Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local

Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local revitalizes our understanding of what writing is and does in the world. The focus of this astute and timely book might be on digital forms of communication, but the case studies and analyses in it have ramifications for our understanding of writing-writ-large. By tracing the ways different forms of writing emerge in situ and in deep interrelation with writers’ sense of agency, audience demands, platform pressures, and the uptake and redistribution of a range of communication activities, Whithaus offers us one of the most sophisticated understandings of how writers write in the world today. As never before, we never write alone. Writing is always already embedded in webs, networks, swarms, and viral redistributions that demand rethinking what writing is and what it means to be literate today.

-- Jonathan Alexander, University of California, Irvine

In the 2010s and 2020s, writing has seemingly exploded, with its fragments settling unpredictably across media and adhering to other modalities in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. Drawing on cases of writing from the past fifteen years, Whithaus sifts through these fragments, exploring how people write together in shared multimodal ecologies. These cases involve Twitch livestreams, Discord servers, TikTok videos, Reddit threads, Nextdoor screeds, and Yelp reviews. They recount writing collaborations spanning fandom communities, Dungeons & Dragons games, antagonistic trolling, conspiracy theories, and local political action. Parodies, pastiches, and protests all show up in this extended mediation on what it means to write multimodally and how that writing creates and shapes locality. Read it—and don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe.

-- Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Au