Meanings of Digital Participation into the Narrative Online Communities

Drawing from theory and research on participatory practices, fan communities and their role in the identity and social work of teenagers, the paper contributes to the debate by analyzing how Italian teenagers take part in a writing-oriented social network such as Wattpad. These practices of authorship and readership have been explored through a mixed method approach, including participatory workshops, interviews and netnography, with a sample of 103 Italian students. Findings show several different ways to approach to digital narration and also different competences connected to such practices, that could be exploited in educational contexts. Different approaches to authorship are thus identified, spanning from an “industry” oriented to an “identity” oriented approach. Also several typologies of social readership emerge, since fans, peers and supporters are different cognitive, emotional and social shapes that teens give to their relation and participation online. The paper aims at describing such models, underlining the deep identity and social work that teens perform through them and offering some suggestions about how to connect it to formal educational contexts.