“yeet nitro boosted”: A Postdigital Perspective on Young People’s Literacy Engagements With the Discord Platform

Abstract

While the influence of digital technologies on literacy expression has long been a central concern of literacy studies, the proliferation of digital platforms across contemporary life has prompted increased scholarly attention to their influence on literacy. How, this scholarship asks, do platforms’ interfaces, algorithms, and business models produce particular formations of literacy, and what do those formations mean for ethical and equitable literacies learning and living? To reckon with these questions, this article brings a postdigital literacies perspective to data collected at the Giga-Games Camp, a video game design summer camp, where young people interacted with each other using Discord, a social media platform. The author describes how the Giga-Gamers and the Discord platform engaged in the mutually articulated platform practice of economics and argues that attention to such platform practices can help educators and researchers respond to the economic forces (re)shaping literacy in the platform society.