This presentation sets out a narrative framework for analysing the evolving memetic cultures of TikTok, building on the model of shared stories (Page, 2018). I explore how video memes employ templatable, micro-plots of personal transformation and use this to develop a typology of memetic retellings which comprises, interlaced, aggregated, reversed and grafted rescripting. The analysis draws on 300 videos from four trending sounds sampled in 2022-23 (including contemporary music, mash ups and television clips), using this to explore the ongoing gendered politics in Tiktok, especially in relation to appearance pressure.

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On December 29 of 2022, misogynistic social media influencer, Andrew Tate, was arrested in Romania on suspicion of rape and human trafficking. Reporting of the incident exposed to the wider public the astonishing extent of the influencer’s popularity among heterosexual boys and men. As part of the broader online ‘manosphere’ – a loose network of antifeminist and reactionary online spaces and communities – Tate’s popularity reflects the growing influence and normalisation of this online culture’s views among a cohort of boys and men looking for role models and trying to make sense of their lives.

A substantial body of feminist media scholarship provides a thorough account of manosphere logics, while pointing to a broader trend of masculine anxieties over ‘men’s [shifting] position in the social hierarchy as a result of feminism’ (Ging 2019: 653). More recently, a number of ‘critically empathetic’ (Lobb 2017) studies have pivoted towards trying to better understand the drivers and preconditions which make individual boys and men vulnerable to being drawn into this detrimental online world.

In this paper, I will discuss my own critically empathetic research which aims to fill gaps in understanding around what is driving increasing numbers of boys and men into manosphere communities.

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Contrasting the visuality of warfare on ‘traditional’ social network-driven platforms with that of so-called ‘WarTok’, I will address the multi-modal affordances of short video formats and how they elevate embodied identity performances. This shift toward embodiment gives rise to new, or perhaps alternative, representations of both victim as well perpetrator. The various modalities that a TikTok post contains—visual, aural, gestural—afford more layered representations of those directly impacted by war, as opposed to the mostly static imagery that dominates a platforms such as X—formerly known as Twitter. TikTok is populated with posts that defy the stereotypes of helpless victims so common in humanitarian or journalistic war photography (Chouliaraki, 2013). However, while victims find voice, they also need to adhere to ‘platformed rules of visibility’. The imagined or anticipated audience nudges creators to premediate what will ‘stick’. Tied to social media’s ‘dictum’ of hyper-narrativity (Wagener, 2019) the personal story tends to trump complexities of ‘facts of war’ as they need to blend in with audience’s preferences. Attuning to trends, popular posts are the posts that cue appropriate emotional responses (Primig, 2023) in the targeted audience and as such seldom afford dialogue. The ‘need’ to continuously lean into majority preferences in order to be ‘seen’ profoundly shapes the ways in which we come to know of others.

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This talk explores the relationship between humans and AI in the realm of authorship. While AI might not possess human-like consciousness, they can still be creative. Large language models can serve as platforms for cyborg authorship. We need to consider writing with contemporary AI in the context of  historical instances of text generation. AI's role in contemporary LLM-based narrative writing is to serve both a co-author and interlocutor. Alignment for AI safety can sometimes serve as censorship and there are challenges in maintaining a balance that can produce compelling narrative. Literature, often addresses complex human issues, which AI might avoid. This talk explores the human function in AI writing. The essence of AI-driven creativity lies in its meaningful interaction with humans in forms of writing that are best understood as dialogic collaborations between the human interacting with the system and the AI. Cyborg authorship is best understood as a new genre of electronic literature.

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Digital technology has changed the way we read. We can be consumed by a narrative on our mobile phone or make our way through a network of connections in a web browser. Whether in terms of structure and navigation or in terms of modes and media therefore, digital technologies affect the way we consume texts and, ultimately, language. Profiling my research in stylistics and narratology, I will explore the literary and technological history of digital fiction before focussing on a recent reader-response study of an immersive mobile phone app-fiction, Blast Theory’s Karen (2015). I will show ways in which this digital fiction builds a world that problematises the divide between reality and fiction and profile my new theoretical category of “ontological resonance” (Bell 2021) as a means of theorising that ontological ambiguity.

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In this talk I'm going to induce a theory of medial reading from a range of empirical studies with readers of digital-born fiction. In particular, I will focus on medium-specific reading in VR as an environment that is known for its immersive, experiential qualities yet less for its affordances for literary fiction and verbal art. I consider what participants’ discursive responses to reading Randall Okita’s allofictional VR memoir, The Book of Distance, reveal about the mediality of reading in VR. I derive the concept of ambimediality from data that shows the blending of multi-, inter- and transmedial processing on the one hand and the ambivalent and ambient contingencies of medium-specific reading in VR on the other.

Digital evolution is largely driven by commercialisation, pushing technology ever forward even as great swathes of the global population are left behind with little access to necessary hardware, infrastructure, and skills. Digital fiction, historically, developed in different ways around the world, influenced by factors such as language, technological access, culture, and government policies. This talk will explore how a “postdigital” world has developed unique digital fiction traditions out of the human responses to barriers and inequalities.