ABSTRACT
Texts are not what they used to be. Consider the morning commute on a New York City subway. People still mark off their social boundaries by keeping their noses in a newspaper, or last night’s homework, but it is more common to see people plugged into their mp3 players or tapping out text messages on their phones. Screens that used to take up entire desktops are now “personal, portable and pedestrian” (Ito, Okabe, & Matsuda, 2005) and dis/play images, music, and animation as well as writing. Much has been made of the shift “from page to screen” (Snyder, 1998) but with the rise of social networking sites, video gaming, fanfi ction, blogging, and YouTube, texts have become part of a new web of signifi cation-Web 2.0-a term that has come to signify the latest version of the Internet in which people are producers, not just consumers, of culture. Wikipedia and “WeMedia” (Bowman & Willis, 2003) capture this participatory ethos of interactivity and involvement. Expertise is under siege as anyone with time, interest, and digital access can contribute to deciding what counts as knowledge on Wikipedia, and what counts as news on websites serving as outlets for “citizen journalism” (e.g., blogs, Flickr, as well as media outlets such as https://www.cnn.com/ireport/). The emergence of Web 2.0 calls into question the conventional defi nition of a text as a static, monomodal, material surface that relays a writer’s intended meaning to a reader.
