Affinities and Beyond! Developing Ways of Seeing in Online Spaces

Abstract

This article presents an insider view of an online community of adults involved in sharing digital photography through a host website, Flickr. It describes how reciprocal teaching and learning partnerships in a dynamic multimodal environment are achieved through the creation of a ‘Third Space’ or ‘Affinity Space’, where ‘Funds of Knowledge’ are shared and processed in such a way that new meanings and discourses are generated. It is argued that this process is evidence of valuable learning and of the deepening of global understandings within the local space of Flickr. The new understandings are at least partly identifiable on the Flickr space, through the co-constructed ‘folksonomy’ or ‘online taxonomy’ of ways of looking at the world. Further, the article provides evidence for broadening existing definitions of literacy, at a time when the visual mode increasingly works interactively with verbal cues and explanations.