Multimodal Chat-Based Apps: Enhancing Copresence When Writing

Abstract

This chapter examines how digital platforms and social media may be integrated as part of academic writing processes. These digital tools can be used to facilitate students’ development as writers who are agile across modes of text production, collaboration, and dissemination. Writing on multimodal apps and platforms such as WhatsApp and Discord have encouraged students to write in ways that are collective and collaborative. Students are taking up brainstorming and “pre-writing” activities on these public platforms as a way to come to writing in virtual contexts in the copresence of others. These forms of “prewriting” are increasingly becoming part of writing processes and bleeding over into how students’ final academic pieces of writing take shape. Students are not only using these social writing processes and genres in their academic writing but they are also becoming digital content creators as they enter their professional spheres.

1 Overview: Introduction

Digital technologies have impacted writing practices across almost every genre and context. Networked, chat-based tools that support collaboration and allow for multimodal composition have played a role in this transformation. Academic writing and production are no exception. The processes and activities an individual employs for preparing to write for both academic, creative and information sharing purposes, or what we term “coming to writing”, including research, information gathering and coordination, are not always evident or recognized parts of the writing process in a traditional sense. Increasingly this coming to writing process involves digital writing across different platforms and within social environments. In this chapter, we examine the potential of chat programs (i.e., WhatsApp, Discord, and Gather.Town) for idea generation and coordination, peer community access, and resource sharing to support coming to writing activity and prewriting practices. The examination is predicated on a review of how researchers have named and understood the affordances of chat and IM for writing in academic contexts. While using chat and IM is a common phenomenon in practice, it is only emerging as an area of explicit research in writing studies. However, to date much of the work focuses on the potential of chat-based platforms as learning environments in Higher Education (Alt, 2017; Mpungose, 2019; Nyasulu & Chawinga, 2019; Zulkanain et al., 2020), students’ chat-based interaction and engagement in secondary education learning communities (Durgungoz & Durgungoz, 2021; Rosenberg & Asterhan, 2018), or anecdotal accounts of students integrating chat-platforms into their academic work.

In this chapter, we consider how the integration of these “non-academic” platforms have shifted the ways in which students are coming to writing and how they compose multimodal academic works. Affordances highlighted by Friedman and Friedman (2013) and Quan-Haase (2008) facilitate possible connections that could provide further insight on the ways in which informal non-academic writing and exchange on networked platforms are part of more institutionalized writing practices. The potential of these tools for academic tasks needs to be investigated in more detail by writing researchers. Coming to writing offers a particularly robust framework for understanding how the messy, pre-writing stages of text production have become blended into almost all stages of students’ writing processes. Writing has become a process where multimodal chat-based forums are always on, always available, and influencing the development of their ideas through the copresence of others. Copresence provides individuals access to collective ideas and resources through networked communities (Latzko-Toth, 2010). Copresence provides the context for examining how academic writing activities shift to social network systems. The chapter concludes with suggestions about future research on how the copresence of individuals within IM or chat communities afford information sharing and exchange that potentially translates to concrete composition processes and the end product of academic writing.

Coming to writing names the conceptual process for writing preparation more broadly. Coming to writing is not solely tied to academic writing, it can apply for novelists, artists, and social media influencers. It’s the mental and social preparation for writing. Within an academic context, coming to writing might include research-based preparation, organizing lecture notes, coordinating resources, and developing an understanding of the genre conventions that are recognized and rewarded in relation to specific disciplines. This chapter examines how chat-based apps such as WhatsApp, Discord, and even Gather.Town have contributed to this process. These chat-based apps have expanded the idea of coming to writing through online networks that facilitate the copresence of others to support the process. The sense of copresence promoted by multimodal chat apps have shifted how writers understand and engage these early stages of their writing processes through online social mechanisms. Coming to writing involves all the social interactions that inform, test, and confirm ideas, strategies, and techniques, including idea formation and coordination through the casual conversations that emerge from social interactions. Dialogue is afforded by networked platforms accessible to students continuously, anytime, anywhere. Coming to writing practices may not be identified in relation to a specific course or assignment. Rather they are interwoven into routine writing activities that help us coordinate diverse components of everyday life using “portable digital writing devices” that keep us digitally connected (Pigg, 2014, p. 252; Spinuzzi et al., 2019). Two particular forms of networked communication, chat platforms and Instant Messaging (IM) apps, provide convenient, accessible and affordable sites for prewriting activity and the process of coming to writing.

