App Fiction and ‘Postdigital Culture’

Abstract

Digital fiction can already boast a relatively long history. From the first text generators to hypertexts to multimodal and multimedia works, this genre of literature has always thrived on the latest technological innovations. The turn of 2015 and 2016 saw the release of three novels in the form of mobile device applications that might be recognized with the benefit of hindsight as paving the way for a new distinct genre of digital fiction. In the following article, I discuss The Pickle Index by Eli Horowitz, Arcadia by Iain Pears, and Belgravia by Julian Fellowes as examples of ‘app fiction’ and explore their generically formative features in the context of so-called ‘postdigital culture.’ These features will subsequently be used to argue that app fiction displays a postdigital dimension that corresponds to more general cultural phenomena within the digital domain in the second decade of the 21st century.

Keywords

• app fiction
• digital fiction
• novel
• postdigital
• poetics
• media literacy
• apps culture
• digital culture