Archivist of ‘Feels’: Web Weaving as a Fragmentary Reading Practice in Tumblr’s Platformized Fan Culture (MA Thesis)
Project Abstract
Shining a spotlight on the evolving role of the reader in the digital age, this MA Cultural Studies dissertation explores what it means to read in a hyperconnected world where media texts circulate as ‘fragments’ particularly within platformized fan communities. At the heart of this question lies Tumblr’s fragmentary fan reading practice, known as web weaving, both a symptom and a contagion of fragmentary reading and platformized fan culture.
In web weaving, users curate fragments—quotes, film stills, lyrics, artworks—into intertextual collages to trace shared emotional themes across seemingly unrelated works. By analyzing the socio-technical infrastructure, platform affordances, and vernacular practices that facilitate web weaving, this thesis conceptualizes Tumblr as a platformed ‘archive of feelings’ (Cvetkovich 2003), where blogs act as public-yet-private databases of media attachments and fan interests. Web weaving emerges as an extension of Tumblr’s affective and archival impulses, preserving fannish ‘feels’ or deeply felt reading experiences. This study argues that web weaving transforms the reader, as a fan, into an archivist who preserves texts that make them feel seen, transformed, and swept away, revealing new contours of knowledge about fragmentary fan reading cultures in communally interpretive yet platformized spaces.
This thesis adopts the sensibility of a ‘methodological bricolage’ (Lindgren 2017), combining multimodal discourse analysis, platform studies-approach, and affect theory in discursive practices to closely read around 80 web weaving posts alongside Tumblr user perspectives on platform culture. Drawing on Lamerichs’ (2022) reception theory of fan affect, Ahmed’s (2004) ‘affective economies’, while also considering Felski’s (2008) modes of textual engagement in reading practices, the study examines affective responses of fans during web weaving to illuminate the relational dynamics between media texts, transformative fandom discourse, and the role of Tumblr as a ‘counterpublic’ platform. Findings suggest that, contrary to scholarly claims of web weaving as a counter-hegemonic practice, web weaving has also fashioned reading as a performance of communal belonging in which readers as fans participate in the logic of value production under platform capitalism, even in seemingly subversive fan cultures. Consequently, the social pressures of fan community norms can delimit affective engagement in web weaving, opening future lines of inquiry into the agency of peer influence in platform cultures and the role of curation in codifying fragmentary reading in the age of digital hyperconnectivity.
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