“Twitter, the most brilliant tough love editor you’ll ever have.” Reading and writing socially during the Twitter Fiction Festival

Authors

  • Joachim Vlieghe Ghent University
  • Kelly L. Page Live What You Love
  • Kris Rutten Ghent University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i4.6334

Abstract

The communication practice of tweeting has fostered numerous literary experiments, like Teju Cole’s series “Small fates” and Jennifer Egan’s novel “Black box”. In late 2012, these experiments culminated in an event that focused on such literary experiments: the first Twitter Fiction Festival. In this paper, we explore how people who participated in the festival use tweeting to embrace and enact writing and reading literature as a social experience. The study includes a participant-centered inquiry based on two one-hour Twitter discussions with 14 participants from the Twitter Fiction Festival as well as analyses of their online literary works and secondary sources related to the festival. We show that festival participants self-identify based on their creative and social practices as artists rather than with traditional labels such as writer or author and are therefore drawn to social media environments.

Author Biography

Joachim Vlieghe, Ghent University

Joachim received his Ph.D. in educational studies at Ghent University in 2014. During his Ph.D. Joachim worked as a principal investigator for the literacy work package of the EMSOC project (User-Empowerment in as Social Media Culture). In 2015, Joachim relocated to VUB where he joined the WISE research group (Web & Information Systems Engineering) as a post-doctoral research fellow. He currently collaborates on the Friendly-ATTAC project as a senior researcher, co-supervising the work of Ph.D. research projects focused on tools for design and fast prototyping of adaptive serious games and innovative e-learning systems.

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Published

2016-03-13

How to Cite

Vlieghe, J., Page, K. L., & Rutten, K. (2016). “Twitter, the most brilliant tough love editor you’ll ever have.” Reading and writing socially during the Twitter Fiction Festival. First Monday, 21(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i4.6334