PROMPT:<\/p>\n
At the beginning of this lesson I pointed to the idea that technological advances in communication tools have been part of the impetus to rethink the divisive and hierarchical categorizing of literature and orality, and suggested that this is happening for a number of reasons. \u00a0I\u2019d like you to consider two aspects of digital literature: 1) social media tools that enable widespread publication, without publishers, and 2) Hypertext, which is the name for the text that lies beyond the text you are reading, until <\/span>you<\/span><\/i> click. How do you think these capabilities might be impacting literature and story?<\/span><\/p>\n ——<\/p>\n As Marshall McLuhan famously once said, \u201cthe medium is the message<\/a>.\u201d This is true when we look at the way that storytelling has been transformed with the influx of convenience provided by social media and hypertext. For example, if we look at Twitter, the platform has become a place where the content itself isn\u2019t very important; realistically, it can be difficult to express an entire story through 280 characters. Instead, tweets become viral often because of the character behind them – in other words, the original publisher\/poster and their values. For example, we can look at Donald Trump\u2019s Twitter frenzy as an example of someone with a weak character and large Twitter following. Regardless of content, people are readily on hand to clown his social media efforts. However, Twitter has had great success in viralizing short but effective storytelling techniques. What comes to mind is the \u201cten word story<\/a>\u201d – a writing phenomenon created by the website dimeshowreview.com. Within it, writers are challenged with creating stories with a suffocatingly small maximum word limit of ten words. However, professional and amateur authors alike have taken to this challenge, with it also sparking several accounts on Twitter that have been collecting and curating submissions. Going back to tweet limits and the basis of character, I believe the success of the ten word challenge to be separate from the person posting, but it instead still relies on factors other than content. When reading powerful ten word stories, it is on the reader to infer and take apart the content, as ten words alone do not suffice to tell the whole story. Instead, writers rely on the employment of nuances to help their readers. Although inference has always been an essential part of any story, the platform in which stories are told is an important element to enjoying a story as a whole. Twitter, or any social media for that matter, provides an excellent platform in the sense that it imbues an easily accessible global cyber community, making it easier for like minded storytellers and consumers alike to bond together. Chamberlain highlights that \u201cwords make us feel closer to the world we live in,\u201d (1) and social media as a storytelling platform goes beyond words themselves, and instead acts as a bonding agent. We can look at oral tradition as another way of understanding the popularity of social media; orature from pre-modern literature was spread by mouth, and often in social settings. Carrying onto the 18th and 19th centuries, storytelling was a popular pasttime that would entertain many people (picture a large group gathered around a hearth). Stories have been bringing people together for eons, and although their structures have changed, the reasons as to why stories are told and enjoyed as a part of humankind remain the same. <\/span><\/p>\n Likewise, hyperlinks are similar in the sense that they do not reveal the full story upon glance; one must click the link in order to access the full material. This puts the power in the reader\u2019s hands. Much as how we are left to piece together short, nuanced stories on the internet, we are also left to decide whether we wish to click into a hyperlink. Ultimately, although the storyteller is the one doling out the material, we as consumers can choose as to how and why we want to perceive such content. <\/span><\/p>\n Works Cited:<\/p>\n Chamberlin, J. Edward. \u201cA New History of Reading: Hunting, Tracking, and Reading.\u201d For the\u00a0Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Braithwaite. Ed. Timothy J. Reiss., 145-164. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2001. 145-164.<\/p>\n Federman, Mark. \u201cWhat Is the Meaning of The Medium Is the Message?\u201d <\/span>What Is the Meaning of The Medium Is the Message?<\/span><\/i>, 23 July 2004, individual.utoronto.ca\/markfederman\/article_mediumisthemessage.htm.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cTen Word Stories.\u201d <\/span>DIME SHOW REVIEW<\/span><\/i>, www.dimeshowreview.com\/category\/fiction\/ten-word-stories\/.<\/span><\/p>\n Oxley, Simon.\u00a0Twitter Logo<\/i>. N.d. N.p.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PROMPT: At the beginning of this lesson I pointed to the idea that technological advances in communication tools have been part of the impetus to rethink the divisive and hierarchical categorizing of literature and orality, and suggested that this is happening for a number of reasons. \u00a0I\u2019d like you to consider two aspects of digital […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42308,"featured_media":10,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/katrinalu470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/katrinalu470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/katrinalu470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/katrinalu470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42308"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/katrinalu470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/katrinalu470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/katrinalu470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/13"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/katrinalu470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/katrinalu470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/katrinalu470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/katrinalu470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}