IM through social media and ICT apps, and digital platforms that afford interactive chat rather than sanctioned Learning Management Systems (LMS) have become ubiquitous for connecting, sharing, querying, and as part of note taking for documenting and remembering (Pigg et al., 2014; Quan-Haase, 2008). Students engage in chat and messaging activity as a large part of their everyday writing practices and are comfortable moving conveniently and fluidly between managing messages and coordinating conversations, researching (through Google), ideation, testing or confirming ideas, setting up social engagements, remembering “stuff” (Pigg et al., 2014, p. 102) and supporting others in their networks. Vie (2015) has sketched out strategies for incorporating social media into higher education writing courses. Often pedagogical approaches like Pigg et al.'s, Quan-Haase’s, and Vie’s integrate social networking systems that allow instructors and students to work simultaneously, across digital platforms and environments. Students in particular have all this activity turned on in the background all the time, so coming to writing and composing becomes more diffuse, not always distinct from everyday details within digital chatter. While students may not use messaging or chat to work through an outline for their next essay, their academic work and pre-writing composing activities cannot be separated from their everyday digital writing practices and spaces.

The affordances of collaboration and content sharing enabled by chat platforms and apps are ripe for helping students “come” to writing outside the classroom, through socially embedded knowledge construction in social contexts not usually considered learning environments. Using social networks for coming to writing involves discussing possible topics related to the course and thinking about potential purpose, function, audience, and genre of the writing. Coming to writing entails thinking together with others in preparation for writing. These processes replace some of the formal prewriting activities that were part of early process movement writing pedagogies. Overall, the social processes involved in coming to writing in these alternative spaces affords “dialogic thinking” (Alt, 2017, p. 626). Networked spaces such as chat platforms facilitate idea generation and coordination, peer cooperation and collaboration, and multimodal resource sharing to support coming to writing activity and prewriting practices. Students can use multimodal chat platforms later in the process to return to brainstorming or to open opportunities for revising and extending a section of their academic papers. The use of chat platforms and apps has evolved in ways that afford socially situated prewriting, organizing, and composing with the support of individualized on-demand communities.

2 Core Idea of the Technology: Developing Copresence Contexts in Chat Apps and Platforms

Originating in the 1970s during an energy crisis, the primary function of early chat technologies was to enable conferencing and collaboration between individuals who were geographically dispersed (Latzko-Toth, 2010). Early chat afforded online community building through small group communication that could be physically scattered across locations, yet digitally connected - the core idea surrounding chat as a platform-based technology. Chat, including IM, further evolved since the early development of ICQ (I seek you) in 1996 emerging as an application that is “near-synchronous communication between two or more users who are known to each other” (Quan-Haase, 2008, p. 106). The development of chat platforms has afforded users access to multiple conversations on a need or want-to-know basis occurring simultaneously alongside other everyday, personal, professional, and academic activities. While mobile phone-based texting may not have originally appeared to be a promising technology to use alongside academic writing activities by the early 2000s, university students were incorporating IM in their academic activities. Early online sites developed for conferencing and collaboration created ground for later apps to develop the always available, on demand forms of copresence that many students now incorporate into their academic writing processes. For the purposes of this chapter, we see chat as both platform technology and digital production/practice. The following sections further describe the affordances of chat as an enabling technology, a social practice that supports copresence, and a coming-to-writing environment.

2.1 Chat as a Site for Academic Writing within a Community of Writers

The ubiquitous use of chat-based apps as well as the technological development of the apps themselves has facilitated an increase in the ways students incorporate chat-based forms of communication into their academic writing processes. Apps such as WhatsApp, Discord, and Gather.Town offer students spaces where they can be co-present with others and draw on the availability of “on demand” groups to answer questions related to their writing activities. These “always on” groups may be from within their particular courses, from their wider university communities, or even emerge as more distributed groups across different geographic areas and institutions. Examining how these apps have developed both inside and outside of academic spaces provides insight on how multimodal, “chat” apps are influencing students’ academic writing practices. While there might be some ambiguity in terms of what sorts of writing we are talking about, we argue that the porous nature of multimodal, chat programs as “preparation” spaces for academic writing means that it is the interplay, the ways in which ideas move between chat programs and formal academic writing spaces is key.

