Abstract
This article examines the strategies of remix as used to author live blogs in mainstream news media. The importance of this lies in how authorship shapes not only the form of the text but also its critical content and reading experience. Studying a variety of live blogs as used on The Guardian website, the author observes and classifies three such strategies: remix for continuity and diversity of content; for connecting digital and physical time-spaces; and for sociability on both the worldwide and mobile web. In light of the reproducibility of content in digital media, the article also re-considers the nature of digital authorship in terms of how such authorship engages in a more extensive global dialogue, adding to a glue of social media that holds together different voices across spaces.
Highlights
This article examines the strategies of remix as used to author live blogs in mainstream news media
While much study has been made of the materiality of digital texts (Cubitt 1998, Leonardi 2010), relatively little attention has been paid to their authorship. (Jenkins 2008) Yet it is a topic of importance, as the authorship of texts shapes not just their form and, as this article will argue, the reading experience they produce and, their critical content
I examine the writing of the “live blog”, an updated version of the popular decade-old form of digital text known as the blog
Summary
The live blog combines (in varying degrees) numerous media elements, such as photographs, videos, print text, tweets and hyperlinks, usually from various sources, to form a coherent narrative of the event. The word “this” was hyperlinked to a YouTube viral video (watched more than 3 million times) of the Elmo (from Sesame Street) stuffed toy which falls over and rolls around the floor to infectiously funny shrieking laughter (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO04rXDTcMo) This is live blogging remix at its best (if rare): the unexpected collision between the dour tedium of Test cricket, usually perceived as one of the most boring of sports due to its interminable length ( 7 to 8 hours a day over 5 days) and incomprehensible rules (too many examples to list here) against the almost infantile delight of a red soft toy in a classic situation of slapstick – falling over and getting up and falling over again – all set to Elmo’s uproarious laughter. Levels build upon levels: through a simple remix of media, the live blog becomes more than the reportage of an event, and a commentary on it and its larger, more profound issues
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