Critical Digital Literacies among Youth: From Food Eating Contests to Societal Transformation

Abstract

In this chapter we trace the development of students’ critical digital literacies as they create and share digital stories. This project was carried out by a team of researchers, teachers, undergraduate and graduate students, and community partners with the UC Links network. Through a curriculum rooted in developing critical imaginings of self, others, and their local and global communities, students’ composition practices shifted from being centered on topics that were considered “viral” to ones that were more rooted in addressing social issues. We explore how the curriculum supported these shifts in students’ stories and the powerful narratives they crafted through this renewed curriculum.

At an after-school program in the San Francisco Bay Area, a group of students clamored around a computer, eager to create a video to share with peers at a partner program. The after-school staff glanced over, satisfied that the group seemed engaged in the process of creating and sharing digital stories with their peers. The group of teens, whom we will call the “Fortnite group,” were avid gamers and had been working on crafting a vlog¹-style digital story to highlight their gaming skills and “hacks” with peers they thought might share a similar passion. The group was quick to finish their work and share their artifact with their peers via a closed digital network created for the program. However, rather than working on their ongoing digital story, unbeknownst to the program staff, the group used this time to troll² another student group (we will refer to them as the “Trolled group”) by creating a new video that mocked the appearance of students in the Trolled group. The Fortnite group used an image of the members of the Trolled group, zooming in on each of their faces as the screen briefly flipped to an object or animal in place of each face while a laugh soundtrack played in the background. The resulting narrative used an overlay of stereotypical imagery and scornful laughter on each student’s face, creating tropes that were overtly racist in some instances and downright hurtful overall.

The students in both groups insisted that the video was an attempt at lighthearted and playful humor and everyone was “just having fun.” However, program staff became concerned about the apparent unwitting adoption of trolling, a common digital practice in everyday social media use, which had quickly become a part of the networked storytelling exchange in the after-school program. Moreover, the program staff were concerned that, if unchecked, the digital storytelling practices would reproduce some hierarchies and engender forms of bullying in online/after-school that already seemed prevalent among social cliques during regular aspects of the school(s). What was intended to be a project that focused on building community and connection across three after-school program sites was seeming to devolve into an unreflective and problematic exchange via media production. The project staff, which included teachers of the after-school programs and members of the research team,³ intuitively knew that what they were seeing amid the students was illustrative of many infamous truisms that served as a cautionary tale to the perils of adolescents’ use of social media. However, the staff were also optimistic about the potential opportunities for powerful and persuasive communication afforded through these technologies (Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010; Hull et al., 2014, Hull et al., 2021) and sought to reframe the project moving forward in a manner that would foster more intentional practices around digital storytelling and communication amongst the students.

Introduction

This chapter traces the efforts of after-school program staff, in collaboration with our research team, to reframe how adolescents in the program approached the creation and sharing of digital stories. Long motivated by the striking contrasts in the many ways social media impacts the lives of children and adolescents, our team has been interested in how young people view and appropriate new technologies in their daily lives. Our work began over 20 years ago, when we collaborated with University-Community Links (UC Links) (https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/) and local school and community partners to create a community technology center in the basement of an old Victorian house in the San Francisco Bay Area (Bay Area). At this site, K-12 students and educators came together after school to create digital stories, and university undergraduate and graduate students learned how to engage in mentorship and tutoring. While participating in the after-school program, undergraduates were enrolled in a UC Berkeley School of Education course focused on literacy as a multimodal practice. Their participation at the community center provided the students an opportunity to link the theories and ideas they were learning in the university classroom with practical experience working with young people after school.

Over the decades, what started as a small local project to support young children and adults in using emergent digital tools to craft narratives of themselves, of others and their community, and of the world they imagined led to larger partnerships that eventually culminated in a global network of programs spanning four continents. Time and time again, this work showed us how proper pedagogical supports foster the creation of powerful digital stories that empower their authors and compel viewers to learn across distances and differences (Hull et al., 2006, 2014, 2010, 2021; Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010). In the present moment, when social media is fraught with acts of harm and simultaneously acts of resistance and subversion, we are compelled to wonder about continually emerging technologies in new ways: How and why are digital spaces sites of dystopian realities filled with hate and other forms of chaos on the one hand, while at the same time sites of utopian possibilities of contestation and change, on the other? Amid the complex realities of the cultural, political, technological, and material dimensions of social media spaces, our goal in this chapter is to “center the critical in Critical Digital Literacies’‘(Smith, 2021, p. 229).

