We the Platform by Aarthi Vadde
Web 2.0 gave us the online world as we know it today. Popularized in 2004, it redefined the internet as social, a “platform” for self-expression and data gathering. The ensuing proliferation of user-generated content such as social media posts, fan fiction, self-published novels, and Instagram poetry has spurred a host of anxieties about the end of literature. Yet contemporary literary fiction is deeply indebted to the folk forms that Web 2.0 cultivated, even when it is sharply critical of the platform business models behind them.We the Platform is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless writers, diverse publishing formats, and vast communities of readers responding to stories publicly and instantly. Countering ubiquitous decline narratives, she offers powerful examples of literary innovation, adaptation, and survival. Among them are Jonathan Lethem and Lauren Oyler’s challenges to individualist ideas of authorship, the Twitter fiction of Jennifer Egan and Teju Cole, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’s collaborative writing on Wattpad, conceptual projects like Book from the Ground, and the experimental use of chatbots by authors including Sheila Heti. Through nuanced and illuminating readings, this book shows how platform-based writing has altered cornerstone concepts of authorship, aesthetic form, and craft, delivering a bold new understanding of literature now.
We The Platform is the most persuasive and engaging account I’ve read of how the internet—rather than being a threat to literature—has become a legitimate and exciting site of literary creation, one where, as with all such sites, regular people and platform owners negotiate and renegotiate the balance of cultural powerA must-read. -- Vauhini Vara, author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
We all know that the internet changed literature—how it’s written and circulated, what it is—but until We the Platform we haven’t known how. Aarthi Vadde has given us the gift of a rigorous, at times thrilling, account of how Web 2.0—the social web, the social media web, the web of Twitter, Wattpad, Goodreads—has transformed copyright and authorship and thus literary production writ large -- Dan Sinykin, author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature
We all know that the internet changed literature—how it’s written and circulated, what it is—but until We the Platform we haven’t known how. Aarthi Vadde has given us the gift of a rigorous, at times thrilling, account of how Web 2.0—the social web, the social media web, the web of Twitter, Wattpad, Goodreads—has transformed copyright and authorship and thus literary production writ large -- Dan Sinykin, author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature
Aarthi Vadde is E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (Columbia, 2016) and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2024), among other books. She is the president of the Society for Novel Studies (2025–27) and cofounder of its podcast Novel Dialogue.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780231219709 |
| ISBN 10 | 0231219709 |
| Title | We the Platform |
| Author | Aarthi Vadde |
| Series | Literature Now |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Columbia University Press |
| Year published | 2026-06-23 |
| Number of pages | 304 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |