THE DIGITAL LOCAL: CROWDFUNDING, RHETORIC, AND COMMUNITY

Thesis (Ph.D.), English, Washington State UniversityCrowdfunding services such as Kickstarter.com, Indigogo, Gofundme, and several others have, in recent years, been drawing increasing attention and funding from both small-scale creative projects and larger-scale personalities alike. Crowdfunding is a type of crowdsourced work where the creators of projects ranging from community restoration to creative publications reach out to the online community, asking for donations in order to fund their projects. Crowdfunding has gained mainstream attention recently with the success of projects like the Oculus Rift, the Pebble Watch, and several niche and indie video games, and has raised questions not only about the changing face of economics, grants, and community-based funding online, but also about the nature of digital collaboration as a whole. A great deal of recent scholarship in various fields has attempted to document what elements of language, culture, geography, and technology contribute to the success or failure of a crowdfunded project. What has not been discussed, however, is how the communities of “backers”, people who donate to projects that catch their interest, form around these projects, and what these gatherings of intrinsically motivated participants can tell us about community and persuasion online. This project will seek to explore the ways in which authors – those who create projects using the crowdfunding site Kickstarter.com – barter social capital for monetary capital, and what this process of exchange between author and audience suggests about the role of persuasion in online communities.Washington State University, Englis