Forgive me from diving headfirst into the topics I have been writing about without a lot of backdrop or too much preamble. You see, I have been working on writing up the results of my PhD research into social media as a slushpile. And, I have learned loads.
For instance, I have narrowed the topics that have jumped out at me in my research into three distinct, but overlapping, areas: Community, Gender, and Power. I could go into a tonne of detail about the roles of community and gender in the place where the citizen author, social platforms, and the publishing industry come crashing together and diverge again, but I won’t. Today it’s about power.
Not that I’ve written this chapter yet. That would be way too easy. Instead I have (again) made visuals that help me to understand the relationships between the industry and this thing I’ve been defining as the discourse of the book. Take the illustrations as you will, I only ask that you also imagine that every single point – marked and unmarked – within the discourse of the book can be viewed by an infinite number of angles, all of which has the potential to create new statements of the book. I guess what I mean is that there’s a whole lot of grey and points of view for everything here.
Remember, feel free to share, but credit, and all that.
