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Paper short abstract:

In this talk, I compare the publishing and curation structures of two children’s literature apps—FunDza.mobi and African Storybook—to examine how these platform structures reflect ideas about literacy development while establishing new formal norms for children’s literature.

Paper long abstract:

As creative energies have increasingly concentrated in digital spaces, privately-owned social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have gradually begun to appear as a new literary commons. Social media’s affordances, together with its accessibility, have increased the visibility of certain literary forms: participatory norms renewed interest in performance poetry and epistolary forms. But one of the most durable impacts of social media publication is its influence on reading practices at a generational level. In this talk, I draw together work in platform studies with formal analysis of social media literatures to evaluate the impact of platform structures and curation algorithms on afrophone literature from South Africa. Specifically, I compare the publishing and curation structures of two children’s literature apps—FunDza.mobi and African Storybook—to examine how these platform structures reflect ideas about literacy development while establishing new formal norms for children’s literature. Most studies of FunDza and ASb have emphasized their role in fostering literacy and reading cultures, but the structure of individual apps determine what forms of discourse are even made legible. The popularity of these apps, as well as their widely acknowledged success as literacy initiatives, may thus affect literary norms in Afrophone languages for generations. In this talk, I investigate the curational and publishing structures of FunDza.mobi and African Storybook to ask: what formal norms do these apps promote? How do they compare to those of feed-oriented apps like Facebook and Twitter? Analyzing story form alongside platform highlights the interaction between genre innovations and formal constraints on social media.