| Following the social media explosion in the early 1990s, writers are now creating a social presence online via blogs, Twitter, and Facebook accounts in order to reach audiences and gain exposure. With new media comes a new genre, Fratire, and new authors, such as Tucker Max and David Thorne, the pioneers of viral success and new media notoriety. Once their online presence was solidified, they each became best-selling print authors and now have multiple texts that have been featured on the New York Times Best Seller's List. Though new media provided the platform for these authors to become published due to their viral online content, old media is what provided them with validation in both online and offline reader communities.;Regardless of the ever-present technology that drives social communication, old media still reigns in the category of timelessness and credibility. This thesis works to explore how new media can provide a platform for budding writers, how media can be manipulated, and works to deconstruct the rhetoric present on social media sites and explore how evoking audience response may play a larger role in virality than content quality. In addition, this thesis will attempt to discuss how digital technologies allow for a blending of old and new media in the form of self-publishing and digital e-readers and will discuss how the role of the author has changed due to new media marketing strategies. By examining the culture of writing, popular media, and advanced writing technologies, one can see how technology has altered what the term "author" truly means, and this paper will work to discover whether an author should write a blog or a book, and if there is any difference between the two genres other than the publication platform. |
