We argue that the commonly used metrics for science communication video engagement, such as the number of views, reveal little about the longer-term impact on viewers. To explore this potential impact, the authors analyzed the comments of a video they created with Kurzgesagt, a professional science communication YouTube channel with 20 million subscribers. The video, “We lied to you…and we’ll do it again,” directly addresses the challenges of simplifying complex content for viewers. Such simplifications will never be able to capture a scientific topic’s nuances, so Kurzgesagt strives for transparency about each video’s limitations, with the goal of inspiring viewers to learn more.

This web text investigates how student users and nonusers perceive and operate within anonymous social media platforms. Through a survey and a small batch of qualitative interviews, I examine the ways that students are using anonymous applications and the extent to which anonymity influences how they navigate these spaces.

This video project considers participatory composition and media platforms like YouTube and Twitch, primarily focusing on how the latter’s infrastructure promotes online community participation and collaborative narratives. Viewers develop an understanding of the technology and together expand upon their media literacies engagements through textual, verbal, aural, and multimodal communication.

In this webtext, I develop an in situ approach for the rhetorical study of large-scale social media data. Grounding this in situ methodology in rhetoric and feminist critiques of data and visualization, this webtext models techniques and strategies for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing Twitter data.

In this article, I propose a social process for digital forgetting (or promoting forgetfulness of media traces that should be relatively inconsequential) using one successful example from Twitter. One example is of course not exhaustive, but it was chosen as a representative model of the ways users are learning to forget. If our systems are not built to forget, we might consider how we can do so not (only) by combating technological functions, but by working with them.

This webtext considers how educational technology platforms challenge student authorship and ownership, focusing on three platforms: Turnitin, Twitter, and Canvas. These platforms represent a range of platform types—a plagiarism detection system, a social media platform, and a learning management system—and support an assortment of composing practices and platform-based interactions that give rise to tensions in authorship.

Using anonymous, location-based social media applications in the writing classroom can heighten student awareness of other situational factors online, such as time, place, and feeling. By engaging with student posts and their accompanying reflections, this text argues for the use of anonymous social media applications in our pedagogy to help students engage ethically in digital spaces.

In this webtext, Hidalgo and Grimes respond to Kristine Blair’s call to make online spaces more hospitable to women’s social professional and political goals by developing six social media guidelines rooted in feminism. They argue that feminism provides key insights on how to create online communication styles that foster positive and productive interactions.

Pinterest has generally been characterized as a women's space, and this characterization is influential on not only users' experiences of the site but also how rhetoric happens in this space. Exploring how rhetoric happens in this social media space can exemplify the everyday public rhetoric that shapes the composing practices and civic engagements of digital citizens who use Pinterest and other social media sites.

I consider the “when” of rhetorical literacies by exploring individual and aggregate posts in the popular photo-sharing service Instagram as meaningful pivot points along broader continua of literate activity. In this way, social media participation is seen as a nexus and fulcrum from which scholars and students of writing and digital rhetorics may trace literate activity both backwards and forwards—to see social media as one public component in a host of self-sponsored writing and rhetorical practices.

By making these moves more visible through this type of analysis, I explain why this kind of social web participation is a significant site of study for digital rhetoric, one that can help expand how we teach social media writing practices to our students. These are students who may very well already be participating in similar fandoms and spaces and entering careers where they will be responsible for responding to these issues and setting policies for producers, consumers, crafters, and participants.

[M]y goal is not to attempt to show uniqueness in fan tweets; even those that might be considered run-of-the-mill fan-type writings that express fan-type adoration are important and meaningful. Rather, I present composing practices as suggested by a grounded theory approach so fan writing on Twitter may begin to be understood on its own terms and not through pre-conceived (and often incorrect) notions about fans, fan writing, and writing on Twitter.

[F]or composition teachers who hope to utilize social media to support student writing, recognition of the rhetorical potential of students’ use of multiple social sites—as active users of not just Facebook, but also Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and others—emerges as a necessary prerequisite to meeting student expertise in rhetoric.

This video presents one academic's experiences using Facebook in service of his professional life in order to contend that Facebook can be valuable to faculty as both a site for professional conversations and a social network that enables users to create and maintain social capital.

The purpose of this project was to explore and document one approach for integrating social media--Facebook, really--into freshman writing. The assignment using Facebook was first given in 2006 and twice more through 2009. Our report on the project takes the form of a network; the content is distributed across the wall, info, and notes sections of the narrator profile, The Facebook Papers, as well as across the pages of all of the authors.

This installation is a personal and cathartic engagement with my initial inability to cope with my daughter's cancer. It details events that began in August of 2008 and concluded, in a sense, in February of 2009. I offer it with hopes of helping digitally oriented rhetoric and composition scholars "determin[e] a should for a we" (Patricia Sullivan & James E. Porter, 1997, p. 103). How should we approach pedagogy in the early 21st century? My tentative answer is to approach it less with aims of "constructing knowledge" and more with hopes of "negotiating encounters.

Penich-Thacker points to the increasing digital presence of the U.S. military, not only on official dot.mil sites but also on commercial social networking sites, and suggests that the interactions and intersections of military and civilian personnel online challenge the notion of "fundamental differences" between these populations.

Lt. Gen. Caldwell is a three-star general who has publicly promoted the use of digital media technologies—from blogs to YouTube to Twitter—by military personnel of all ranks. He discusses training, security, and other issues associated with the use of information technologies by active-duty military personnel.