Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing

John R Gallagher

• Editorial: Utah State University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781607329749
• Categoría: Langues et linguistique
• Categoría: Linguistique

Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing explores "neglected circulatory writing processes" to better understand why and how digital writers compose, revise, and deliver arguments that undergo sometimes constant revision. John R. Gallagher also looks at how digital writers respond to comments, develop a brand, and evolve their arguments—all post-publication.With the advent of easy-to-use websites, ordinary people have become internet writers, disseminating their texts to large audiences. Social media sites enable writers' audiences to communicate back to the them, instantly and often. Even professional writers work within interfaces that place comments adjacent to their text, privileging the audience's voice. Thus, writers face the prospect of attending to their writing after they deliver their initial arguments. Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing describes the conditions that encourage "published" texts to be revisited. It demonstrates—through forty case studies of Amazon reviewers, redditors, and established journalists—how writers consider the timing, attention, and management of their writing under these ever-evolving conditions.Online culture, from social media to blog posts, requires a responsiveness to readers that is rarely duplicated in print and requires writers to consistently reread, edit, and update texts, a process often invisible to readers. This book takes questions of circulation online and shows, via interviews with both writers and participatory audience members, that writing studies must contend with writing's afterlife. It will be of interest to researchers, scholars, and students of writing studies and the fields of rhetoric, communication, education, technical communication, digital writing, and social media, as well as all content creators interested in learning how to create more effective posts, comments, replies, and reviews.

1

Methods and Participants

DOI: 10.7330/9781607329749.c001

This book is based on forty case studies of digital writers. The scope of this book is restricted to three principles of selection: (1) individuals (2) who write and communicate within IPI-templated environments while (3) actively considering responses from their audiences. I choose these three principles of selection for specific reasons related to the goal of this book, which is to identify writing strategies for negotiating with the rapid audience feedback that occurs in update culture. I choose individuals rather than groups of people, institutions, or autotelic communities because identifiable strategies that individuals use to contend with their participatory audiences may be more easily transferred to other individuals than from group to group due to the complexity of collaboration. Other studies, notably Krista Kennedy’s Textual Curation: Authorship, Agency, and Technology in Wikipedia and Chambers’s Cyclopædia (2016), examine how organizations, communities, or groups contend with participatory audiences.

While the three main strategies I present in this book—timing, attention, management—may be applied to groups, organizations, or institutions, I can neither confirm nor deny their effectiveness and, therefore, make no claims about this act of transfer. While this individualistic approach does not fully account for the medley of activities and institutional structures that my participants are embedded within, individuals still make choices when reading their comments, reacting to interface affordances (e.g., Likes, Shares, Retweets), and communicating with interactive websites. In other words, individual writers remain actors and can speak directly to writing within a medley of social pressures and expectations.

I also restrict my claims to contexts of IPI templates. In broad terms, I don’t investigate people who design, code, or program their own websites from scratch. I investigate people who write and communicate through the portals and prestructured designs of a company or corporation. IPI templates are immensely important to this project because my claims are couched in what I call template rhetoric, something my previous work has investigated (Gallagher 2015a, 2015b, 2017).

While the next chapter lays out template rhetoric in depth, I briefly explain it here: users communicate with each other on the social web through interactive templates that structure the available means of communication. Users frequently invent new ways of using the means given to them, such as creative hashtags on Twitter or quirky uses of photographs on Instagram, but users act within these structures due primarily to a lack of coding access. Even expert computer programmers are often forced to use templates because the vast majority of users have chosen the corporate-based social web rather than designing their own websites. Explicit examples of templates include Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. More subtle examples of templates include the review system of Amazon and even WordPress’s preformatted toolkits.

Last, I restrict my claims to individuals who consider audience response. I use “consider” here generously. Users who respond explicitly to their audiences fall into my scope but so do users who read and ignore their comments, users who block trolls, and users who have enough experience with audience response to form an imagined, generalized reader, such as a hivemind or lurker. I examine and investigate people who contend, explicitly or implicitly, with audience response. Consequently, this selection criterion means that my participants already have audience participation.

