Nar­ra­tive in So­cial Media

Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• Zones of Contact and Fields of Consistency in Electronic Literature

• Nar­ra­tive in So­cial Media

• Dene Grigar

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• Panel: Zones of Contact and Fields of Consistency in Electronic Literature

  Sto­ries broad­cast in 140 or less char­ac­ters over the course of a day may, at first, seem only a 21st cen­tury up­date of se­ri­al­ized mi­cro-fic­tion, yet con­sid­er­ing the strate­gies au­thors take to pro­duce lit­er­ary works in­volv­ing so­cial media, their cre­ations re­sist easy de­f­i­n­i­tion.  This paper looks the broad no­tion of nar­ra­tive as it plays out in the so­cial net­work­ing site, Twit­ter, in works such as Adam Higgs et al’s  “Crush­ing It:  A So­cial Media Love Story,” Jay Bush­man’s “The Good Cap­tain,” and Dene Gri­gar’s “The 24-Hour Mi­cro-Elit Pro­ject.”  Specif­i­cally, the paper asks two ques­tions:  First, how do nar­ra­tives cre­ated for so­cial media sites work against what has be­come the con­ven­tional way to de­scribe e-lit­er­a­ture?  Sec­ond, what do we learn about so­cial media lit­er­a­ture if we think about it in terms of non-nar­ra­tiv­ity? At stake are as­sump­tions about what con­sti­tutes elec­tronic lit­er­a­ture and con­ven­tional views about nar­ra­tiv­ity in re­la­tion to works pro­duced with and for dig­i­tal media.

Category:

• Panel