“Devilish Smartphones” and the “Stone-Cold” Internet: Implications of the Technology Addiction Trope in College Student Digital Literacy Narratives

Abstract

Responding to danah boyd's 2014 study, It's Complicated, this article uses evidence from a sampling of 75 digital literacy narratives, produced within first-year composition courses, to show that college students often describe their embodied and virtual social experiences in bifurcated terms. Through analyzing a sample of digital literacy narratives using a corpus tool (VoyantTools), I captured word frequency and collocations to conclude that a significant percentage of undergraduate students in my sample largely differentiate their virtual and embodied activities in spite of the fact that ample evidence suggests that students move fluidly between online and offline spaces for both their school and social lives (Gee, 2003, Vie, 2008, Buck, 2012). This article works through four case studies from this corpus to explore how the perceived differences between virtual and embodied interactions get described. Through the trope of digital “addiction,” virtual interactions become pathologized and problematically create a bifurcated perception that does not reflect what we know about how twenty-first century writers work (Hawisher & Selfe, 2000). To demonstrate to students the complexity of digital literacy practices, this article concludes with a call to encourage instructors to model the fluidity of virtual and embodied interactions to undergraduate writing students. “Smart phones are making my housemates and me become anti-social. We may be sociable in virtual social network, but virtual is virtual, and it's difficult to correlate with real life… Staring at my cell phone will estrange my friends from me. At the end, I just want to tell my dear friends, when spending time with people you care about, please put your smartphone away.”- Excerpt from “Grace's” student digital literacy narrative, “Stop Phubbing”