Abstract:

Digital technologies facilitate movement across time, space, and sociocultural borders. They are used to bring people together across oceans and continents. Increasingly teachers are adopting digital texts in the classroom, however, if we hope to engage adolescent learners, we must move beyond using digital texts in the classroom to gain a deeper understanding of students and their ways of knowing (McLean). This paper explores the digital literacy practices of immigrant adolescents living in Johannesburg, South Africa. Through an examination of their social networking sites I consider how they use digital media and social networks to negotiate their identities. Given that identity is essential to the human experience, and the Internet has provided a new context for its exploration, identity is examined in this case through the lens of Hall (2000) and others and positioned in terms of how the adolescents construct and re-construct themselves within the host country and diaspora.

Keywords:

Adolescent literacies, digital literacies, diasporic identities.