Social Medial Platforms As Slushpiles for the Publishing Industry. Toss in a pinch of McLuhan, Foucault, and use them to pin down the changing definition of the ‘book’ while looking at how this all effects subculture and genre (fiction) publishing, and then you’ve got the gist.

I began my doctoral research last summer with an idea and a desire to be able to get beyond the usual ways that social media is useful. I wanted to design a programme that turned your tweets into poetry, but I realised I am not a coder, and someone beat me to it before I could even approach one of my talented friends and colleagues to get something off the ground.

My current research is a way of understanding what we mean when we say ‘book’. Is it a traditionally published paper and cloth item? Is it an eBook? A text-message book? A Twitter novel? Audiobooks? Recorded echoes? Can a Pinterest board be read as a photobook? I am interested in how the idea, and even the physicality of the book is changing. Then I want to use that change to look at what that has meant for the publishing industry over the last five to ten years. This is where Foucault and McLuhan comes in.

McLuhan’s Global Village and Rear View Mirror are fantastic ways to look at the snapshot of where social media and publishing converge. Thinking of the ‘book’ as an idea/item in flux, we can use the Rear View Mirror to get a better understanding of why the book must retain some qualities of the traditional printed version that is a part of our history. We need the framework of a comfortable idea to be able to digest and accept something new. For instance, why do eBooks have flipping pages and cover designs even though they are held on devices? Why do we still make a page flipping motion when we want to indicate for someone to go on to the next section of a screen or text message? Why do we keep page numbers and titles on screens just like in the printed versions?

All of these questions have an answer in the past. Meaning, we can use Foucault’s archaeology to understand how the connections are made between various nodes and statements, which themselves are linked in a particular time frame.

This is not to say that the definition of a ‘book’ can be absolutely written in stone. In fact, my research is not about absolutes. It is about discovering how the different statements or series of statements regarding the book, social media and subculture gives rise to the citizen author, a term which was coined by Leander Reeves (Oxford Brookes) and which I use to mean those authors who forgo traditional publishing models and