FEATURE ARTICLE

Digital tools and online spaces offer new opportunities for young people to share their creative work with an authentic audience. Writing is increasingly digital and mul-timodal. Writers, their practices, and their tools have never existed in a vacuum, but technology offers new spaces for writ-ers to respond to the world around them and readily share their work with readers. Although school en-vironments treat cognition as an individual accom-plishment, real-world “in the wild ” learning tasks are intertwined with culture, available resources, and in-teraction with others (Hutchins, 1995). Today’s tech-nologies have forged new ways that young people can engage with words and ideas. When they post a sta-tus update on Facebook, share a story on FanFiction. net, or role-play on Tumblr, their writing practices are inextricably linked to digital tools and online spaces. These, in turn, shape their understand-ing of audience, pur-pose, and genre. In this article, we draw from three ethno-graphic studies of adoles-cent literacy and online affinity spaces relate