32 Social Media, Blog zines New Literature and Readership

Mr. Pratim Das

epgp books

 

 

 

Introduction

 

Social Media has given us the opportunity to do many resourceful things, stand out from the crowd and achieve viral status online. It’s created ways for us to fight injustice, build communities and honor everyday heroes. Surprisingly; it has even managed to influence the world of literature. The concept of literature is now rapidly changing. The concept of literature is now getting a new dimension. The idea or notion about literature that it can only be written in form of print is changing from last decade. Now literature is emerging also in the digital platform. People are sharing their creative and original works through social media websites or microblogs. The traditional view of literature is transforming as people are taking advantage of a virtual world to be precise in social media platform. This transition to the new digital age is changing the way of thinking about creative writing and literature as well as enables people to publish their own work easily and get instant feedback. Around 49% of the world population has an internet connection today. Literary enthusiasts have explored online spaces for creative expression, giving rise to a new modern genre of literature. Day by day this new literature is getting more popularity among its readers. Though there are some loopholes and problems in this New-born literature, but it has its relevance in the context of modern literature.

Twitter as a tool for new literature:

 

The word globalization is the most discussed word in the 21st century. In this age of globalization, we are surrounded by multiple forms of entertainment. Nowadays people cannot think of a life without social media, youtube etc. The advancement of new media like facebook, twitter and blogs are not just a multimedia platform, but it also allows it users to share, create, author digital contents on the internet. This shift of paradigm implies a new role for the user from a consumer to an active producer. These new platforms enable users not only to access but also they can contribute. Carla Raguseo in his article, ‘Twitter Fiction: Social Networking and Microfiction in 140 characters’ shows how web is turning into a new platform for interactive open publishing. He went on to point out that these users of web are responsible for the revolution in literature for the way literature is created and distributed on social platforms. These significant changes in social media and web have a profound effect on social, educational and cultural spheres.

 

Today, everyone is more or less familiar with the word ‘Social Media’. The definition of the word “Social Media” is so obscure and often people mixed it up with the word “social networking”. There are a lot of arguments about the actual definition of social media. There  is a trend of equating social media with social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter etc., which is misleading. Social networking is just a sub-category of social media. If we look at each word individually, we will get a clear understanding of it. The word ‘Social’ refers to interacting with other people by sharing information as well as receiving information from them. The term “Media” refers to an instrument of communication like the internet (Nations, Daniel ;). The Internet is new age media while TV, radio, and newspapers are examples of more traditional forms of media.

 

Now the question arises here is, what make social media distinguish from traditional forms of media. The traditional form of media is a one-way street where people can read the newspaper or listen to a report on television. But this kind of media has its limitation. In radio, TV or newspaper we only get information, but can’t take part in interaction or discussion. Social media enable us to interact and people can put their indigenous perspective on the matter. In this age of globalization, new ways are emerging to create and deliver literature worldwide. Social media makes it easier for it users to spread digital content on the web in real time. Creative writings or literary projects have been developing in social media, which is perhaps the most relevant development in literature in last decade. The production of micro fiction or twitterature is quite a remarkable event in literary history. Twitterature refers to an original, self-contained work of fiction. It can be 140 character stories, fan fiction or it can be the retelling of literary classics and legends (Twitterature). Twitterature can be published any tweet user. This new literary genre is experimental for its authors. The format of twitterature and the limitation of 140 character space have generated two approaches, with some authors writing stories of exactly 140 characters, while others simply consider it as a limit instead of a structural constraint. Twittearture includes various genres like aphorisms, poetry, fiction etc. The aphorism is quite popular because of its shortness and it is suitable for the word length of twitter. But there is another reason for its immense popularity among netizens. In twitter, people put their own brief insights on every aphorism. Another form of twitter literature is fiction. Twitterature fiction includes 140 character stories, fan-fiction, the retelling of literary classics and legends, twitter novels and other collaborative works .

 

140 character stories refer to the fiction that fits into a single tweet. Sean Hill or Arjun Bose is a pioneer of writing in this form. Fan-fiction is another integral part of twitterature. Tweet accounts have been created for the character in films, TV series, and books. Through fan fiction, we can gain an insight into the nature of all-time literary classics by their imaginative tweets as they interact with other users. The twitter fiction is another form of fiction which can be told in over hundreds of tweets and it can run for months. In this kind of novel context is usually maintained by a unique hashtag. Examples of twitter fiction include Small Places, written by Nick Belardes using the Twitter account@smallplaces. Another instance of twitter fiction is Executive Severance, written by Robert K. Blechman using the Twitter account RKBs_Twitstery (Twitterature). Even Neil Gaiman took an attempt to write twitter fiction collaboratively. In this literary project, his twitter followers collaborated with him on a novel (Blackwell, Laura ;). Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole is also famous for his innovative use of twitter as a platform for creative writing. The idea of writing in twitter occurred to him suddenly. He began messaging to his friends on twitter and asked them to be a part of “storytelling experiment”, which was his first literary venture on twitter. He sent participants a sentence and instructs them to post it for their followers. Cole then retweeted those tweets in order (Rathbone, Keira ;). After assembling together 31 retweets from 31 people the result was “Hafiz”, which was Cole’s first fiction on twitter. “Hafiz” was also an attempt of distributing storytelling, made by Cole.