As “chat” programs have changed over the last thirty years, their utility as places where students can connect, share ideas, and coordinate activities around academic writing assignments has transformed in profound ways. The move from text-based chat applications to multimodal apps has seen software platforms evolve from tools to enhance brainstorming and peer-to-peer feedback to cross-platform mobile apps that promote a sense of copresence and promise “on demand” community support. The technological developments of these “chatroom” apps have been driven by changes outside of academic circles; however, within writing studies there has been a steady investment in working to adapt and utilize chat programs for academic writing tasks. For instance, in the late 1980s, the “InterChange” module was developed by writing researchers, teachers, and programmers at the University of Texas as part of the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment (DIWE) (LeBlanc, 1992). The early work of Lester Faigley (1993) and others on using these LAN-based chats evolved into more sustained conversations around how platforms could be used to build “communities of writers” within college and university courses during the early 1990s (Crawford et al., 1998; Essid & Hickey, 1998; Palmquist et al., 1998). While writing researchers, writing program administrators, and software designers were wrestling with creating and integrating chat software into college writing courses, the use of chat technologies was growing rapidly outside of academic contexts. SMS texting on mobile phones exploded as a form of digital, written communication (albeit brief and extremely short form). Students increasingly turned to these non-academic, but familiar tools when they needed to take part in cooperative or coordinated actions for their writing assignments.

Much of the recent research on instant messaging and chatting focuses on the sociability afforded by networked communications engaged by individuals for different social purposes. However, little research exists on how instant message and chat platforms afford a purposeful sociability that supports idea generation and organization for academic writing through mobile devices. Pigg et al. (2014) position mobile phones as “remarkably agile writing technologies” or “writing devices” (p. 95) that afford students speed, reach, continual access, and interactivity (pp. 92, 95). They situate writing as a form of coordination and managing activity in everyday life as well as academic life. Pigg et al. (2014) argue that students at college and university use writing as a way of organizing “personal, professional, and academic memory, sociability and planning” (p. 93). Students in their study ubiquitously used mobile phones as devices for coming to writing, coordinating activity and for actual writing production (p. 100). Students were customizing a sense of copresence and individualizing the groups they were connecting with through their phones. Their writing processes were being reshaped in ways that they valued.

Chat threads have also served as archives of thoughts and places for the coordination of events and conversations. Students catalog notes, observations, and ideas so they may be retrieved as a reminder later on. The social practices and archival affordances of chat support academic work in the prewriting stage through reminders of ideas, resources, through links and lecture notes sent to oneself. The on-demand individualized networks support the evolution of this archive. Students’ writing processes, as Pigg et al. (2014) and Quan-Hasse (2008) have shown, are developing, and changing based on the availability of multimodal, chat apps. Programs such as Discord, WhatsApp, and Gather.Town have come to reach across devices; they are available simultaneously on mobile phones, desktops, laptops, and tablets for students. Students’ reliance on apps that provide, or claim to provide, access to individualized, “on demand” communities and anytime access to peer feedback to answer questions about writing tasks has shifted how students come to a writing task. These technologies have not only digitized writing, but they have also digitized the conversations that happen around writing within information rich social networks.

