What Would Media Studies Do?: Social Media Shakespeare as a Technosocial Process

Abstract

This essay explores the topic of social media Shakespeare from the perspective of Media Studies, identifying directions for future research shaped by emerging approaches in this field. Drawing on a range of posthuman, political economy, and cultural studies strands, it conceptualizes social media Shakespearean texts as assemblages of interactions between technologies, human creative subjects, and wider socioeconomic contexts. It proposes exploring memes, videos, tweets, or blog posts as instances of technosocial communication that foreground the interplay of text, algorithms, and users. It argues for moving beyond exploration of signification to understanding the unfixed, processual qualities of these texts, including exploring them through the affective experiences of production and consumption. It further advocates for extending concepts of remediation or adaptation to encompass the cyclical, embodied, and dynamic processes of digital media. This, it argues, is what Media Studies would do to analyze social media's Shakespeares.