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Team Edward or team Jacob?: how user-generated content is transforming young adult literature

Published: 08 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

This poster is part of a larger project which examines how the Internet is influencing transmedia cultural products created for teens, and challenging the traditional role of librarians as arbiters of taste within the realm of young adult (YA) literature. The overall research focuses on four case studies that explore the effect of the Internet on YA literature and how it is created, evaluated, and read. Results from one such case study, based on books in Stephenie Meyer's bestselling Twilight series [1], are presented here. Fan activity around Twilight demonstrates how teens create user-generated content which publishers are able to transform into powerful, socially-networked marketing material which is created and disseminated by the users themselves. This in turn causes a disintermediated relationship between publishers and their teen consumers, and as a result, raises important questions about what happens to YA librarians' conventional role as taste-makers in the field, and about the types of YA books that will be published in the future.

References

[1]
Meyer, S. 2005. Twilight. Little, Brown, New York, NY:
[2]
Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (R. Nice Trans.). Harvard University Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., Cambridge, MA.
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Toffler, A. 1980. The Third Wave. Bantam, New York, NY.
[4]
Jenkins, H. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
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Bullen, E. 2009. Inside story: Product placement and adolescent consumer identity in young adult fiction. Media, Culture & Society, 31, 3, 497--507.
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Coté, M. and Pybus, J. 2007. Learning to immaterial labor 2.0: Myspace and social networks. Ephemera, 7(1), 88--106.
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Murray, S. 2010. "Remix My Lit:" Toward an open access literary culture. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 16, 1, 23--38.
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Terranova, T. 2000. Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social Text, 63, 18, 33--57.
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Andrejevic, M. 2008. Watching television without pity: The productivity of online fans. Television & New Media, 9, 1, 24--46.
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Agosto, Denise E., Hughes-Hassell, Sandra. 2006. Toward a model of the everyday life information needs of urban teenagers, part 1: Theoretical model; part 2: Empirical model. JASIST, 57, 10 and 11, 1394-1403-1418-1426.
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Dresang, E. 2005. The Information-Seeking Behavior of Youth in the Digital Environment. Library Trends, 54, 2, 178--196
[12]
Zipes, J. 2001. Sticks and stones: The troublesome success of children's literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. Routledge, New York, NY.
[13]
Meyer, S. 2006. New Moon. Little, Brown, New York, NY.
[14]
Radway, J. 1984. Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular literature. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    iConference '11: Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
    February 2011
    858 pages
    ISBN:9781450301213
    DOI:10.1145/1940761
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 08 February 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. Twilight
    2. EULAs
    3. convergence culture
    4. internet
    5. librarians
    6. user-generated content
    7. virtual ethnography
    8. young adult literature

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    iConference '11
    iConference '11: iConference 2011
    February 8 - 11, 2011
    Washington, Seattle, USA

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