We watched "The Machine
is Us/ing Us" and had an interesting class discussion on whether it was a
scholarly work or not. It was not, perhaps, “scholarly”; but it was an
argument, and it made me think about the sociology of internet communication.
I’m not much for social
networking, but I do spend a lot of time on certain sites that fit Kaplan and
Haenlein’s definition of social media as “a group of Internet-based
applications…that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content”:
I’m into fanfiction.
Henry Jenkins, an American
media scholar, makes an interesting argument about fandom and participatory
culture (we discussed the Xena website study in class). It’s about reclaiming
storytelling—folk culture—from corporations, and bringing it back to the public
sphere where people can share the ideas and give them new meanings.
For fans, it’s about
engagement— interaction with the stories and with each other.
Since websites replaced fan
magazines, the features of communication that have become popular in social
networking (embedding images, video, and links, tagging, and so on) have begun
to be applied to storytelling in this new medium.
Example: Archive of Our Own
The site is interconnected
with other sites.
It’s a key part of the site’s
arrangement.
This story was written by a
native English speaker based on a graphic novel series by a Japanese man. A French
woman linked the story to her own page of works. She supplemented the tags and also
used tagging to comment on the story.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiut2ti_LCv30fICA7aMcYbivFYDgLynBH8yruLHpwnvo3Z7A6r5W-dBcLAUU4oa9KoQrAZMA1RbaV66lxQYw6-nNys003jQgz-htIJNiXiI7mEQ6FC1wWPO31hYmzohdx1GFnyRMBjfyma/s320/6.png)
Stories can be written, oral,
or video; illustrated; transformed from text to audio; originally in any
language and translated to any other. The medium is flexible and interactive,
and nothing stands in isolation.
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