New media and Austen

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries vlog is smart and clever in many ways--characterization, modernization, adaptation of events and issues of class and economics to a United States's context. But it also comments intelligently on new media itself. Lydia, for example, participates it the gossip mill about whether Bing Lee's "harem" of women by texting and calling her network of friends (Lizzie Bennet Diaries, episode 4). In addition to the videos of main story, there is Lydia's blog, twitter exchanges, tumbler posts, and the main webpage with the cast bios and interviews. It is an entire media world of its own--maybe a bit like the mini-worlds Austen herself creates in her novels?

There's probably a lot more to say about how LBD participates in new media, but (with my head, as usual, in the world of the eighteenth-century), I'm interested in how the series picks up Austen's own concern with new media and its influence on it users. That is, Austen herself commented on what we can call one of the new media of her own time--the novel. She does this most pointedly in her novel Northanger Abbey, as we will see. While the series is certainly interested in this, bringing it explicitly into the story with Lizzie being a Mass Comm grad student and both Darcy and Mr. Collins owning a digital media companies, I'm not sure LBD is a forceful in its examination of new media as Austen was. I'll be interested to see what everyone thinks after we've read Northanger Abbey!