participatory culture

Anime is a popular media in Iran nowadays, and some anime Instagram fan pages have over 400 hundred followers. Iranian anime audiences use the Instagram platform to gain news about anime, access anime broadcast and download resources and share and audit unofficial fans' content creations. Due to the lack of news websites’ coverage about anime and lack of anime news websites in Persian, Iranian anime fan-pages admins volunteer to translate anime news, usually from English and share the contents on an Instagram platform for the rest of the audiences. Applying Henry Jenkins’ participatory culture and convergence culture concepts, we prepared a questionnaire. We asked 387 anime audiences who were Instagram users about how often they watch anime, how often they read and watch anime fan-pages content, how often they participate in fandom chats and discussions. We saw an evident association for watching anime and reading and watching anime fan-pages content, while we saw a moderate association for watching anime and participating in fandom chats and discussions.

This paper establishes Twitter literature as a born-digital literary genre shaped by the dialectical nature of cyberspace and its constraints and affordances, including enforced brevity, threading modularity, and algorithmic virality. It addresses the gap in studies on electronic literature and digital humanities, traditionally pivoted on studies of hypertext fiction, while pushing the literary potentials of microblogging to the margin. Synthesizing Hayles’s media-specific analysis, Levine’s genre theory, and other ideas on the dynamics of cyberspace, it argues that the constraints of Twitter do not overshadow creative forms of cultural critique, but, on the contrary, they create a space of tension between democratization and hierarchy. This paper contends that the constraints potentially democratize the production of literature through a highly social space of engagement and participation, yet the algorithmic systems usually preserve the hierarchies and attenuate the democratic potential. Through a genealogical analysis, the literary possibilities behind Twitter literature and its evolution are traced to pre-digital fragments, digital precursors, and key movements on Twitter. Analyses of two examples, including Jennifer Egan's Black Box and Teju Cole’s Small Fates, demonstrate how constraints foster aphoristic density, nonlinear narratives, and participatory meaning-making within the contested space. The paper promotes digital humanities by redefining twenty-first-century literariness and placing cyberspace as a potential zone for genre formation.