MANGA

 History 

    
    Digital Fiction (DF) is not to be considered as simply the digitalized version of printed literary narratives; for instance, e-books are not included in this category, as they do not require readers to have a different type of interaction compared to printed books. Instead, DF embraces the concept of ergodic literature (Aarseth, 1997), that requires of readers a “nontrivial effort” (Aarseth, 1997, p.1), such as a deeper level of interaction that includes the making of choices, and thus goes beyond the simple eye movement or turning of pages. Born digital narratives are to be considered those types of narratives that harness the affordances and architectural characteristics of the digital medium to produce artefacts that could not be experienced in any other way or through any other medium without loosing some of its functions.

    DF, in its turn, can be investigated as part of the even broader category of digital storytelling, an umbrella term which includes both non-fictional narratives, those based on real events and characters, like biographical, autobiographical, or documentary works; and fictional narratives, such as those that represent (even partially) imaginary and/or invented events. Scholars are used to distinguish between at least two generations of DF (Ciccoricco, 2007; Alexander, 2011; Bell, Ensslin & Rustad, 2014): the first generation considers narratives of the pre-World Wide Web era, and the second generation includes those produced and published within the World Wide Web and further. DF evolved from the first experiments with interactive fiction of the 1960s, which were primarily print-based. Thus, it is possible to distinguish between 1) a pre-digital era, which includes print-based literary works, known also as proto-hypertexts (Bell, Ensslin & Rustad, 2014, p.8); 2) a first wave of DF, which consensually starts in the early 1980s with the technological advancements of computers and Internet; and 3) a second wave, which starts from the early 2000s and includes works of fiction built on the World Wide Web environment and beyond.

    Proto-hypertext is a retrospective term for those literary works, which are considered as the “precursors of hypertext fiction” (Bell, 2010, p.2). Two main examples of this type of fiction include the ex-perimental books Composition №1 by Marc Saporta (1963), and The Unfortunates by Bryan Stanley Johnson (1969), which consisted in separate pages or chapters of a novel, which can be read in any order the reader decides. This type of novels can be considered ancestors of DF: the narrative space is expanded across separate pages or booklets, affording a non-linear reading experience. Considered as novels, the content is primarily text-based, but it is delivered in separate autonomous sections, which are linked to each other according to the order chosen by the reader. The reader is able to participate and interact with the narrative content, both on a cognitive level, by mentally reconstructing the narrative each time the reading order changes, and on a physical level, by physically choosing and reading one section before the other.

    The first wave of DF includes many forms; on the one hand, works in hypertext fiction appeared as a remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) of the experimental novels of the 1960s; on the other hand, interactive fic- tion emerged as a hybrid form, blurring the boundaries between games and narratives. Hypertext fiction appeared in the late 1980s. It consists of blocks of text, sometimes including images, that are connected to each other through hyperlinks. Delivered through floppy disks and experienced through the computer screen, hypertext fiction allows the reader to navigate the narrative space, choosing which link to follow, thus influencing the narrative experience.

    The second wave of DF is strongly connected to the technological advancements in information systems. Soon after its invention in 1991, the World Wide Web became the standard for Internet usage and navigation. The Web introduced new possibilities for storytelling, with the development of multimedia software as Adobe Flash, allowing creators to add graphics, visuals, and sounds to the virtual texts. The multimodal capacities of the digital medium inspired writers, designers, artists, and developers to experiment with forms of digital fiction in which content is conveyed not only through text, but it is enriched by images, animations, audio-visual elements and sounds.

    New platforms for DF and storytelling emerged with the evolution of the World Wide Web, allowing creators to easily produce content through online services devoted to image sharing, creation and editing, collaborative writing, microblogging, video editing and sharing, and social networking. Social media platforms thus emerged as a new territory for storytelling: DF appears on blogs and discussion forums (Page, 2013); on specific websites like Narratively — Human stories, boldly told; Our Better World; on web platforms specifically dedicated to the spread of digital stories as Storify, Medium, Cowbird, Facebookstories; and on the most popular social media and social network sites as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Whatsapp.

    The term social media fiction has recently appeared in the literature about the topic of digital fiction and narratives; texts, which appear on social media platforms and social network sites do not stem from litera- ture, but “they are the result of an act of communication” (Kuznetsova, 2014, p.271). Social media fiction is part of a continuum.