Relocating Weddings Online

Description

A paper examining the way that online media has begun to dominate the perception of wedding traditions in contemporary category romance. Using popular websites (such as buzzfeed.com and YouTube) as well as more traditional mediums (specifically Mills&Boon’s The Wedding Season quartet and BBC’s reality television programme Don’t Tell the Bride), I examined an overview of how different wedding traditions are being relocated within our social consciousness. When we consider how weddings’ presence online is becoming more defined (either through specialist websites and blogs, or through general media collections and articles), it becomes apparent that this has had an impact on the way they are now planned. The way that other people will view a wedding – through social media, or photos that often were not ‘okayed’ by the couple – is having an increasingly large impact upon portrayals of weddings in fiction and reality television. The perfect proposal, DIY decorations and day become simultaneously achievable and unachievable; with these images of perfection touted all over the internet, weddings become improbably idealised. In order to address these challenges, I explored the presence of The Proposal, The Photos and The Big Day (all purposefully capitalised) online, and identify why it is that weddings appear more tangible on the internet than in real life. The immediacy and interconnectiveness of the internet is changing the way we connect with each other every day, and now it is changing our weddings too.

Period	19 Jun 2014
Held at	The Fifth International Conference on Popular Romance Studies
Event type	Conference
Location	Thessaloniki, Greece
Degree of Recognition	International