‘Community’, semiotic flows, and mediated contribution to activity

This article begins with an overview and problematization of the term community through a brief assessment of its history, diverse uses, core attributes, heterogeneous elements, and collocational companions. Following this, I describe demographics and processes associated with collective engagement in digitally mediated environments. Utilizing select alternatives to the term ‘community’ and incorporating the cultural-historical notions of mediation and activity , I then present research describing exogenous influences affecting educational uses of technology in L2 settings, the use of instant messaging and blogging for out-of-class FL interaction at the secondary school level, and a pedagogically focused example of a remixing text posted to an online fan fiction website. I conclude by proposing bridging activities as an approach for connecting the emergent logics of digital vernaculars with the analytics of formal schooling.