amy winehouse's cuts, tracks, bruises, and blemishes: a digital narrative
Channel: E-Learning Corgi
Date: 2011-05-05

Any new cut, scrape, track, blemish, or bruise on Amy Winehouse is news in the tabloids and celebrity blogs.  The cuts tell a story, but not in the way that one might expect.  The narrative emerges because of the convergence of digital media (video, photos, audio), and the openness of Web 2.0, where bloggers, readers, paparazzi, and the culture at large synthesize and create a reality that resonates with the undercurrent of a deeper story just beginning to emerge.

Amy Winehouse, whose Grammy-winning records are largely autobiographical, and often disturbingly so, has made thousands of tabloid headlines for her problems ranging from her self-inflicted cuts and self-harming, to drug abuse, resulting in burns, needle marks, and facial blemishes.  Further, her turbulent relationship with her boyfriend, now husband, Blake, has been physically abusive, resulting in bruises, scratches, scrapes.  Each mark on Amy's body tells a story, but the story is largely indeterminate, except in the space of Web 2.0 applications, where text messages, blogs, feeds, and shared communication create a shared consciousness -- not only of the details of her life, but also of what the readers want to see, and what they project, and thus reveal about themselves.   Susan Smith Nash is your guide.