As digital technologies increasingly proliferate in some parts of the world, the ways in which information is shared across space and time are rapidly and continually shifting, presenting both opportunities and challenges for meaning-making and literacy education (Darvin, 2017; Dixon-Román et al., 2019; Warschauer, 2009). Simply put, while the technologizing of our worlds enables “accessing wealth, power, and knowledge,” it can also cause “one of the most damaging forms of exclusion” (Castells, 2010, pp. 93, 3). These shifts require understanding and addressing the ways in which communication across distances through the circulation of media can be empowering and reflexive rather than dehumanizing and marginalizing, thereby reproducing existing hierarchies. Toward this end, many have proposed frameworks to articulate ways to support students, particularly adolescents and youth, through the development of critically oriented skills and practices to traverse these spaces and imagine futures equitable for all (Ávila, 2021; Darvin, 2017; Bacalja et al., 2021).

Critical Digital Literacies: An Overview

scholars have called for pedagogical efforts to support the development of students’ “digital literacies.” Digital literacies (DL) have been variously articulated as skills that relate to communication with and through digital media, a means to access information in a rapidly changing and fluid knowledge economy, and ways to represent oneself in the new world order (Ávila, 2021; Darvin, 2017; Mirra & Garcia, 2020; Nichols & Stornaiuolo, 2019). To allow for digital literacies to be reinterpreted in conjunction with critical literacies, the term “critical digital literacies” (CDL) was introduced in an effort to foreground ideological and hegemonic power structures that exist in digital spaces. CDL was first defined as “those skills and practices that lead to the creation of digital texts that interrogate the world; they also allow the interrogation of digital, multimedia texts” (Ávila & Pandya, 2012, p. 3). Subsequently, Luke (2014) offered an extension of this term as critical digital literacy practice, or “a process of naming and renaming the world, seeing its patterns, designs and complexities, and developing the capacity to redesign and shape it” (p. 29). Others similarly emphasize the importance of design considerations in CDL, which include weighing the effectiveness of modal affordances offered by social media spaces and their constituent technologies, as well as the design choices made by users of social media spaces in their production of digital artifacts (Mirra & Garcia, 2020; Pangrazio, 2016).

Ultimately, efforts to conceptualize CDL seek to elucidate the interplay of platforms, policies, economic interests, and educational goals to understand CDL as not only being attuned to power relations, in the context of digital worlds, but equally, media literacies, or the ability to identify the inner workings of the interplay of platforms, policies, economic interests, and educational goals. These efforts offer “undoubtedly complex and varying kaleidoscopic views” (Ávila, 2021, p. 1) that helpfully articulate a range of skills and practices that pedagogical efforts in literacy education might undertake to foster in order for students to skillfully and safely traverse rapidly proliferating, interconnected, and dynamic digital networks of information, knowledge creation, and participation, and to use their awareness of how power operates within and across these networks to appropriate these spaces as sites that enact contestation and transformation (Ávila, 2021; Darvin, 2017; Mirra & Garcia, 2020; Nichols & Stornaiuolo, 2019).

Extending Critical Digital Literacies

Many have noted that pedagogical endeavors to support the development of CDL in schools often focus on developing literacies to navigate the use of digital technologies, rather than applying or developing critical literacies in their use (Darvin, 2017; Pangrazio, 2016). Further, even the wide variety of skills and practices couched under the umbrella of “digital literacies” or “critical thinking” might still overlook the many complexities and challenges of teaching students to actually be critical (Nichols & Stornaiuolo, 2019; boyd, 2018). Equally, this focus on fostering literacies in the context of the digital sometimes seems to discount that many practices, such as bullying, that engender harm and promote exclusionary worldviews in social media spaces, as well as subsequent efforts to combat them, are not new or exclusive to social media; rather, the rapidly changing digital landscape simply offers new spaces to implement and instantiate already-existing harmful practices and worldviews. Toward this end, boyd (2018) emphasizes the importance of individuals developing and exercising empathy in online (and offline) spaces rather than simply engaging in critical thinking or having media literacy skills when using dig​​ital tools. In fact, boyd opines in a SXSW keynote address, after she lays bare the apparent rationality, not to mention the rhetorical effectiveness, of those who expertly indoctrinate youth and others into racist ideologies, “the difference between what is deemed missionary work, education, and radicalization depends a lot on your worldview. And your understanding of power.” boyd argues, then, that critical thinking can be weaponized, but she also suggests that cultivating empathy is one safeguard against certain kinds of misinformation and mistrust. She recommends “building the capacity to truly hear and embrace someone else’s perspective and teaching people to understand another’s view while also holding their view firm.”

