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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.
— Vauhini Vara, author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
What do we see when we don’t assume that what the internet has done to literature is all bad? Helping us explore the possibilities as well as the perils of the present, Aarthi Vadde’s state-of-the-art account of our postscarcity literary world offers a wonderfully energizing tour of some of the most fascinating experiments it has inspired.
— Mark McGurl, author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon
We all know that the internet changed literature—the ways it’s written and circulated, what it is—but until We the Platform we haven’t known how. Aarthi Vadde has given us the gift of a rigorous, at times thrilling account of how Web 2.0—the social web, the social media web, the web of Twitter, Wattpad, Goodreads—has transformed copyright and authorship and thus literary production writ large.
— Dan Sinykin, author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature
It turns out that social media may not, in fact, have killed the literary star—such is Vadde’s sharp and welcome rebuttal to the fatalistic 'end of literature' narrative. We the Platform maps the complex convergence of legacy publishing and platform capitalism, showing how literature endures by navigating, rather than fleeing, the logic of Web 2.0.
— Rita Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara
Introduction: Literature and Mass Writing
1. Platform or Publisher?
2. Attribution and Evasion
3. Celebrity Twitter Fiction
4. Fangirl Fiction
5. Reading and Looking
Epilogue: The Writer’s Hand-at-a-Distance
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index