7.20 Some more thoughts on focus= Why study LOCAL participation in global communities?

The 7.13 post forgets to nail down a relation to writing studies/new literacies.  It misses the question of WHY it might be important to study the ethos associated with hyperlives (within the context of particular groups of individuals participating on Tumblr, NaNoWriMo, Fantasy Sports, E-lit writing, IFLS, and FanFic).  So I am going to put up some notes here (I have started reading some of the New Literacy/Writing Studies stuff=Language, Ethnography & Education: Bridging NLS & Bourdieu, Jennifer Trainor's ethnographic study of racism + emotion and writing classrooms - and going back to the Ito et al and reviewing some of the important ethnographies/explorations of ethos in writing studies and thinking about how they were "used". 

So I am thinking that our proposal has to ground itself in WHY it is important to study the ethos of the particular groups we have chosen.  So far, my answer to the "so what" question is:

Line of reasoning for why study ethos:  Writers/thinkers bring discourses from their communities of practices into their other communications.  These discourses are often embodied in ways of being (ethos) and are often unconscious so that individuals may not be able to articulate them.  Writing studies has a long history of using ethnographic and autoethnographic studies (including self-authored literacy narratives)  to understand the "ways with words" individuals bring to the classroom, and how those discourses affect the ways individuals will "hear" and respond to classroom discourses (for example, Dyson, Gee, Heath,  Hicks, Rose, Selfe & Hawisher, Trainor). 

Why local:  larger studies (Livingstone, Ito et al, Macarthur foundation) are suited to providing general descriptions of broad patters.  Our study provides detailed description of local instantiations of those patterns.  From similar perspectives in that all authors are members of a single university community with "shared" demographics.  This does not make us the "same" but places us within a set of material world circumstances and life styles that are enough different from lives at residential universities, more suburban or rural institutions, or groups not associated with universities.  For example, while the focus on "youth" and technology may be appropriate for many universities, it is not so useful here at Kean, where more than X% of our students are not traditional students. 

Why study hyperlife ethos: see DeVoss, Cushman, Grabill discussion of affordances + Kress on modality; other theorists (Lankshear Knobel) on distinctness of culture/ethos

Connection to Writing studies  understanding of Discourse/identity/ethos assumptions which may be experienced as obstacles to learning (see Trainor's discussion of emotions + learning + discourse).