3 On-demand Copresence

Latzko-Toth (2010) defines chat activity as “social synchrony” based on a participant’s presence via some form of networked digital screen. He contends that chat, particularly chat that has evolved through IM requires “simultaneous presence” a form of “copresence” within a virtually shared space (p. 362). Chat affords the sustained copresence between individuals who know each other and have mutual interests that support the connection. Chat-based platforms assume a synchronous reciprocity of the co-present chat group members, a form of conferencing, while instant messaging, a sub-form of chat, assumes a background copresence where individuals respond if available (Latzko-Toth, 2010). IM is always on—always available and presents as abbreviated conversations rather than content laden communications like email. The brevity of messages affords immediate conversation coordination, exchange, and feedback. The affordance of copresence is based on the receiver(s) choosing to interact and acknowledge the presence of others. IM copresence is “self-centred” relying on social relations that already exist based on a shared purpose, rather than more traditional notions of a gathering site (chat room) or “conference” where individuals are attracted to the site to gain new social connections (Latzko-Toth, 2010, p. 369). Latzko-Toth (2010) states that copresence is “an affordance more than a reality” as it exists within the individual’s “awareness of” the potential presence of another who can lend support in a myriad of ways (p. 369). The copresence of chat and IM is predicated on networks of individual need and preference, what Manuel Castells (2001) calls “networked individualism” (pp. 128–129) or what we have termed, on-demand communities.

Networked apps and platforms afford communication, content sharing, collaboration and copresence through on-demand peer communities outside the conventions of the traditional classroom context. Students use platforms such as Instagram, Whats-App, Discord and Gather. Town to connect socially to access information and engage in what Pigg (2014) terms “composing habits,” to navigate everyday routines within information rich nonacademic virtual spaces. Many apps, particularly those perceived as familiar virtual spaces which have provided positive support in the past, afford social connection, open and constant conversation that becomes a comfortable and convenient learning/writing space. The ways in which students access chat platforms through mobile devices for academic work and coming to writing, highlights their familiar ways of communicating through networks.

3.1 Copresence as Peer Support in Non-academic Spaces

The ease of accessing information and communication channels through Discord and Whatsapp provides the opportunity for anywhere, anytime collective learning. WhatsApp developed as a cross-platform text messaging and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service, foregrounds users’ access to each other through mobile devices. It enables users to not only send text and voice messages to each other, but also to share images, documents, and other content. Whereas Discord, originally designed as a chat platform to supplement online gaming, has evolved into a social media platform that connects participants through online servers where they can use text or voice chat. The written chats are frequently saturated with gifs, emojis, and other multimodal forms of writing on these servers. As a virtual office app, Gather.Town on the other hand shares some of the affordances for connecting with others and using multiple modalities (i.e., visual and audio elements) to support writing activities available in WhatsApp and Discord. However, as a platform designed to allow users to set up an online space where they can meet with others, Gather.Town’s interface and functionality more closely resembles a top-down viewed video game rather than a chat designed for mobile phones. WhatsApp, Discord, and Gather.Town employ user-driven processes, with user-driven dynamics that have been appropriated by students from their everyday non-academic lives in the service of academic work within their socially networked communities. Alternative, non-academic communication spaces provide students opportunities to engage with others in ways that are meaningful to them, potentially inspiring collaboration in new ways (Alt, 2017). The copresence afforded by chat platforms and apps supports group communication that provides an always available space for generating and trying on ideas, discussing logistics, sourcing, and sharing techniques, creating socially inspired field notes, and for provoking feedback to everyday composing habits that are part of the coming -to -writing process within peer support communities.

4 Functional Specifications: Idea Generation, Peer Networks, and Resource Sharing

The perception of copresence fostered by multimodal chat platforms and apps offers support for writers’ idea generation and coordination, peer community access, and resource sharing to support coming to writing activities and prewriting practices in academic writing contexts, even though these software tools were not originally designed for these purposes. Coworking, a precursor to copresence in the sense that individuals work alone but within a physical proximity to each other (Spinuzzi, 2012), and copresence, working in virtual proximity, afford the possibility of momentary and spontaneous collaborations that may be part of idea generation within the coming to writing process. Collaboration is organic in this case, spontaneous between available individuals. If we consider the functional specifications and affordances of Whats-App, Discord, and Gather.Town, we come to see how these multimodal chat apps and platforms enhance how students generate ideas, access peer feedback, and share resources through a community of networked writers. The copresence of other writers provides opportunities for them to connect with other students in their courses, at their educational institutions, or from more distributed networks of students at other universities.

