Adaptation Online

Reviews / Votes

Adaptation Online is a productive and useful book. It is theoretically grounded in familiar performances studies terms, and clearly lays out the pathway for using our disciplinary knowledge to more deeply understanding digital practices. Gratch gives us a vocabulary with which to continue exploring, points to new questions and directions in which to move, and shows us how to put this new adaptation methodology into practice for ourselves. For students, scholars, and practitioners of performance studies, this is an important book in working through our relationship to digital practices, and it encourages us to engage ourselves, to embody the practices we are seeking to understand. Gratch proves herself with this work as an important and thoughtful voice in this conversation, and her book belongs in our discussions and our classrooms. * Text and Performance Quarterly * This book makes a strong contribution to the breadth and health of performance studies, and should be noted for its relevance and explanatory power when it comes to emerging forms of performance, technology, participation, and democratization. It moves beyond the analysis of "the digital," broadly understood, to look at specific forms of adaptation and citationality in memes and viral video. The sweding chapter in particular, but not exclusively, shows how the ludic and the analytic work in tandem in serious play that unites comrades in art and helps build engaged, critical communities of practitioners. -- Craig S. Gingrich-Philbrook, Southern Illinois University Lyndsay Michalik-Gratch's study of the ubiquitous practices of adapting videos on the Internet extends adaptation theory into new terrain with deft, insightful, and entertaining analyses of such phenomena and aesthetic/cultural practices as YouTube and social media memes, practices of autotuning, songification, sweding and various forms of re-enactment and parody. She develops a typology of video adaptation, an original theorization that is both precise and supple enough to be of great use to scholars who analyze Internet and popular culture communication in her wake. -- Patricia A. Suchy, Louisiana State University Lyndsay Michalik Gratch's Adaptation Online attempts something different than a mere aesthetics or typology of digital appropriation and intertextual remixing, or even a sustained inquiry into the legality of appropriation. The book's sometimes troubling examples raise questions about the ethics of online appropriation. Gratch's most extreme cases compel readers to think through how unauthorized borrowing, "outsider" banditry, parody, mimicry, and sometimes outright mockery (even when uttered in a playful remix "vernacular") do or do not constitute responsible acts within virtual communities--which embrace, as the book reminds us, "a potentially global audience." -- Paul Edwards, Northwestern University