Daniel Defoe’s Social Networks [ Art and Literature / Association ]
… was known to his contemporaries almost exclusively as a ‘scribbler’, and he revelled in the possibilities for virtual self fashioning afforded by crafting an identity through printed words on the page rather than as a flesh and blood human … or wrote. He lived three centuries before the invention of the internet, but Defoe pioneered the techniques of virtual self fashioning that have defined the digital age; like the avatars of contemporary social media such as Twitter and … been punished by standing in the pillory for the crime of authoring a seditious libel. By contrast, Defoe advertised himself to the public as the author of a bestselling poem, The True-Born Englishman (1701). His long-running authorship of …
Dissent | Fiction | Friendship | Tories | Satire | Whigs
Encyclopedia