In order to understand students to better engage them in their own learning in a secondary ELA classroom, it’s pivotal to understand students’ literacy backgrounds.  Before Millennials became “Millennials,” they were digital natives.  Being raised in a digital, media-saturated world is the new normal for students in the United States.  No longer are the days of hardcover Encyclopedic series or even dictionaries.  It’s Wikipedia and Dictionary.com at worst and JStor and Oxford-English at best.  The manner in which students gather information is mainly through digital media and technological devices.  With such a broad shift in social and learning culture, it is worrisome how the education system is slow to catch up.  While veteran educators and administrators are still defending the high school canon of conservative rich white men from the 1700s and earlier, students today have entered most assuredly into the context of the posthuman.

The use of social media is characterized by identity and participation.  Whenever a person dives into a new social media platform, they are greeted by standard profiling questions: email, username, password.  Sometimes, depending on the platform, users are asked for first name, last name, or gender.  From there, profiles are generated and @arivera9548 is no longer an empty domain name, but a person, or rather, an extension of a person, the creation on the posthuman.  Katherine Hayles clarifies, “even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman.  The defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components” (Hayles 4).  From the moment users create a social media profile, they have constructed an agent of themselves.  Through this profile, this extended subject can browse, navigate, and participate in the contexts and constructs on the platform.  Serving as an extension of the user, yet, dissociated from that same physical being. Creating a social media presence allows for teenagers and students to involve themselves in “the construction of subjectivity,” as Hayles highlights in the definition of posthuman.  When students create their profiles on social media accounts and write themselves into being, they are entering into a networked public and altering their definition of self.  From their given name to a chosen username, teens alter their subjectivity to be identifiable with a pattern of information displayed as their profile page.

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