Sixth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

This paper offers insights and particularly effective student writing samples from ten years of teaching “Youth Identity in a Networked Culture,” a composition class at UC Santa Cruz. The course is an investigation into how our reliance on digital media has shaped our relationships with ourselves and with one another, and invites college students to use writing to examine the digital selves they have created. In their own piercing language, students discuss how their family lives and the intimacy of their connections with others have been impacted by their reliance on digital devices to mediate their human interactions. The study offers selections from persuasive student compositions about the effects of the students’ decision to shift their identities back offline, and how that decision has benefited their relationships with themselves and others. The insights in these student essays offer an inspiring call-to-arms for their peers to greatly diminish their constant online connection. In these remarkable excerpts from their essays, students describe their own reliance on digital media—often depicted as an addiction—and the insights they gained after undertaking a “digital detox,” or break from their devices, which allowed them to see their dependence for the first time. The paper also includes the essay prompts that generated this powerful student writing, and address how this composition classroom has functioned as a highly effective laboratory in which these students have been able to produce revealing, self-aware, and perceptive writing about their online identities.