Texto Digital (Nov 2022)
E-literary creativity on the dark web: Covid-19 Whatsapp bot’s interactive storytelling in WhatsApperature
Abstract
Social media affordances prioritize automatic interactive digital narrative about the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic to counteract misinformation and fake news in Nigeria. To engage the public about their health risk, WhatsApp chatbot was launched by Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in collaboration with UNICEF on the U-Report platform. It is the first Nigerian multilingual SMS-based interactive chatbot to run on all mobile telecommunication networks (the dark web), WhatsApp and Facebook Messengers to address health issues. This essay describes SMS-Chatbot which offers narratives to counter health misinformation in five languages-English, Pidgin, Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. A techno-discursive analysis is presented to explain the relationship between the technotext and the wreader by employing Pedro Barbosa’s theory of wreader[1] on the extracted English version which is perceived as the digital literary practice on WhatsApp, that is, “WhatsApperature”. [1] Blend of writer and reader, coined by George Landow (professor) in English. https://www.wordsense.eu/wreader/ consulted 24/10/2021 Wreader it has been used by Pedro Barbosa in Portugal since early late 1970s (Vuillemin 1999).
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