The main argument of the chapter is the analysis of the reading and writing behaviour on Wattpad during the phases of lockdown in Italy for the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic represents the first great event of ‘data society' reactions making several authors reflect on various aspects and thoughts about social impact of tech ecosystems. Nowadays, it becomes essential to understand the role that digital technologies and media have had to soothe feelings related to social isolation and physical distancing measures. Thus, as widely acknowledged, besides providing data for social research in many aspects of life, the digital context also suggests above all innovated methods enforced by the physical distancing. This research has explored about 600 stories edited on Wattpad that have been selected through the query “Covid.” The aim of the analysis is to map collective imaginary of users about the COVID-19 pandemic within a digital medium for fanfiction, combining three fundamental approaches of digital methods.
TopIntroduction
When the Pandemic status was declared in March 2020 and the lockdown became the instrument to contain the health crisis and reduce the number of contagions as much as possible in Italy, each of us suspended relational and research activities in presence, trying to restore order to everyday life. From the first weeks in which the crisis took shape, there was a need to find new ways of doing research, as we were temporarily deprived of traditional tools, and to closely observe the ways of narrating the pandemic of some narrating communities.
The case presented here attempts to describe the heterogeneous production of stories written within Wattpad, a social reading and storytelling platform, during the first wave of the pandemic. The constellation of stories belonging to different narrative genres can be interpreted as a choral narrative of the cultural trauma one is participating in. Storytelling, the act of narrating through the written word, is thus the way to interpret and attribute meanings to this human experience, but it is also the result of the culture in which it develops. In the case of Wattpad, this is not only a culture within the community, but also the socio-technical culture of the platform itself.
In order to analyse this small world of narrators/readers producing the multitude of pre-narratives, digital methods inspired by the research programmes of digital sociology and the digital humanities were used.
We will thus begin by defining the context of the pandemic as a cultural trauma, interpreted in which carrier groups and media contribute to creating the idea of ontological evil (Alexander 2003: 2006). The role of the media, especially the digital media, has been to produce information and to shorten the distance between peoples. This has resulted in an exponential increase in the use of platforms and consequently in the production of data on the one hand, but also in information disorders (Di Salvo, Milan 2020) on the other. Immediately afterwards, the digital methods and tools used for automatic data extraction and processing will be described, reviewing the most recent studies of digital sociology research programmes. Finally, data analysis with data visualisation will be presented, focusing on two macro areas: user representation and content analysis.