 

Basically, twitter fiction provides its readers an experience and challenges them to explore multiple meanings and to develop their interpretation skills. Furthermore, these micro-stories, fictions are rich in cultural aspects and it provides its readers a wide range of learning opportunities, which is dynamic, relevant and exciting. Carla Raguseo in his article ‘Twitter Fiction: Social Networking and Microfiction in 140 characters’ explained two approaches of microstories. He said that, “the 140-character space limitation has generated two approaches, with some authors, like Arjun Basu, writing stories of exactly 140 characters, while others simply consider it as a limit instead of a structural constraint and may write 140 characters or less” (Raguseo, Carla;). He cited Twitter Fiction writer Chris Brauer in support of his statement. Chris Brauer said,

“One of the most demanding early questions is whether you should post stories of exactly 140 characters or write stories of 140 characters or less. This has a big practical impact on the process as if you decide on the former you often find yourself writing to conform to the strict format instead of letting the creative process drive the length. It really is the difference between writing free-form poetry and iambic pentameter or haikus. (2009, n.p.)”

(Raguseo, Carla;).

L.Zavala in his book, “From Literary Theory to Postmodern Mini fiction” has pointed out the several benefits of micro fiction and how this micro fiction works as an antivirus of literature (Zavala, L). In his book, Zavala argued that micro fiction is a vaccine for children and inexperienced readers to become addicted to literature. Zavala also mentioned that micro fiction provides a didactic way to learn critical literary elements such as humor, irony, parody, allusion etc. and it blurs the distinction between the reading and interpretations of a text. According to him easy access of twitterature allows a reader to approach huge works by embarking on its fragments. Although twitterature is in a state of infancy but it slowly emerging as a future of literature, as many curious, excited writers are joining in this venture. Even Indian writers are jumping on this bandwagon. Chindu Sreedharan, a UK-based lecturer at Bournemouth University picked Twitter for the retelling of the Mahabharata (Mahabharata to be retold on Twitter from Duryodhana’s point of view). He is using the point of view of Bhima for storytelling and is currently standing at 600+ tweets. This piece of twitterature called EpicRetold, which is quite popular among netizens. Tech writer Rakesh Raman’s literary  venture  Robojit  has  an  immense  popularity  among  its  readers,  which  has  been published as a book on Flipkart named The Sand Planet (Tharakan, Tony;). Another writer is Arjun Basu who writes 140 character short stories on twitter. His writing experiment is quite popular and he has around one lakh follower on twitter.

 

Role of Facebook and Instagram in new literary movement:

 

Facebook fiction is also an integral part of this new literature movement on an internet. Though, Facebook fiction has less flexibility than twitter to go beyond the digital space. Facebook does not have collaborative stories, multi-perspective stories, and online drama like twitter. But the interesting thing about Facebook is the relationship between fiction and Facebook, which is a shift from reality to fiction, Facebook remains a successful platform for blogging and literary processes on Facebook are quite similar like other microblogging websites. Even some scholars arguing that Facebook has more literary possibilities than other web blog websites. Though there is a certain policy in Facebook as a creation of fake names without indicating that it is not a personal account is restricted. But we can found Facebook pages of the fictional character. Among them, recent example is a project developed by Steve Lowtwait and Michael Smith (Rospigliosi and Greener ). They took an attempt to tell a fictional story through Facebook by creating profiles of the story’s fictional characters. The authors have created Facebook pages for the main protagonist of the story. But they did not stop there. They went on to create the profile for protagonist’s wife, children and his best friend which is imaginary. The interesting thing about this project is anyone has a chance to communicate with the fictional character and even they can influence the plot of the story.

 

Instagram is also joining in the league with Facebook, Twitter. Instagram has the potentiality to emerge out as a successful platform for social media fiction. Instagram gave birth of photo inspired fiction which is longer in length than Twitter Nano stories. In this photo illustrated short fiction on Instagram questions the border of reality. Random real people become the protagonists of fictional stories when Instagram users post photos with a short fictional text. This subgenre of storytelling can be found on Instagram under the #realpeopleinfictionalstories tag.12 Another popular trend of Instagram is taking the photo of strangers, but writing imaginary stories based on these photos of real people is the new trend for both social media and literature. This kind of Instagram project has turned the real places and figures into fictional place and character, making these projects the space between reality and literature.

