Platformization, social media, and investing in unequal digital literacy practices

Abstract This paper examines how the platformization of social media and the material conditions in which these technologies are used shape how transnational learners invest in unequally valued digital literacy practices. As platforms reconfigure cultural practices and imaginations, L2 learners negotiate online norms and conventions to participate agentively in these spaces, positioning themselves while also positioning others. Based on data from a case study involving 16 immigrant Filipino secondary school students in Canada, this paper highlights how various inequalities of access, participation, and representation circumscribe social media practices. Findings show how the material designs of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat encourage patterns of interaction that become the basis of legitimate participation in these platforms, privileging certain aesthetic norms and class-inflected tastes. Learners are socialized into these conventions in ways that can exclude peers who do not have access to particular resources or whose semiotic productions are not deemed valuable. This asymmetric distribution of resources shapes practices that provide contrasting opportunities for L2 use and expansion of social networks. Tracing these inequalities to platformization, this paper proposes digital repertoires and digital socialization as constructs to draw attention to how learners develop and enact digital literacies that are valued unequally and that shape different opportunities for learning.