Given the increasingly frenetic pace at which academic writing processes are being digitized, it is not surprising students are using these apps and the connections they create to generate ideas, to coordinate with others, to gain access to peers working on similar issues, and to share resources. As multimodal chat apps, WhatsApp and Discord not only provide affordances related to developing a sense of copresence as students work on academic writing activities, but they also stretch writing beyond the textual, beyond the alphabetic, into realms where visual and audio elements impact students’ thinking and writing processes. The commonalities across how WhatsApp, Discord, and Gather.Town are being used highlight how university students value copresence as they work on academic writing tasks. They are not the only apps and platforms being used by students and faculty to support idea generation, the development of peer communities or networks, and resource sharing for academic writing tasks. However, they provide us with popular examples where multimodal connections with others are being used to support students’ academic writing.

Friedman and Friedman (2013) recognized key characteristics of social networked technologies, of which chat platforms and IM are a part. These characteristics provide the capacity for communication, collaboration, community, and creativity. The functional specificities afforded by the copresence of chat platforms support three aspects of coming to writing and ensuing composing habits identified as idea generation, peer network support, and multimodal resource sharing, all of which include the characteristics of socially networked technologies.

4.1 Idea Generation: Multimodal Brainstorming as Starting Point and Recursive Activity

Chat platforms and apps shift prewriting processes from being a technique integrated into students’ composing habits to something that emerges from a blending of social interactions and the idea formation required by academic writing assignments. It’s a different way of brainstorming by utilizing available social conversation to generate ideas for academic tasks through peer support communities. The text-based threads of chat and IM platforms enable individuals to keep track of conversations even if they choose not to contribute in the moment. The conversation threads function as “always available” records of the interactions that individuals can return to, expand on, and recirculate for potential feedback from co-present others inviting spontaneous albeit momentary collaboration. Voice-channels as well as text-channels assist in developing ideas. These important multimodal features of chat are being used more frequently in the form of livestreaming and composing, a way of recording similar to putting music to an Instagram post. In addition, users/composers can express affect by using emojis to signify their emotional responses to ideas and to the feedback they receive. Students describe using chat and IM platforms such as WhatsApp to discuss their initial topic ideas for various academic writing, particularly for collaborative work where idea brainstorming can be further fleshed out using other platforms such as Google docs or Zoom.

Copresence supports open idea generation within selected peer communities, where individuals try on ideas freely and reinforce relationships with others that support prewriting within an informal social environment. Spinuzzi’s (2012) research on coworking provides insight on what could be considered the precursor to virtual copresent working through social networks in terms of idea testing and peer support (see also Spinuzzi et al., 2019). Coworking, according to Spinuzzi, lessens isolation because of a feeling of community through the presence of others. The philosophy behind coworking places emphasis on communities made up of lone individuals working in the same physical space, i.e., individuals “working alone, together” (Spinuzzi, 2012, p. 400). The physical proximity of others within coworking spaces affords opportunities to collaborate on such things as idea generation and brainstorming, even if the collaboration is only momentary - a moment of “bouncing ideas” off others present. Students use chat and IM platforms to come to writing through social and communal support and resource sharing—a virtual extension of coworking that accentuates the anywhere, anytime opportunity for collaborative moments with copresent individuals. Working with the support of copresent others in media rich multimodal environments inspires questions such as what else can I do, and what else is possible, thereby enhancing the writing endeavor (Bowen & Whithaus, 2013).

4.2 Peer Networks: “Always There” Access to Individualized Communities

Copresence of chat platforms and apps function as consistent “sustained” communication channels that enable “peer teaching and resource sharing” (Durgungoz et al., 2021). Individuals use socially networked platforms to form relationships and clusters of relationships, and easily move between private and public communications and conversations within the space of the same mobile devices. For students, these relationships provide both intellectual and emotional support for constructing knowledge and answering questions around content, technique, and resource sharing. Whatsapp and Discord facilitate micro-community building, relationship forming, inquiry, testing, and social gathering logistics. These activities can occur simultaneously within the same space, providing continuous available support to writing and composing habits through background channels.

