The matter of new media making: An intra-action analysis of adolescents making a digital book trailer

Representational logic cannot account for the entanglements of all that matters in making new media: feeling bodies, vibrant matter, feeling bodies and vibrant matter all moving and at different rates. In the currently shifting communicative landscape, where mobile technologies are the primary means for youths’ digital production, all this movement, all this moving matter, is integral to generating fuller, more (than) human expressions of youths’ new media making. This article therefore develops a non-representational theory of new media making through an intra-action analysis of five adolescents making a digital book trailer while moving within and across three locations. As guiding poststructural methodology, intra-action analysis attuned the authors to moments when bodies-materials-place became perceptibly entangled in the drawing of boundaries and exclusions. Analysis expresses how emergent (re)shapings of boundaries and exclusions across production settings were concurrent with a process of privileging text-based/media-based ideas and thereby various students’ becoming agencies and capacities to act as new media makers. The article concludes arguing that poststructural attention to literacy in the making matters as an ethical imperative for researchers and educators. Literacy in the making enacts boundaries and exclusions that participate in ongoing discursive-material practices, which have potential to produce histories differently in as yet unimagined futures.