ABSTRACT
Online tools enable authors and readers to share information, questions and feedback about a written work without the mediation of a publisher or agent. Little is known about how the two groups interact online around works of fiction, using either specialist social reading platforms e.g. GoodReads or Wattpad, or popular social media tools like Twitter. A better understanding of the interplay between them and the role technology plays as mediator can help inform the development of next-generation tools to suit their needs. We describe findings from interviews conducted with genre fiction authors and readers about how and why they interact and share information online. Interviews revealed that the social dynamics between the groups are complex, and that intercommunication can be both limited and somewhat unwanted. This shifted our focus from identifying how they interact to understanding why they do not. We found that communication patterns established by the traditional publishing industry create barriers between the groups, made visible, and exacerbated, by their retrofit to online social platforms where readers and authors are treated as equal. We discuss our key findings and highlight opportunities to better support the incongruent information needs of the groups.
- Roland Barthes. 1967. The Death of the Author. Retrieved November 25, 2016 from http://www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdfGoogle Scholar
- George Buchanan and Dana Mckay. 2011. In the Bookshop': Examining Popular Search Strategies. Proceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries: 269--278. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sally Jo Cunningham, Nicholas Vanderschantz, Claire Timpany, Annika Hinze, and George Buchanan. 2013. Social information behaviour in Bookshops: implications for digital libraries. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8092 LNCS: 84--95.Google Scholar
- Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. 2013. Reading beyond the book: The social practices of contemporary literary culture. Routledge, New York.Google Scholar
- Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor. 2005. Pamela in the marketplace': literary controversy and print culture in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
- Peter L. Shillingsburg. 2006. Script Act Theory. In From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. 40--79. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Allison Woodruff. Necessary, Unpleasant, and Disempowering: Reputation Management in the Internet Age. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Distant Voices in the Dark: Understanding the Incongruent Information Needs of Fiction Authors and Readers
Recommendations
Participant reactivity in a longitudinal mixed-method study of the information behavior of people with type 2 diabetes: research validity vs. "street validity"
ASIST '13: Proceedings of the 76th ASIS&T Annual Meeting: Beyond the Cloud: Rethinking Information BoundariesParticipant reactivity -- a phenomenon in which the responses and/or behaviors of study participants are affected by their awareness that they are part of a study -- is often deemed to be a potential threat to the research validity of a study's ...
A large-scale study of daily information needs captured in situ
The goal of this work is to provide a fundamental understanding of the daily information needs of people through a large-scale, in-depth, quantitative investigation. To this end, we have conducted one of the most comprehensive studies of information ...
Voices that cannot be heard: Can shyness explain how we communicate on Facebook versus face-to-face?
Social networking sites have gained popularity among all populations, especially young adults. Personality traits were found to be predictive of how individuals use social media. Therefore, this study sought to examine the association between shyness ...
Comments