Special Issue of PopMeC Journal
Constant transformation has been the norm in the new digital media environment since its inception. During the 2020 health crisis, the impact of this ever-changing digital world in our daily lives has been especially notable. Due to quarantine measures, the only opportunity to interact with friends and to consume culture was to rely on social networks, streaming services and video conferencing softwares. Web-based cultural activities have affected people’s relationships with cyberspace: many have visited museums, seen award ceremonies, and even been to concerts online. In other words, we are never disconnected from the Internet (DeNardis 2020).
Our continuous virtual presence has had a radical aesthetic influence in our lives. Fictional narratives have been evolving hand in hand with the continuous change in digital media—from vaporwave and memes to changes in the way we write and express ourselves. These new ideas and symbols have developed thanks to online trends, both in terms of rhetoric and via the emergence of new words. Renowned writers such as Jennifer Egan and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have not overlooked this transforming environment and have published their works on social media platforms in a serialized format (what is now known as Twitterature). Their cases are notable examples of how the possibilities to share content and combine mediums in order to create fictional narratives have grown exponentially. While the content of those stories has not been significantly altered by the format, we can look at this phenomenon from the perspective of media scholar Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message.
In this context, boundaries between cultural and leisure industries continue to blur. The cultural field—which had already accepted video games, comics and fanfiction into the realm of the mainstream—has continued to expand thanks to social media and the increasing gamification in video on demand platforms. Prosumers (a portmanteau of producer and consumer coined by Alvin Toffler in 1980) and textual poachers (Jenkins 1992) are now ubiquitous in the creation of fictional narratives on the Internet along with hybridization. For instance, radionovelas have turned into podcasts with their own webpages where both fans and creators share commentary, photos, and sources that become part of the fictional narrative. These changes have led to an epistemological transformation in artistic practices that highlights the intermedial nature of contemporary forms of fiction.