Abstract
The internet is awash with new popular forms, from TED Talks and podcasts to makeup tutorials and tweets. And yet scholars have only just begun to explore these forms cultural effects. This essay develops an approach to new forms of popular digital "content," grounded in the humanistic theory tradition. The approach draws together formalist methods of analyzing genre from computational literary criticism and new media theory and applies them to the investigation of large databases of popular digital content—material on which neither subfield has yet focused extensively. Illustration is provided through a case study: an analysis of the genres that dominate a database of 18,908 of the most popular blog posts on Medium.com, 2019-2021, considered in relation to posthumanist theories of personhood. In this way, the essay shows what a formalist approach to popular digital content, grounded in literary and new media theory, can contribute to our growing, trans-disciplinary comprehension of digital culture.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 795-851 |
| Number of pages | 57 |
| Journal | New Literary History |
| Volume | 53 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 2023 |
| Externally published | Yes |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Literature and Literary Theory