Students create micro-communities that support a diverse range of daily activities and composing habits including their academic writing through their “desire to dwell with friends” (Rosenberg & Asterhan, 2018). Chat platforms such as WhatsApp exist as part of students’ worlds, encouraging connectivity and conversation within the social environments in which they are afforded multimodal communication, and in which they are most comfortable. In Discord, servers can be created and moderated by anyone. Reyman and Sparby (2019) have examined how Discord relies on users to moderate content on servers they have created or servers they have joined. In many ways, the process of running a server may be more like curating an open and ever evolving stream of comments and resources and less like what we think of as traditional forms of moderating a discussion. These curated writing resources are “always there,” they are accessible not as artifacts, the way they would be on a static website, but rather as points within a discussion that can be revisited.

4.3 Resource Sharing: Multimodal Content Gathering and Sharing

Students report that they use Whatsapp and Discord for addressing questions and sharing resources around writing techniques and expectations, exchanging ideas and resources related to content creation and fielding logistical questions about events and opportunities. They use chat platforms and apps to learn about writing, to group chat about writing events, discuss techniques and conventions particularly around editing, and to organize further meetings, both virtual and face-to-face, to focus on the writing itself. Chat platforms such as Whatsapp and Discord facilitate the exchange of multimodal resources that may be used to augment learning about a topic or be integrated into the presentation of content within the writing product itself.

Chat and the copresent availability of resource sharing has increased multimodal opportunities for writing and composing. However, the focus on integrating multimodal texts within academic writing has shifted from discussion around innovative pedagogical practices in the field of writing instruction (Bowen & Whithaus, 2013; Reiss et al., 1998) to mainstream expectations that the digitalization of writing affords more experimentation with image, sound, and video as part of academic texts (Blevins, 2018). Chat platforms such as Whatsapp or Discord support the sharing of images/photos/memes, videos, and audio that create media rich environments, still within the flexible convenience of mobile devices. Multimodality in some of these instances is the multiplicity of voices through copresent support and information sharing and momentary collaboration, as much as it is compositions that are augmented by image and video. Writing within media rich environments offers the user the flexibility to use the tools that afford the most appropriate mode of interaction and one that is best suited to the context and purpose of the interaction (Rosenberg & Asterhan, 2018). Chat platforms and apps provide media rich environments that conveniently and easily facilitate resource sharing and composing through everyday, always on mobile devices.

5 Implications for Writing Theory and Practice: Copresence and Ambiance for Coming to Writing

When students use WhatsApp, Discord, or Gather.Town to support their academic writing, they are tapping into spaces originally designed to facilitate other forms of social interaction. These students are repurposing WhatsApp, Discord, or Gather.Town and making them into digital writing environments to support their “real” academic writing. Writing researchers, particularly those interested in the digitization of writing, need to continue to examine the details of how students are using these multimodal chat and virtual office apps as part of, their academic writing processes. The digitization of writing has seen shifts in the way we write every day and within academic and learning environments. However, further investigation is needed to better understand the impact of copresent writing with others within digitized virtual spaces. New forms of collaborative practice for academic writing are emerging and will continue to emerge and evolve through “non-writing and non-academic” apps and platforms. We need to document what is emerging in these cases and identify how to better facilitate these new forms of writing.

In the context of academic writing, students’ activities in these apps help them draw on the copresence of other student writers. Students participate in these forums for a variety of reasons, one of which is the coordination of their activities across a number of media environments in which they engage as part of their daily composing and socializing activities. Additionally, students garner support for their writing activities and gain a sense of belonging within an ambiance in which they feel comfortable and supported. Chat and virtual office apps allow students to build micro communities where they are not obligated to other members in a traditional sense, but rather participate in a drop in space where support and relationships exist in an always available form.

Students also use the channels on WhatsApp and Discord or the spaces in Gather.Town for sharing resources that help them complete the course-specific writing tasks they are working on (i.e., examples of successful essays from previous versions of the course or other resources). They are using these pieces of software to connect with clusters of people who will support their writing activities, their coming to writing. It’s not really a community in the traditional sense. It’s “relationships” but relationships to the content, the work, as much as it is to other users. As writing researchers from across multiple disciplines, we need to examine how these new communities of writers and their sense of connecting with others is shaping their academic writing processes. Chat platforms and virtual office apps provide sites for communal composing habits that support coming to writing through the copresence of others. These sites offer extensions to traditional spaces of academic work. However, what we still don’t understand in terms of coming to writing through the copresence of available others, is the tangible impact on the end-product, the textual evidence of the words and perhaps the images and the sounds that make it into academic writing, into academic presentations about the topics the students are writing on. We do know that copresence is becoming increasingly essential for students’ academic writing processes–it's about writing and connecting with others and what is meaningful to them. It’s about the supportive chat conversations where you post and someone else responds. But the exact contours of its dialogic nature have not yet been mapped out.

