ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the concepts of centripetal and centrifugal cultural forces in relation to ecologies of writing as a theoretical framework for interpreting and responding to adolescents' global engagement with digital writing and media. It argues that the three levels of analysis Núñez proposed align well with focus on young people's involvement as global citizens who use digital writing and media to engage with sociocultural, political, and economic issues that might otherwise go unnoticed. The tendency to frame the connection between new literacies and global engagement as a means to compete for capital is not an exclusively American phenomenon, and literacy researchers themselves sometimes operate under the same assumption, as people see in Mills's persuasive observation that "sophisticated technological knowledge is now a highly demanded credential for cosmopolitan recognition in globalised networks".
