The Role of Affect in Adolescents' Online Literacies: Participatory Pressures in BookTube Culture

Outside of compulsory schooling, adolescents become more responsible for maintaining their reading lives together, which is consequential for educators wishing to foster student identities as lifelong readers, writers, and digital designers. The authors describe the role of affect in a youth-driven, online participatory culture, BookTube, in which participants are largely young adults just beyond compulsory school age. Analysis draws on poststructural conceptions of affect as distinct from emotion to develop the concept of participatory pressures. Participatory pressures complicate understandings of youth-generated online cultures, showing specifically how BookTube's aesthetic norms create and maintain feelings of pressure about what style and content count. At the same time, participatory pressures contribute to BookTubers’ development of individual styles that attract viewers, such as using humor in playfulness and social critique. Implications consider how literacy educators may better prepare youths for affective experiences of maintaining shared reading lives in online participatory cultures. © 2018 International Literacy Association