The conversations students have with others in these apps appear to be meaningful, connective, and hopefully productive. However, how does the copresence of others when you reach out with an idea or question or something new to share, impact the assignment you as a student writer are working on? There is the potential that someone will respond. Students are present together… working and writing in parallel with each other. However, we still don’t know the impact of copresence, through the opportunity for idea testing and access to feedback within individualized communities, on students’ development as writers. Questions around the differences in impact based on the discipline you are working in may have implications for working in design, in biology, in engineering, or in the humanities. Do you draw on different types of multimodal evidence in your academic writing depending on how you interact with others in WhatsApp, Discord, or Gather.Town? What about how each app or platform offers its affordances to the users? Do these make a difference? How are instructors deliberating incorporating these technologies into academic writing activities? These types of questions and the empirical studies to develop answers to them point to the necessity of continuing to examine how digital platforms are impacting students’ academic writing processes. Answering these questions is not only about developing particular platforms for academic writing, but also about considering how students actually experience the digitization of academic writing based on their lived experiences with multimodal chat and virtual office apps, and shape how they write and the others they write with.

6 Terms

Chat-based app: emerged from programs such as ICQ and mobile phone texting capabilities; as cross-platform technologies became increasingly present on mobile devices, laptops, and desktops, chat-based apps became a primary mode of synchronous communication; the next evolution in these tools was the development of multimodal chat-based apps that enabled both synchronous and asynchronous forms of communication (e.g., WhatsApp and Discord). Later collaborative tools (e.g., Gather.Town) incorporate elements from chat-based apps but also create a fuller place-based simulation.

Coming to writing: a way of naming the combined mental, conceptual, and physical process for preparing to write.

Copresence: the capacity to access the presence (and guidance) of others for information gathering and sharing through networked digital technologies

Multimodal: ways of communicating that draw on visual, linguistic, aural, gestural, and/or spatial modalities rather than only alphabetic text.

Prewriting: seen as activities that students and writers engage in before starting a formal writing task in classic writing process theories; as writing theory and research has evolved, prewriting and brainstorming have remained important steps; however, the recursive nature of writing processes have been recognized in writing process research since at least the early 1990s and–as we argue in this chapter–changes in information technologies have increasingly blurred the boundaries between distinct stages in the writing process.

Writing process(es): classic writing process theory suggested five stages–prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. Advances in writing process theory, post-process approaches, work in Writing Through the Lifespan (WTTL), and other more situated approaches to understanding how writers work have emphasized not only the recursive nature of writing processes but also the plurality of writing processes. That is, different writers write differently, and these differences may vary not only among writers, but also between different contexts (i.e., one writer might go through different writing processes depending on the writing task they are engaged in).

7 Tools

Tool	Features	Specificities
Discord	Chat based, multimodal app	Initially developed as a copresence platform for gamers, for connecting with each other while gaming and/or livestreaming https://discord.com/
Gather.Town	Place-based simulation, incorporates chat-based functionality	Tool for collaboration, includes text-chat; its multimodality emerges from the place-based simulation rather than within voice or text chat https://www.gather.town/
ICQ	“I seek you” chat-based platform	One of the original text-chat based platforms on the internet; used heavily in the late 1990s
Instant Messaging (IM)	Instant Messaging, emerged from mobile phone-based texting and computer-based texting (AOL “Instant Messenger”), now a common cross-platform functionality between phones, computers, and mobile devices	Text-based chat using AOL IM was a common form of real-time communication in the 1990s for users of AOL. In many ways, the functionality of IM and mobile phone-based text messaging have converged in cross-platform apps such as WhatsApp and Discord
WhatsApp	Chat based, multimodal app	Developed to connect users of mobile phones with each other; widely used around the world, particularly where there is limited access to high-speed internet connections https://www.whatsapp.com/