Improvising and Collaborating Creatively with Social Media

Abstract

In this chapter, I discuss how writing in social media spaces takes on a performance as well as a social dimension. There is an oscillation between people, poems and words in Twitter hashtag streams and in Facebook groups. The act of writing poems or posting visual images such as photographs becomes performance as well as communication. People who participate in online poetry networks get to know each other through each other’s words and images and come together to improvise with digitally co-present others. There is a relational aesthetics at play. This chapter will include some research data from an article previously published in Text Journal http://textjournal.com.au/oct11/berry.htm. In that article (Berry 2011), I explored implications of social media for literary creative practice and how it may encourage participation in creative practice communities and move creative writing into new areas and forms. Here, I also present previously unpublished material drawn from a participatory art project using Twitter which I directed in a gallery space in 2013 to further explore the performance dimensions of writing in social and mobile media spaces.