We have explored this capacity in our previous work as the development of cosmopolitan sensibilities and practices, reflexive understandings of self and others (Appiah, 2006; Hull et al., 2021), which we believe can serve as another safeguard against the weaponization of critical thinking and other harmful messages. As Darvin (2017) explains, “while critical digital literacy exposes how power operates in this world, cosmopolitanism shapes dispositions that allow learners to navigate this world with greater respect and responsibility” (p. 12). This chapter is thus an effort to elucidate how literacy scholars and educators might reimagine CDL as a practice of enabling youth to leverage their creative, productive, and transformative capacities when engaging with social media by supporting the development of critical capacities rooted in raising critical consciousness, a la Paulo Freire (2014), and also the empathetic imagining of self in relation to others. We ask, how can literacy educators support the development of students’ everyday digital literacies in ways that privilege criticality and empathy?

Program Context

This project took place as part of a long-standing collaboration between our research team and a network of after-school programs in the Bay Area. The after-school programs provide expanded, expansive learning opportunities to children and youth each day after school. Activities in the programs ranged from digital storytelling, curricular support, sports, and other forms of engagement. The curriculum for these spaces was designed collaboratively by members of our research team and program staff. For the project described in this chapter, undergraduate and graduate students worked with the after-school staff to design learning opportunities based on students’ interests and needs identified by program staff. We focus particularly on how students’ composition practices in the after-school program became more critically and empathetically turned in response to curricular modifications enacted by program staff. We also trace the pedagogical structures that supported these shifts as they were revealed by students’ creation of digital stories.

The after-school programs were located in three faith-based private schools—St. Augustine,⁴ St. Christian, and St. Erica—that served students and families from low-income backgrounds primarily identified as Hispanic and Latine. The programs were part of the federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program (CCLC),⁵ supporting the creation of community learning centers and academic enrichment programs during nonschool hours for historically marginalized youth, and also part of the UC Links network. The programs were run by after-school staff and undergraduate and graduate students and researchers. Across the three programs, 10–20 students from each school from grades five through eight worked together to create their digital stories. The groups varied in terms of composition by gender with some all-male, some all-female, and some mixed male-female groups.⁶ Students formed their own groups of three to five based on their existing friendships with peers in their classrooms.

Many students in the technologically rich San Francisco Bay Area were well versed in the practices of popular social media culture and were already members of and seamlessly navigated various social media platforms on a daily basis. They expressed that they frequently spent time on YouTube⁷ and followed specific channels and/or vloggers. They also participated in viral literacy practices that were popular across the Internet (such as the Kiki challenge⁸) and thus had digital footprints across social media platforms. At the start of the program, the after-school program staff developed a translocal network among the three schools. The eventual goal of this project was to create and share videos across sites intended to be modeled after vlogs; students were encouraged to create videos that would be “liked” by their peers in response to a set of guiding questions.

Working in small groups, students responded to and provided feedback on the videos made by other groups and incorporated feedback into improving their own videos as part of their efforts to create “likable” vlogs. The themes in most students’ projects at this point mirrored many viral Internet and/or YouTube trends. For example, some students wanted to partake in the then popular Mukbang⁹ challenge to see if they could push the limits of their appetite, while another group aspired to mimic flossing—a dance move associated with the popular game, Fortnite. More concerning was that at this point in the project, an instance of trolling, which we described in the vignette at the beginning of the chapter, became a part of the students’ creation and sharing practices where groups mocked other groups through their vlogs.

The “Fortnite group,” whom we introduced in the vignette, became upset by some of the feedback they received on their video and created a response video that mocked the students who gave them feedback. As mentioned before, although students insisted they were all “just having fun,” the after-school teaching team was concerned that such practices would exacerbate what already seemed like social cliques and bullying during the regular school day. More importantly, given the prominent role these students indicated social media usage played in their lives, staff wanted to work with students toward becoming more intentional about their participation in social media trends so as to be aware of the ways in which their own practices could contribute to creating reflexive spaces that recognize asymmetrical power structures or harms and open up possibilities for contestation and subversion rather than reproducing exclusionary or marginalizing messages. In an effort to ensure students were engaging in digital exchanges in ways that supported their reflection on the purpose, meaning, and outcome of their practices, our research team worked in collaboration with the program staff to shift the focus of the project using the structure described below.

