Looking at Multimodal Literacy through Myspace and Facebook

Learning to read texts besides only traditional ones featuring only the written word can be valuable. In her piece entitled "MySpace, Facebook, and Multimodal Literacy in the Writing Classroom," Jennifer Swartz discusses ways to teach multimodal literacy through social media sites.

Swartz writes, "To help students see the ways in which writing is relevant to their everyday lives, I introduce Facebook and MySpace to the classroom where we look at these social networking sites as rhetorical texts." In this piece, Swartz makes the acknowledgment that social media sites have forever changed the way people write. The author argues, then, that the writing on these sites should be addressed.

While implementing the study of Facebook and Myspace into her class, Swartz makes it clear that they are not just studying status updates of friends or looking at new photos which have been uploaded. She mentions that "we look at their Facebook and MySpace pages in class and discuss how they describe themselves, what songs they utilize, what pictures represent them, and whether they have set their profiles to private. In other words, we explore how they use rhetoric to construct an online identity and what the ramifications of those choices are." Facebook pages, then, become multimodal texts which maintain rhetoric and assert identity. These texts can be studied to better understand rhetoric, Swartz argues.

The study of Facebook as a multimodal text quickly becomes the study of audience. Swartz notes that for students "there is a disconnect between the virtual audience and the audience for whom they are writing...they have completely forgotten that members beyond their immediate circle might be consuming the information they publicize, interpreting it in different ways, and using it for different purposes." This is a reminder that students must be aware at all times of their audience: the audience they did consider as well as the one they did not. In turn, students should be taught through this exercise to consider and cater to all members of their audience.

Swartz states further that "the ways in which we imagine an audience might not be consistent with the reality of that audience, since those who peruse our profiles are very often not the ones whom we envision will be doing so. By asking students to think about their profiles, they begin to see that their construction of an online identity is a specific set of rhetorical choices, each one dictated by how they want to depict themselves in an online environment."

By considering all aspects of audience for their Facebook pages, students might better consider their audience in composition for the academic setting. Further, by learning to read and address multimodal texts, they may better craft multimodal texts of their own with a strong sense of rhetoric.