harnassing skills or teaching skills?

I was recently reading the NCTE post on the importance of reading and writing in the 21st century, specifically related to digital reading and writing that have increased the amount of text the average person encounters and produces. Their statement focused on the critical skills necessary to write in a new media age. Obviously blogging would fall into that problem writing category. With bad punctuation, spelling and capitalization always already normal. But where does the situatedness of a particular type of writing for a particular type of audience take it outside the realm of the classroom and make it inaccessible to teachers? I certainly wouldn’t want to talk to students about how they tweet, or write comments to friends on MySpace. But I would want to talk about how they recognize the ‘right’ tweet to a particular audience, and how a particular public MySpace comment can be made recognizable only to a small group of people is phrased just right. So, am I teaching digital literacy, or am I simply accessing the digital skills kids are building anyway because their friends are all online, so they have to be? I had a teacher start her class this semester by saying we’d be talking about the theory behind socializing online, not learning how to use the internet, and there was a very key difference. Are we just researching the internet to push it into a ‘hip’ pedagogy?