Composition Forum 41 - Spring 2019 - Going Public in an Age of Digital Anxiety

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by kopisore

Composition studies seeks to help students go public through new technologies of literacy, yet the field remains anxious because students often already write for varied public audiences across digital contexts. Students themselves also experience anxiety in a destabilized rhetorical environment where authority, argument, and audience are not stable. The article proposes five topoi—presence, persistence, permeability, promiscuity, and power—to name the anxieties, affordances, writing dispositions, and challenges they create for composition pedagogy.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages14

Reading Time35 min

AccessFree to download

Going Public in an Age of Digital Anxiety

Presence

Persistence

Permeability

Promiscuity

Power

Current Issue From the Editors Weblog Editorial Board Editorial Policy Submissions Archives Accessibility Search Composition Forum 41, Spring 2019 Going Public in an Age of Digital Anxiety: How Students Negotiate the Topoi of Online Writing Environments David Gold, Merideth Garcia, and Anna V. Knutson Abstract: Though composition studies has long sought to leverage new technologies of literacy to help students go public, we remain anxious about our ability to do so, as students commonly enter our classrooms already composing for diverse public audiences in a variety of digital contexts. Yet students, too, are often anxious about these new modes of composition, which circulate in a destabilized rhetorical environment where traditional understandings of authority, argument, and audience no longer hold. This article identifies five topoi of this new rhetorical landscape—presence, persistence, permeability, promiscuity, and power—describing the anxieties and affordances they present for student writers, the dispositions toward writing they foster, and the challenges and opportunities they pose for composition. This framework provides a critical vocabulary for compositionists seeking to help students negotiate emerging networked publics. Online writing makes us anxious. As three scholars and students of the digital{1} we ought to be more sanguine. Collectively, we have embraced a succession of online writing affordances—from HTML to blogs to wikis to Twitter Analytics—and sought to share them with our students. We belong to a field that has long been invested in leveraging new technologies of literacy to help students go public, an interest that has only intensified over the last decade, as new writing platforms have led to new writing ecologies in which members of highly social “networked publics”(boyd,“Social”) write as a “mass daily experience”(Brandt 3) as part of an emerging “participatory culture”(Jenkins et al. ) . We should thus be ideally poised to help students navigate the affordances of this new terrain. Yet we often find our pedagogy inadequate, our vocabulary limited, and our students hesitant to participate in the very deliberative spaces new writing technologies ostensibly foster. We do not believe we are alone. Long-standing concerns in the field about the teaching of public writing—whether classrooms can serve as publics, assignments transfer to public settings, public writing spaces serve a democratic public sphere (Eberly; Ervin; Gogan; Wardle)—have only been exacerbated by the advent of new writing technologies, and scholars have expressed particular concern about the toxicity of online public discourse, corporate ownership of “public” writing spaces, and an increasingly privatized and neoliberal public sphere (Duffy; Giroux; Welch) . Against these forces, students have often been treated as hapless, even willing victims (Bauerlein; Carr) by scholars expressing a grim technological determinism (Baym 27-44) . Yet even generous readings of students’technoliteracy practices sometimes discount the deeply felt challenges students experience in negotiating the terrain of participatory culture, and it is our goal in this essay to call greater scholarly attention to these experiences and to further a pedagogical conversation in response. Our students are not naïve. But, like us, they are conflicted. On the one hand, they are immersed in emerging writing technologies and practicing public writing; not only do they enter our classrooms already composing for diverse public audiences in a variety of digital contexts, they often employ sophisticated strategies for doing so. At the sametime, they are often anxious about these new modes of composition, which circulate in a destabilized rhetorical environment where traditional understandings of authority, argument, audience, and other classroom staples no longer hold. In the “habitus of the new”(Papacharissi and Easton), technological affordances we have

FAQs

What problem does the article focus on regarding students and online writing?

It examines how students and composition instructors both experience anxiety when writing for public audiences in digital environments. The article highlights a destabilized rhetorical landscape where traditional views of authority, argument, and audience no longer hold.

What are the five topoi introduced for the new rhetorical landscape?

The article identifies five topoi: presence, persistence, permeability, promiscuity, and power. These frame the anxieties and affordances students face and the dispositions those forces foster.

How do networked publics change the risks of writing?

The article argues that rhetorical failure can have higher stakes than in traditional classrooms. When writing is public, an unwise or ineffective moment may forever shape how a writer is defined.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by kopisore