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  • We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature by Aarthi Vadde book cover
  • We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature by Aarthi Vadde book cover
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We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature

by Aarthi Vadde

Literature after the rise of Web 2.0

$162.87 USD
$162.87 USD $162.87 USD

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AlbakiReads Editorial

Literature after the rise of Web 2.0

Aarthi Vadde connects the growth of social platforms and user-generated writing with changes in contemporary literary practice. The book considers how forms such as Twitter fiction, collaborative Wattpad projects, Instagram poetry, and chatbot experiments intersect with literary fiction and publishing. Its examples—including work by Jennifer Egan, Teju Cole, Margaret Atwood, and Sheila Heti—frame questions about authorship, aesthetic form, and craft amid new ways of creating and sharing text. Vadde also challenges accounts that treat online writing as evidence of literature’s decline, examining how platform-based practices can contribute to literary innovation while remaining entangled with the business models of the platforms themselves.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in twenty-first-century literary criticism and contemporary fiction.
  • Those exploring how social media, fan fiction, and self-publishing intersect with literature.
  • Readers studying authorship, digital publishing, or experimental forms of writing.

Themes

Web 2.0 and literary cultureMass and collaborative writingAuthorship and craftDigital platforms and publishingLiterary innovation and adaptation

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Web 2.0 gave us the online world as we know it today. Popularized in 2004, it redefined the internet as social, a "platform" for self-expression and data gathering. The ensuing proliferation of user-generated content such as social media posts, fan fiction, self-published novels, and Instagram poetry has spurred a host of anxieties about the end of literature. Yet contemporary literary fiction is deeply indebted to the folk forms that Web 2.0 cultivated, even when it is sharply critical of the platform business models behind them.

We the Platform is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless writers, diverse publishing formats, and vast communities of readers responding to stories publicly and instantly. Countering ubiquitous decline narratives, she offers powerful examples of literary innovation, adaptation, and survival. Among them are Jonathan Lethem and Lauren Oyler's challenges to individualist ideas of authorship, the Twitter fiction of Jennifer Egan and Teju Cole, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman's collaborative writing on Wattpad, conceptual projects like Book from the Ground, and the experimental use of chatbots by authors including Sheila Heti. Through nuanced and illuminating readings, this book shows how platform-based writing has altered cornerstone concepts of authorship, aesthetic form, and craft, delivering a bold new understanding of literature now.

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