Reframing Project Goals

Students were introduced to ideas about storytelling through reflections on their own memories of stories that had made an impact on them or felt compelling. Students explored the terms “impact” and “compelling” as a means to have larger conversations about what constitutes a “likable” story, in the sense of a memorable or meaningful story (beyond simply being literally “liked” through the click of a button). Students also reflected on the content and nature of such stories, the modalities stories were delivered through, and considerations of implicit messages and imagined audiences in telling meaningful stories. The research team introduced students to a range of short stories across a variety of genres, including through viewing commercially made films by various documentarians, media conglomerates, and others as well as hearing stories that project staff read aloud from books (or played via audio). The content that students viewed also included digital stories created by students from India and the Bay Area who had been part of a separate project, “360 storytelling,” on which the research team had been working for the past two years. In the 360 storytelling project, the research team iteratively worked with middle and high schoolers at two programs—one in the Bay Area and one in India—to craft digital stories for their local communities and for a global audience of peers participating in a digital storytelling exchange. The project began with students at a San Francisco school creating narratives about their everyday lives to share with peers in India based on digital stories that had been crafted by students from India involved in an earlier project (Hull et al., 2010; Hull et al., 2021). The students in India viewed these stories created by San Francisco youth and crafted narratives to highlight salient aspects of their own lives while considering how their own stories might respond to those of their peers. These stories were brought back to the students at the San Francisco school. The research team shared the stories from this prior project with the focal sites of the current project in response to the trolling incident described at the outset of this chapter.

During this reframing of the project, the research team selected and introduced students to stories that centered on themes of identity, community, diversity, and equity. Researchers and program staff also collaboratively developed a set of questions for reflection that scaffolded students’ viewing of these films. The questions focused on identifying the purpose of the story, the intended audience of the story, the meanings and messages conveyed through the story, and a consideration of elements that have the potential to make a story impactful. The same set of questions was used for each film students viewed. In discussions that ensued, the program staff and researchers followed up with clarifying questions as needed in response to student comments and observations in order to highlight aspects of powerful and persuasive narratives that privileged criticality and empathy. Through this reframing, our team charged students with creating stories that might be impactful or compelling to a network of real and imagined peers locally and globally. Students thus composed narratives that would eventually be shared through our private digital network while considering a wider audience than initially intended. Reframing the goals of the project by introducing a variety of digital stories and explicitly considering the notion of impact created opportunities for students to reflect on the meaning behind the message of their stories and the practices they drew on to create and share these.

Key Ideas: Supporting Shifts Toward Meaningful Messaging

The project team noted that shifts in students’ goals emerged in response to their viewing of artifacts—that is, other films and digital stories—in conjunction with explicit conversations about considerations of audience and the impact of stories on audiences. The project staff employed a consistent set of questions to support students’ viewing of each artifact and followed up with probing questions as needed in response to comments made by students. We found that explicit conversations​​ that scaffolded students’ analysis of the artifacts they watched allowed them to develop skills in reflecting on the intentions and/or goals of the artifacts’ authors, the meaning being conveyed through the artifacts, the intended audience of the artifacts, as well as the ways various modalities employed in the artifacts came together to create and convey specific meaning. This generative structure also enabled students to identify lived inequities in their own lives around immigration status, gun violence, food access, cultural diversity and assimilation, poverty, and police brutality. Students articulated in notes they captured during their discussions that impactful stories are those that evoke a strong emotional reaction in bringing attention to the lives of people impacted by an issue and those working to address these issues. For example, in response to a news clip about rapper 21 Savage being targeted and arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), students were able to identify the poignancy of this targeting and separation from his family as being “impactful” elements of the story (Fig. 5.1). Ultimately, the viewing of several genres of films on a variety of topics led students to conclude that powerful stories are those that “tell” a viewer about the challenges and successes of the protagonists of the film and their communities through evoking empathy. Thus, questions that centered explicit conversations and reflections on the idea of an impactful story and the modality through which it was told helped students to focus on the message or meaning behind a narrative, rather than on practices that were already popular on the modalities they engaged with. This shift thus allowed students to see the possibilities of the stories they could tell through social media platforms and the many ways these stories could have an “impact” beyond simply the garnering of “likes.”

