Book Blogs as Tastemakers
Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: Amidst the abundant opportunities for book chat provided by digital media platforms, the book blog is distinctive; less obviously corporatised than Amazon, Facebook or Twitter, longer in format, and focused around the tastes of an individual and the community of likeminded readers they attract (Rak 2005, Steiner 2010).Book blogs model how to read, as well as what to read.In this article, I consider book blogs as shared expressions of readers' aesthetic conduct, which may encompass a variety of tastes.I map two contrasting networks of blogs: highbrow literary blogs, and romance fiction blogs.Both networks demonstrate connections to the publishing industry, while also maintaining an autonomy based on readers offering authentic opinions as a service to other readers.Analysis of book blogs shows that while new media does enable mass participation of readers in book culture, this participation can be stratified into taste-based groups, which are themselves further stratified by a hierarchy in which bloggers accumulate a specific kind of 'readerly capital' evident in their influence on other readers.Book blogs, like other forms of participation in literary culture, work within genres and taste cultures to create a diversified cultural space.
Author: Elizabeth Driscoll
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Australian Research Council
OpenAlex ID: W3017065698