Aarthi Vadde's "We the Platform"

Aarthi Vadde is E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (2016) and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2024), among other books. She is the president of the Society for Novel Studies (2025–27) and cofounder of its podcast Novel Dialogue.

Vadde applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature, and reported the following:

If you turn to page 99 of We the Platform, the first thing you’ll see is the answer to a question posed on page 98 (uh oh).

Jeopardy-style, here’s the answer:

At least three things: First, many authors and publishers are “profoundly suspicious of the internet but recognize the need to revise their business models to find ways of profiting from it.” Second, “the effect of multiple book formats (print, e-book, audio) alongside platforms for self-publication has changed what it means to own fiction intellectually for authors and consume fiction physically for readers.” Third, the circulation of literature, in which “the owning of books and the sharing of written stories are two separate things, has influenced the styles, subjects, and locations of literary writing.

The question: What happens to literature when the internet dominates book culture?

Surprisingly, maybe even reassuringly, the Page 99 Test produced satisfying results. We the Platform is about how the internet changed twenty-first century literature (that’s my subtitle) and page 99 covers both the economic changes to the landscape and the stylistic innovations that resulted from major authors deciding to write fiction for social media. The rest of page introduces three such authors – Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, and Teju Cole – all of whom wrote fiction on Twitter in the 2010s. I claim, crucially on page 99, that writing for Twitter led them to make “formal and rhetorical adjustments away from the printed book” and these in turn led to stylistic changes in their major post-Twitter novels (like The Candy House, Slade House, and Tremor).

So in a nutshell, page 99 gets to the heart of my book’s thesis even if it only provides a peek into one of my chapters. Other chapters provide answers to different questions: like how did Creative Commons turn authorship into a mass cultural category? Why did Margaret Atwood partner with Wattpad? Does the online growth of fan fiction shed new light on literary fiction? (Hint: it absolutely does). As a whole, We the Platform strives to be a two-way street: it shows how the internet changed literature but, just as importantly, how literature changes our perspective on the internet.

Visit Aarthi Vadde's website.

--Marshal Zeringue