Fig. 5.1

Student notes in response to questions posed by instructors

Over the course of the program, we observed how students became more adept at recognizing and articulating elements of narratives that were powerful and persuasive and sought to incorporate these elements into their own digital stories. There was a distinct shift in the kinds of practices they instantiated as they sought to appropriate digital technologies as tools to create impactful stories that were rooted in acts of care, responsibility, and a commitment toward improving the lives of others, near and far. For example, in the digital stories made by other students in the San Francisco Bay Area and India, themes around LGBTQIA2S+ rights were raised and resonated with the students in this project, allowing them to reflect on the experiences of LGBTQIA2S+ individuals and question how people who identify as queer might be treated within their own community.

Key Ideas: Intertwining Narratives

Collectively, students’ questions for and interest in their global peers located in a country they didn’t know much about, and their local peers who lived a few cities over but had vastly different experiences eventually bumped up against their initial desires to go viral; their goals to participate in a social network that they already were members of and knew intimately became intertwined with considerations of “impactful” narratives and their interest in raising social awareness. In the sections that follow, we highlight this tension and students’ resolution of this tension. We draw on examples of videos made by two student groups that represent themes common across all.

We Are What we Eat … and Discuss

One student group at the St. Augustine site initially planned to create a video to participate in the popular Mukbang challenge. They insisted that this theme would give them the most views/likes compared to other student groups. However, inspired by some of the films they were introduced to, they decided to work on making a film about their school and also articulate ways they could each be agents of change in tackling a social issue. Their final video was a combination of these seemingly disparate goals wherein they juxtaposed a tour of their school, followed by them eating at a table in their cafeteria while engaging in a conversation about one thing in their local communities or the larger global world they each wanted to change. Their responses reflected the current sociopolitical climate in the United States with one student expressing her wish for a president other than Donald Trump, whose policies had made her immigrant family confront and fear deportation on a daily basis. Another student advocated for systemic change to end racism, referring specifically to examples of police brutality against the Black community and anti-immigrant sentiments that many in his community had experienced. The group agreed that it is important to “change the way things work” because the current system only serves the interests of certain privileged groups and continues to marginalize others. This convergence of ideas to create their final video seemed to allow students to participate in a popular viral literacy practice they desired to be a part of by filming themselves eating a meal and doing so in a healthier way than the original challenge since the students did not eat excessive amounts of food as in the ethos of Mukbang. Simultaneously, students shared stories about their lives, aspirations, and hopes to bring about better futures for themselves and their communities through a collective conversation about a number of issues and specific ways to tackle these.

Fluidity “Makes-Up” Gender

A student group at the St. Erica site had planned on creating a make-up tutorial as their initial film idea. Their goal with this was to teach young girls like themselves how to use make-up (eyeliner, lipstick, etc.) since they felt this was something a large number of viewers would be interested in. They planned to include an element of what they described as “stupidity” and to use the title “make-up tutorial gone wrong” to capture audience interest. They mused that this clickbait¹⁰ strategy would help their video become viral. When viewing the films during the project reframing, the students in this group noticed symbolism for LGBTQIA2S+ pride captured in the footage of one of the videos and were drawn by themes of gender equality which were more explicitly emphasized in two other videos. Program staff supported students in elucidating themes around social issues that were emerging in the narratives students viewed. For example, in noting the rainbow-colored sidewalks captured in the Castro district of San Francisco, the students noted advocacy efforts for LGBTQIA2S+ that were recently brought to light. This conversation was scaffolded by program leaders to facilitate a reflection on additional social issues in their communities and opened up conversations about racial justice, police brutality, gun violence, forced deportations, and more. As a result, they expressed a desire to reimagine their video as an awareness campaign to bring to light several important social issues. Namely, the group wanted to critique the role that media and the make-up industry play in the Given the tall order of their goals for this video and unsure of how to make sure their campaign popular, this group decided ultimately to create a make-up tutorial that focused on make-up used by girls and boys since they felt the latter group is stigmatized for using make-up (Fig. 5.2). This compromise thus allowed them to construct a story that would circulate widely while tackling a social issue around gender discrimination—namely that “makeup does not have a gender, it’s [use] a choice [for all],” thus attempting to disrupt gender norms and stigma around the use of make-up by nonfemale-presenting genders. The group concluded with a direct message spoken in unison to viewers: “Remember, you are beautiful just the way you are.” Though their video did not explicitly define gender, there were clear implicit messages that alluded to gender as a fluid and nonbinary construct and pushed back on dominant exclusionary binaries. Thus, the group shifted the focus of their video from simply teaching girls how to wear make-up to using their platform to raise awareness around gender discrimination and unrealistic beauty standards; their final video title, “make up tutorial,” was informed by their initial clickbait approach of having a popular tag but included a more complex narrative than they had begun with.