Blogging is another platform which is responsible for reshaping the concept of literature. In this age of new literacy, blogs are playing a pivotal role like other  microblogging websites. Though there is a difference between micro-blog and blog, as a microblog has few limitations. Otherwise, the basic features are same. Today people use blogs for different purposes. Some write about their own interests, some express their anger on current political issues and record their insights on it. Some write about their own interests, some post comments and at the same time they can interact with other bloggers. In an individual blog, bloggers can update or add to posts, modify and edit the content. In this way, they are easy to keep up to date, which is different compared to hard copy articles and writing. Each blog has RSS and an XML function, which means other bloggers and the public, can read and can be a part of reproducing the content anytime, anywhere.Kuznetsova Eugenia. ‘Social Network Services as Fiction Generating Platform and the Rise of Social Media Fiction’ 2014.

 

According to Razmerita et al, blogs are providing a new space for communicating and collaborating. Minocha (2009) showed Franklin and Van Harmelen’s research which says that bloggers can create parallel knowledge through posts and comments as they can post their opinions and comments on other people’s blog (Wang, Jianfeng;). In this age of new literacy, blogs are new tool of creative works for both individual and organization. As blogs are providing “collaborative space” for people so they can post their comments in group writing and can be a part of a venture. Unlike conventional form of print-based writing, blogs can be modified anytime by a reader. In weblogs there is a transparency between authors and readers, makes it more acceptable to its users. Blogging threads are not static and discrete units, but they are dynamic and malleable, open for re-authoring multiple times. In blogs, the narrative became repeatedly overwritten with complex subplots and multi-layered characters, which is an evolutionary development for written text. Apart from weblog, there is another kind of blog that focused on a particular topic of literature. This lit blog covers a wide range of literary subjects like fiction, nonfiction, poetry, the publishing industry, literary journals, literary criticism, and more. Lit blogs feature those subjects of a literature of which mainstream press did not aware of. Lit blogs can have both one and multiple authors. This kind of blogs presents a study in a form of discussion on a specific area of literature. Bookslut, The Literary Saloon are some well-known name among lit blogs1. These lit blogs are providing a new alternative space for its readers.

 

Some of the well-known authors like Neil Gaiman, Holly Black, and Scott Westerfeld have their own lit blogs. Although the blog culture of India too is not lagging behind. Blog culture in India is nearly a decade old. Some of the common and popular blog names in India is Shout Me Loud, Next Big What etc.

 

In our traditional literary system, the place of social media fiction still needs to be defined properly. But the recent development in social media literature and the rise of a huge number of methods of storytelling on the internet prove that this new literature is a self- sufficient genre of literary creation. This new literature with its technical advances and new formats of interactive storytelling makes it more appealing to its reader. With this new literacy, the reader becomes a part of a fictional story unknowingly. Authors are involving independent participants in this literary process by blurring the line between fiction and reality. They are trying to establish communication between reality and the imaginary world through this e-literature. Authors are still experimenting with this new format of fiction in media. But one thing is clear that this new kind of fiction doesn’t just make only storytelling process more interactive, it’s also conveying new meanings and giving literature new functions in social processes. Though in its inception, it was far from being a unified movement in literature. Web literature or blogs have emerged in an unorganized way as it was a result of continuous experiments on the web by an individual or a group of people. But it soon became the subject of a study of literature. At the moment when printed literature is in impending crisis, web literature has opened the doors of a new literature to its reader. The new generation of literature is the more popular to the youths because most of the time they spent on the internet.

 

Hence print literature may be hampered by restrictions like availability of investments, financial viability, limits of geography, marketing and distribution but on the other hand e-literature does not have such barriers. As a newcomer on the literary scene, internet literature complicates the social organization of print literature. The ease of online self-publishing shifts the balance of power among authors, editors, publishers and critics. E- literature has shifted the balance of power from print to online literature writers, editors, publishers and critics. Now they are not to be dependent on someone else for their own literary publications. Now they are earning fame from cyberspace. Web literature is also changing the meaning of authorship. On the internet it becomes much more democratic, as now common readers can publish their own work in cyberspace too. Over the years web literature has taken on some distinct features in content, genre, style and language, thus expanding the range of literary writing. In language, web literature exhibits such dazzling creativity that it has provided a new dimension into our literary culture.

 

Conclusion:

 

Twitter, Facebook and other blogs have quite a deep effect on our verbal environment. 160 character for texting and 140 characters for tweeting or 6 words memoir all these form of ultra- minimalist narrative emerge from social media. This ultra-minimalism has affected our sentences and turns them in the form of idiom. The literature has been influenced deeply by ultra-minimalism. Few years ago it was absurd to think of 140 character short story or fiction. But in this digital age, social media is changing the way of creative writing. Unlike print literature it has some problematic issues like plagiarism etc., but it is true social media and this new literature is exploring a new side, which could possibly lead us to write a new version of literary history in future.

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