Material metaphor: somatic writing for platform studies

The digital is pervasive, framing enduring cultural and technical questions in new ways and challenging how we write and read ourselves online. This article presents findings from a research collaboration across creative writing and digital cultures, through which we aimed to explore selfhood as it is expressed within a digital landscape. Investigating the potential of creative writing methods – namely, the use of metaphor – as interventions in platform studies and media studies more broadly, we outline the results of a somatic writing workshop, which highlighted three modes of embodiment that arose: impacting, affected and intra-acting. Results demonstrate how the lived body remains a significant reference point for online realities, supporting claims of an intrinsic connection between somatic and digital experience and evidencing the research capacity of creative writing methods within new media scholarship.