Fig. 5.2

Student collaboration on reimagined video on make-up (Note: Image intentionally blurred)

Both abovementioned examples illustrate an intertwining of the goals from students’ initial ideas to create a narrative that would go viral and the goals from their later ideas involving the use of media to raise awareness and address social issues. Students explicitly acknowledged that their initial ideas at the start of the project would likely receive more likes, while narratives involving reflections on current issues would be less popular. They reflected that the latter would perhaps be polarizing or viewed as “political” by potential viewers and thus were less likely to garner interest than the former. Ultimately, students incorporated elements of what they considered viral videos, intentionally also choosing to avoid any political markers in their video title, but demonstrated a recognition of and engagement in forms of meaning-making that were ethically turned in their final narratives. In other words, the students moved toward a recognition of incorporating elements of ethically turned narratives through issues centered on and justice in conjunction with other “cool” aspects of their everyday experiences. Thus, students were able to craft a message that both highlighted inequities and tackled social issues through seemingly ordinary actions in their everyday lives. While they were careful to leverage clickbait strategies to supposedly garner more views, students were able to craft their narratives and showcase their lives in ways that were critically and empathetically turned.

Discussion

Students’ practices over the course of this project illustrate important considerations about ways to scaffold adolescents’ social media practices as they traverse various digital spaces. This scaffolding, rooted in critical pedagogy and dialogue, engaged students in intentional reflections on impactful meaning-making via stories and an interrogation of the modes used to share their message in an effort to engage in cosmopolitan habits of mind (Appiah, 2006; Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010). An important part of the scaffolding was a willingness for students to build from instead of abandoning their own youthful interests in popular Internet culture. Darvin (2017) notes that in social media spaces, popularity is quantified by the number of likes one receives on their posts and the construction of social networks and membership/participation within these networks shapes the social and political discourses that individuals participate in. However, students’ shift from the idea of popularity as measured by the algorithms on social media platforms, to an understanding of impact as an emotion rooted in empathy, care, and concern for the wellbeing of others, is remarkable and illustrates an emerging criticality of literacy practices as they traverse social media spaces. This shift perhaps corresponds with a recognition of the ways that the “rules” of the game—in this case, practices on social media—are hurtful, an intentionality that perhaps needs to be explicitly taught to disrupt the status quo of conforming to and maintaining hegemonic structures.

The shifts in students’ understanding of impact led to a corresponding change in the messages of their own narratives—one that was still rooted in wanting to be popular or highlight “cool” aspects of their lives, but through practices that demonstrated a reflection on inequities in their worlds and ideation on subsequent action toward better-imagined futures. Thus, students appropriated the digital tools and spaces they engaged with by practicing critically oriented ways of caring about the world with their “heart and soul,” as they described, while being attuned to how power shapes the differential experiences of individuals and communities. Their final narratives drew on their own everyday experiences to address social issues and pa​​rticipate in civic discourse and action in reflexive and agentive ways, providing an example of boyd’s (2018) goals for empathetic as well as critical social media practice.

This shift was achieved primarily through opportunities for intentional reflections provided within the reframed program curriculum. The staff at the program sought to redirect students’ attention to aspects of meaning-making practices that centered the meaning and message itself, rather than solely the tools that also mediated these practices. Exploring narratives through a range of media allowed students to focus on the intent behind the messages and to consider how various modalities might support creating and sharing messages that were “impactful” in the sense of evoking empathy and care for the wellbeing of others, habits rooted in raising critical consciousness (boyd, 2018; Freire, 2014). Thus, students centered these orientations in their narratives, rather than the medium itself. Amid recent efforts to better support the students’ literacy practices in digital contexts and in their efforts to imagine better lifeworlds, our work allows us to offer a renewed charge for adults—whether educators, caregivers, or others—who support adolescents in their social media practices to uplift above all else, a focus on the criticality leavened with empathy.