Cutting Through “The Fog of Scrolling”: Understanding Students' Entangled Digital Reading Through Metacognitive Reflections on Self-Made Video-Recordings

Abstract

As meaning-making increasingly happens in digital spaces, it is essential for researchers to examine how students learn to critically read and navigate within and across constantly changing online platforms. This qualitative study examines university students' experiences reading and navigating online. To do so, the author examines self-created reflections based on video recordings of participants' time spent reading in online spaces. Participants recorded themselves reading on the internet and then watched these videos, creating commentaries about what they noticed about how they navigated the web. Findings highlight the role of social media as a catalyst for inquiry online; participants' constant movement as its own experiential purpose; the role of stimulation-seeking, multimodality, and distraction; and the ways that digital platforms channeled participants toward consumer sites and shaped their thinking as consumers as they engaged online. The author discusses these findings in relation to the dominant approaches to teaching digital reading for online environments awash in disinformation and manipulative content. The paper closes with suggestions for digital reading researchers and educators and discusses the incorporation of reflective video creation as a part of digital literacy instruction.