Transient Literacies in Action

Book excerpt: "Networked mobile technologies (laptops, phones, tablets) complicate environments where they are used. These devices' capacity for movement and exchange opens the door to new resources, social arrangements, and cognitive challenges for users. This book focuses on the impact of these devices on writing by exploring transient literacies, or writers' everyday practices of spatial analysis and positioning that locate mobile composing and integrate materials across screens and physical spaces. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, the book traces how 22 writers across an independent coffee shop and campus social commons navigate their social and spatial environments while writing texts that range from academic to personal to professional. The book argues that many mobile composers position places outside their homes and offices as a commons that provides access to materials. Composers in these spaces work in complicated atmospheres of ambient sociability, in which they navigate multiple social channels simultaneously. They also continually produce new models of attention as an outcome of interacting with people and technologies while writing. Based on this conception of writing as phenomenologically experienced in participation with materials, the book concludes by envisioning composing learning as a process of continually adjusting embodied practices based on new encounters with materials"--