Family Communication in the Age of Digital and Social Media
Series:
Edited By Carol J. Bruess
15. Creating Couples’ Identities: Telling and Distorting via “Wedsite” Relationship Narratives
Extract
15
← 312 | 313 → Creating Couples’ Identities
Telling and Distorting via “Wedsite” Relationship Narratives
LAURA BETH DAWS
Southern Polytechnic State University
Introduction
Lindsey and Chris met in college, and after a few years of dating exclusively they decided to get married. Upon getting engaged, Lindsey immediately created a website to share the details of the upcoming wedding with their friends and family. Such a website is also known as a “wedsite” (Daws, 2009). Lindsey and Chris’s wedsite was informative for wedding guests: It contained information about where and when the ceremony and reception would be located, where the couple was registered for gifts, who was in their bridal party, and suggested hotels for out-of-town wedding guests. But there was other information on the site indicating they didn’t create the site only to share the details of their upcoming wedding. For example, visitors had the option to take a quiz about the couple with questions such as “What’s Lindsey’s favorite food? What’s Chris’s hometown? What’s Lindsey’s and Chris’s height difference?” The “about us quiz” was designed to test friends’ and family members’ knowledge of the couple they’d soon be supporting at a wedding. In this case, the wedsite went beyond the pragmatic function of a cost-effective, efficient way to keep guests informed of the details of their wedding.
Another engaged couple, Casey and Tommy, also chose to create a wedsite. Like Lindsey and Chris’s, their wedsite communicated important...
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