Wargo’s (2015) study on one youth’s composition of experience through mobile digital technology using an iphone and the snapchat app demonstrates how spatial story is created in the virtual world—a digital type of collage that maps experience.

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Activating iBrains: A Call for Mediation?
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Can digital technologies and social media foster more exploration, discovery, and creativity than learning that occurs without technology? It is not uncommon to see toddlers and preschoolers in Newfoundland and Labrador interacting with, using, and manipulating digital devices like smartphones and tablets in everyday life. While travelling this summer, I saw caregivers and their children sharing devices on ferry crossings, on airplanes, at restaurants while waiting for food, and even while sitting in a cart at Walmart.
At first, I was quick to assume that parents who give their young children access to ablets and phones were attempting to distract their children so that they would be less fussy in public space. While this may be partly true, I began to think about how their interactions with digital devices may actually increase their critical thinking skills and help facilitate learning. In fact, studies have focused on how children use digital technology and how children can demonstrate abilities that are often underestimated (Harrison & McTavish, 2018), how their interactions are highly active processes which activate higher order thinking (Kunnath & Jackson, 2019), and how digital technology can encourage children to create, design, narrate, and compose (Wargo, 2015).
As children age, their interactions with digital technology create opportunities for them to harness the power of social media. With their incredibly vast, wide-spread audiences, social apps like Snapchat and Twitter engage young adults in ways traditional texts could never. As content on social media expands exponentially, youth will require effective skills to sift through information that often contains bias, opinions, and highly edited realities that could easily manipulate an uninformed audience (Kunnath & Jackson, 2019).
These same skills are necessary for safe use of social media. Wargo’s (2015) study on one youth’s composition of experience through mobile digital technology using an iPhone and the Snapchat app demonstrates how spatial story is created in the virtual world—a digital type of collage that maps experience. Unfortunately, the study does not recognize the manipulative nature of some of the editing capabilities of the app which could open a discussion on the significance of critical literacy education for adolescents that Kunnath & Jackson (2019) describe in their study on student critical consciousness as it relates to digital literacy.
Regardless of age, there is potential in using digital technology to strengthen literacy development and higher order thinking; however, appropriate mediation of device use and clear social norms and guidance from parents and teachers in the social space is an important consideration as technology and social medias advance (Harrison & McTavish, 2018).
References
Harrison, E. & McTavish, M. (2018). ‘iBabies: Infants’ and toddlers’ emergent language and
literacy in a digital culture of iDevices. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 18 (2), 163-188.
Kunnath, J.P. & Jackson, A. (2019). Developing student critical consciousness: Twitter as a tool
to apply critical literacy in the English classroom. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 11 (1), 52-74.
Wargo, J.M. (2015). Spatial stories with nomadic narrators: Affect, Snapchat, and feeling
embodiment in youth mobile composing. Journal of Language and Literabcicy Education, 11 (1), 47-64.