Navigating discourses in place in the world of Webkinz

Abstract
Geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003) frames this analysis of play, multimodal collaboration, and peer mediation as players navigate barriers to online connectivity in a children’s social network and gaming site. A geosemiotic perspective enables examination of children’s web play as discourses in place: fluidly converging and diverging interactions among four factors: (1) social actors, (2) interaction order, (3) visual semiotics, and (4) place semiotics. The video data are excerpted from an ethnographic study of a computer club for primary school-aged children in an afterschool program serving working-class and middle-class families in a US Midwest university community. Discourses of schooling in the computer room and Webkinz complicated children’s goal of coordinated game play and mutual participation in online games. Barriers to online connection produced ruptures that foregrounded childrens’ collaborative management of time and space. This foregrounding makes typically backgrounded practices, modes, and discourses visible and available for deconstruction and critique.
Description
This is the postprint, author's accepted manuscript version of this article after peer review.
Keywords
discourses in place, virtual worlds, online play, peer mediation, nexus analysis, multimodal analysis, mediated discourse analysis, Scollon, geosemiotics
Citation
Wohlwend, K. E., Vander Zanden, S., Husbye, N. E., & Kuby, C. R. (2011). Navigating discourses in place in the world of Webkinz. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 11(2), 141-163.
DOI
10.1177/1468798411401862
Relation
Rights
Type
Article