Abstract

The idea of reading as a site of cultural consumption or cultural production has exercised the minds of critical cultural scholarship over the past century. The shift from imagining reading as a passive act of submitting to the text’s impositions, to imagining it as productive was in itself paradigmatic if not revolutionary. In the new age netizenship, the concept ‘reading’ invokes new completely different associations of meaning than it did in the last century when to read was to make sense of an already existing text. In this paper I propose a conception of news reading online akin to the act of riding the riddim that describes the participatory nature of dancehall music production. I argue that the forms of convivial textual encounters and engagements with news text online are underpinned by a complex welter of activities beyond what existing signifiers such as writing or reading can fully encompass or denote. I employ virtual ethnography of online news ecologies of three national news websites in Zimbabwe to explore the productive reader-writerly engagements with news text online characterised by an interplay of reading and writing that outstrips and alters the text on which it feeds, thus “wriding” it to new vistas of meaning for want of a better term.

Key Words: Wriding Online News; Invitation to Mean; Re-Entexualisation; Polysemic; Peer-To-Peer Production; Collaborative Authoring.

*      Zvenyika Eckson Mugari, Ph.D. is a lecturer in the Media and Society Studies Department, Midlands State University, Gweru, Zimbabwe.

                        ^JCMR Journal of Communication and Media Research, Vol. 10, No. 1, April 2018, 1 – 18