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.


The site is interconnected with other sites.

Pages can be linked to other pages, both external and within the site.

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.
 

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.
0

Add a comment

Blog Archive
Contributors
Loading
Dynamic Views theme. Powered by Blogger. Report Abuse.