Context

This study is situated in the template-standardized interactions of internet cultures that emerged in the mid-2000s. While business models refer to this as Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005), I use the phrase interactive and participatory internet (IPI) to emphasize users’ motivations, purposes, and goals. As IPI environments and templates proliferate, textual participation has grown along with them in the form of commenting cultures. While online comments have only been briefly touched upon or mentioned tangentially by writing studies (Gallagher 2018; Sparby 2017; Tarsa 2015), a vast body of research exists on commenting and commenters in communication and media studies. For a comprehensive review of empirical studies, see Malinen (2015) and for a taxonomy of comments, see Joseph Reagle (2015). This previous research, in very broad terms, focuses on IPI environments, the commenters, and the functions of digital comments. First, researchers have investigated the discussion factors that make an IPI environment interactive (Ziegele, Breiner, and Quiring 2014) and how the nature of the forum influences the civility of that interaction (Rowe 2015; Santana 2016), touching on issues of race and racism (Loke 2012), as well as gender and sexism (Moss-Racusin, Molenda, and Cramer 2015). Second, researchers have studied the parameters that impact a commenter’s credibility (Kareklas, Muehling, and Weber 2015), which is often intertwined with issues of anonymity (Reader 2012; Santana 2013) and motivation (or perceived motivation) given that motivation appears to be social (Springer, Engelmann, and Pfaffinger 2015). It has been noted that trolling can negatively impact credibility (Phillips 2015), including the credibility of the text, by influencing reader trust (Marchionni 2015). Finally, digital comments themselves can perform a variety of functions, including reviewing (Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006), interpreting and questioning scientific arguments (Len-Rios, Bhandari, and Medvedeva 2014), recording reader reactions to journalistic information (Ürper and Çevikel 2016), editing ebooks (Laquintano 2010, 2016), peer reviewing and community building in digital classrooms (Molinari 2004), and encouraging democratic discourse at the local (Canter 2013) and national (Dashti, Al-Kandari, and Al-Abdullah 2015) levels. These studies demonstrate mechanisms by which a wide variety of comment cultures can evolve and the effects these cultures have on both commenters and original texts.

This study extends our understanding of digital comment culture(s) by examining ways initial writers respond to comments. While researchers have assessed how digital comments shape attitudes of other commenters (Sung and Lee 2015), to my knowledge no researchers have focused on how initial writers react to comments after their initial discourse, aside from my past work (Gallagher 2015a, 2018). This study provides a look at the impact comment culture has on the production and producers of IPI texts as those texts circulate around the internet. To put it less formally, this study examines how writers revise, tweak, and rethink their writing strategies as their texts move about the internet accumulating comments and other types of reception (Likes, etc.).

Introduction to Participants

I studied writers in these participatory environments because they are significantly more likely to be everyday writers, thus giving this study more utility to everyday users, such as students and other aspirational writers who want to know more about the world digital writers encounter. While I say more about some of the economics in chapter 5, “Textual Management,” the writers I studied were either not paid or contingent labor. Those who did make money from their writing often contended with the gig economy, that is, temporary work outside traditional organizational structures, in some form or another. In light of these economic considerations, their goal was often to be read widely, which meant they engaged their audiences via comments in an attempt to build a digital ethos.

I found that internet writers who actively considered their participatory audiences exhibited interesting similarities, despite having disparate purposes. They tended to share similar strategies for contending with participatory audiences; in other words, it was the interaction with audiences that generally united these writers. Whether it was Amazon reviewers, digital journalists, bloggers, or redditors, I found participants took on the language of their particular template while trying to establish their own writing style and voice. While searching for a writing style is nothing new, my participants searched for ways to engage, quite literally, readers in the participants’ own style and voice. They were not just imagining the audience. They read comments and thought about how to engage readers, using the affordances of their templates and their own personal style. As I’ll discuss in chapter 5, even dealing with trolls might be a way to demonstrate personal style. They often considered algorithms in complex ways, sometimes rising to the level of an audience.

I draw on case studies of forty writers who contend with participatory audiences. It is incidental that this number turned out evenly. I studied three main groups of writers: redditors, Amazon reviewers, and digital journalists or bloggers. What they all have in common is that they generally have broad audiences on the basis of being top-level redditors (top fifty based on comment karma, an indication of audience visibility based on audience voting), top-level Amazon reviewers (top one hundred based on Amazon’s ranking system), and journalists or bloggers who actively consider their audiences (self-reported and with sizable Twitter followings). Many journalists in my study kept their own blogs, which makes this distinction often murky. I also allowed the more well-known participants to make contacts for me (snowball sampling) and thus expand my pool to interested and qualified participants. I determined all rankings during my initial contact with participants (and they have since changed, ranking higher and lower depending quite literally on the day). I also interviewed multiple participants w...