Instead of writing Eileen and Rhiannon's texts off as derivative, we began to see them as contributions to an ongoing, intertextual conversation about such issues as friendship, loyalty, power, and sexuality.

As a form, fanfictions make intertextuality visible because they rely on readers' ability to see relationships between the fan-writer's stories and the original media sources.

While the counters on these sites indicate that they did not receive many visits, Rhiannon did report that they were visited by friends she met online who lived as far away as North Carolina and New Mexico in the United States.

new tools for working with various modes of communication are producing a change in the way that young people are choosing to construct meaningful texts for themselves and others in their affinity spaces.

Because many young people growing up in a digital world will find their own reasons for becoming literate--reasons that go beyond reading and writing to acquire academic knowledge-it is important to remain open to changes in subject matter learning that will invite and extend the literacy practices they already possess and value.

In sum, these young people's penchant for creating online content that was easily distributed and used by others with similar interests was facilitated in part by their ability to remix multimodal texts, use new tools to show and tell, and rewrite their social identities.

The storylines through which young people exist in online spaces are highly social as are the literacy skills they employ.