Platform poetry and restorative experience: creator, community and catharsis.

Abstract

Where poetry on social media is often subsumed under the term ‘Instapoetry’, this study addresses a research gap concerning the particularities of poetry tailored towards the specific technological affordances and communicative cultures of social media platforms. Whilst doing so, it tackles how platform poets respond to the technological and communicative specificities to build communities around their poetry. Between technological affordances and business exploitations, community expectations and author aspirations, this poetry can provide digital bibliotherapy. However, there are trade-offs; authors provide bibliotherapeutic materials, and community participants seek catharsis from disclosing emotional distress, but there are more finely grained details. Platforms vary: Instagram encourages poet-centric linear communication, YouTube facilitates community building but also star treatment, Tumblr prioritises collectivism over individualism, while Facebook is a space where third parties crosspost poetry to articulate aspects of their identities to their connections. An author can be an altruist or a careerist, a detached facilitator, or a community participant. A community participant can be someone needing healing or an exploiter of vulnerable people. Structuring these interactions are corporate forces aimed at profit, maximised by algorithmic efficiencies that echo offline discrimination and contribute to psychological harm. Intersecting social media studies, English studies, digital humanities and communication studies, this interdisciplinary study will unravel these relationships between author, platform and audience. Based on its cases of Instagram and Humble the Poet, r.h Sin’s crossposted material from Instagram to Facebook, YouTube and Clickfortaz, and Tumblr with the profile of Charly Cox, the study finds a system of benefit whereby platform poets, platform poetry consumers and the platforms themselves seek self-interest that, inadvertently, can benefit parties who have a stake in the poetry’s ‘platformity’. Due to its properties and how it is consumed, platform poetry may comprise digital bibliotherapy, but those properties and that mode of consumption means there is an ambiguity where, in addition to addressing trauma, the platformity introduces exclusions because of the digital setting. Platformity members have contested these exclusions by working counterintuitively, attempting to subvert mechanisms that oppress. This first known study of tensions between self and community in platform poetry will provide new contributions to knowledge concerning the well-being benefits of poetry on social media, the building of therapeutic communities in digital settings, and the agency of these communities to resist the toxic elements of digital platform commerce.