Web 2.0 Technologies, Cultural and Technological Hegemonies, and Teaching Design to Deconstruct Them in the Cross-Cultural Digital Contact Zone

Web 2.0 is regarded to be both a platform for building up innovative technologies as well as a space for users to upload and share their personal information in the form of text, pictures, links, and videos with others. Web 2.0 technologies have been regarded to be democratic and empowering for their collaborative, participatory and distributive characteristics, but very little is known about how collaborative, participatory, and distributive they are. So, it is important to know how students from periphery cultural and linguistic backgrounds feel excluded in Web environments (digital contact zone). In this article, I propose to invite writing students from periphery cultural and linguistic backgrounds to design their interfaces to transform them into democratic platforms. When they re/design digital platforms, they will be able to deconstruct the technological, cultural, and linguistic hegemonies perpetuated by Web 2.0 tools. With this, they will develop a critical perspective towards technology in the writing classroom, and they will re/design technologies to transform them into inclusive spaces by incorporating different cultural and linguistic norms and values that they bring with them. It will also provide them an opportunity to use their rhetorical strategies and design skills in their writing.