Literacies in Focus
NUI Galway
Featured Making Jesus Viral: How Contemporary Churches Have Adapted to TikTok View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jenna Bluedorn
As the media landscape is constantly shifting, corporations and individuals alike must adapt their online presence to meet their potential audience across platforms. Very few churches, as non-profit organizations, have begun to adapt TikTok into their digital messaging strategies. Little research on church’s social media use has been conducted, with none having examined the use of TikTok. This research contributes to the larger body of work by filling the gap in TikTok research in general and helping to understand how the platform fits into the larger social media world. A content analysis of three churches’ TikTok presence is provided with recommendations on how churches can further utilize TikTok to reach potential new audiences and maximize their influence among the younger generation (Generation Z).
Fictocritical Tactics for Reshaping Online Communication: Towards a 'Creatively Paranoid' Media Literacy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Zach Pearl
While it is clear that disinformation is an increasingly serious problem plaguing online platforms, this is juxtaposed with ongoing calls in the humanities dating back to the late 1970s to deconstruct and even eliminate the fact/fiction dichotomy, particularly in cyberfeminist critiques of technoscience. This paper-presentation argues that fictocriticism—a particularly indeterminate and feminist practice of writing that tactically blends theory, narrative, poetry and autobiography to eschew binary logics of knowledge production—might serve as a model for online communication in such a manner that it reflexively draws attention to its own artifice, and, in turn, promotes a more critical media literacy in online writing environments through what the American hypermedia theorist Stuart Moulthrop has called "creative paranoia" (1991). Drawing upon past and present research, I examine key examples of fictocriticism by Canadian and Australian authors, and through close reading I explore traits of their writing that may serve as theoretical touchstones for reimagining the protocols of online communication in less determinate yet more democratic terms. To illustrate some of the practical challenges and concerns that come with fictocritical writing in online environments, I also briefly look at interventions and performances made on Instagram in recent years by contemporary media artists such as Audrey Wollen and Amalia Ulman, noting how the "selfie" and the "overshare" have emerged as newly contested spaces in feminist discourse and the fact/fiction paradigm.
