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15 In 2009 Iran blocked its citizens’ access to Twitter and Facebook in an attempt to quell social discord about its federal election. A Ryerson student was threatened in 2008 with suspension for cheating because of setting up a study group on Facebook. The U.S. Marine Corps has banned the use of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. New media studies , especially those concerned with social media environments, are investigating the constructions, roles, and effects of the media that are proliferating in the information age. The variety of social media available to those with high-speed internet connections means that those with an inclination can publish themselves online. These technologies do more than create a platform for speakers, however. The infrastructure and interface of social media influence how messages are created and sent. McLuhan couldn’t have been more prescient with his assertion that the medium is the message; for social media, the software is the message. There are myriad social media platforms available, but this chapter will concentrate on the interfaces of three of the most widely used in North America: blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Moreover, we will look at how the infrastructures behind the interfaces themselves construct, normalize, and proliferate the public images of the speaker. The technologies that run under the hood of popular social media help create and distribute online selves, cobble together communities, and share sound bites and narratives. A study of new texts on the boundaries of literature must consider the ways in which the medium creates the message. The interface defines new social media. Consider the Source: Critical Considerations of the Medium of Social Media Kirsten C. Uszkalo and Darren James Harkness 2 16 · Kirsten C. Uszk alo and Darren James Harkness Online Identities The majority of scholars argue that blogs function as an online extension or even evolution of the autobiographical diary form; a number have also conducted other such genre-targeted studies. Articles on blogging emerged as early as 1998, when Yasuyuki Kawaura, Yoshiro Kawakami, and Kiyomi Yamashita discussed the phenomenon in their article “Keeping a Diary in Cyberspace.” Kawaura et al. concluded that online journals were “primarily a communicative behavior” and that they were a form of self-expression and self-disclosure (244, 236). In 2000, Philippe Lejeune wrote “Cher écran–” (Dear screen) and Rebecca Blood published “Weblogs: A History and Perspective,” which gives an excellent, if brief, chronology of the development of the weblog . She starts with Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom, which claims the first usage of the term in 1997, and skims past some of the early names in blogging on her way to discussing the rise of Pitas, one of the first blogging services; Blogger; and Dave Winer’s Edit This Page. Since online writing’s rise in 1999, much critical and cultural work has attempted to categorize and examine what it is. Critics have argued that blogs are online diaries, online journals, new journalism, and “Hyde Park corner blather” (Dvorak). Others, such as Julie Rak and Viviane Serfaty, have looked at the content of the blog and its genre forms. These approaches make it possible to teach online writing like epistolary writing, life writing , or (auto)biography. Particularly useful for this approach is a special issue of Biography, published in the winter of 2003, which includes several articles geared toward positioning the online journal within the realm of biographical and autobiographical study.1 The ways in which we create online narratives are as important as the stories they tell. It is necessary to understand that the media are changing. They are changing in form. They are forming the broadcaster and the broadcasts. Their formats encourage users to communicate differently and to represent themselves in a specific format. Twitter is a 140-character, short-form message to a group of listeners who can respond; it is the broadcast of a single thought. Individual topic sentences, random musings, theses, and suggestions locate the author within an introspective moment intended for mass communication. Facebook is the corporatization of the self on pages filled with news Consider the Source · 17 feeds, highlights, and personalized advertising. Facebook is a billboard of the self, a branded image of the “online me,” which is sponsored by friends as an act of validation and crossover. The blog is the most like traditional periodical publications. The oldest and most stable form of social media, the blog is the blankest piece of paper, the least linked in of the online social media tools. However, blogs are...

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