In “What South Park Character Are You?: Popular Culture, Literacy, and Online Performances of Identity,” Bronwyn Williams reads through university students MySpace and Facebook pages in order to better understand and discuss popular culture and construction of identity in a digital context. Williams explains that “the performance of identity is obviously always a social phenomenon” (27). He goes on to point out that “the use of popular culture images to create a personal web page may have a global audience who know nothing else about the creator of the page;” however, students using social networking sites “expect friends to make judgments and comments about their choice of songs, images, and video” (Williams 28). The interactive nature of digital technologies allows anyone with access to create, reshape, or repurpose a variety of multimodal texts and share the production with an audience. Williams points out that “the intersection of media technologies and popular culture practices converge to create new concepts of performing identity” but when an audience member encounters a web page, they might not understand the text(s) the way the author originally intended (30). After speaking with one student, Williams explains “students like Tony understand that while they may be constructing an identity for their friends, the nature of the online text is that it is extended to an audience that is beyond the knowledge and beyond the control of the writer of the page (33). Despite the fact that they may be misunderstood or certain texts may not be interpreted the way the students intended, it is evident students are thinking about how to convey a certain message to their audience and making rhetorical decisions in order to ensure their web page reflects who they are.
An image of a South Park character on a student’s web page could be interpreted in a variety of ways depending on the audience member’s knowledge (or lack of) of the television show. One student has a picture of Kyle (a South Park character) on his page, and Williams suggests how “we might see Mitchell’s posting of the image on the page as in some way a sincere reflection of the identity he is constructing” (35). I would recommend this article to scholars and my peers in the field because the interviews Williams conducted with university students shed light on multiple issues in terms of digital writing. He argues that students’ literacy practices in an online context are heavily influenced by popular culture. This article informs my research project as I am interested in L2 writers’ construction of identity in a digital context as well as the rhetorical decisions they make when developing their Facebook pages. This study has wider pedagogical implications because as digital technologies continue to grow, a majority of students will encounter multimedia and multimodal texts; in fact, they will most likely be consumers and producers. Therefore, it is essential we continue to ask questions, conduct research, and report findings as students’ literacy practices evolve in the classroom as well as online.
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