightening) to think about how technology “massages” our identities in this way. In particular, how do we grow up differently when our entire lives (including mistakes) are catalogued and easily accessible by both parents and future “friends”?
SCOTT P MCDONALD says
You say: “Innovative instructional designs recognize how students use technologies to present multiple identities.” I am not sure about this directionality or intentionality. My question is similar to MJ’s above: How does the contract develop? I think with technology and discourse is it dialectic. There are technologies that succeed because the meet expectations of uses, which is what I feel like you are saying, in part, in your statement. However, there are also technologies that force different ways of presenting identity. Neither is a guarantee of success of a technology, either meeting expectations or breaking with them. There is something more subtle going on where technology creates the opportunity for enacting identity in a way that is “just right” and it is used to enact identity that is “just right” for the technology. Complexity is the center.