New Linguistic Spaces in Cyberculture: The Influence of the Metaverse on the Minifiction of Social Networks

Abstract

The liquid society to which Zygmunt Bauman alluded has transformed the concepts of time and space in all areas, intermingling us with each other. In cybercultural spaces, and more specifically in the oral and written microtextuality that takes place on networks and in the media, we can observe how the emergence of the metaverse, a virtual space where the participants involved replicate behaviors and interactions similar to those in real life through virtual reality and augmented reality, has conditioned the minification that occurs in digital literature to starting from the acceleration of discourses, that is, from that space-time liquidity that affects the way we express ourselves and the way we create literary content. Taking this circumstance into account, from a qualitative approach, the characteristics of the micro-story are analyzed (brevity, economy of language and narrative hybridization, among others) with the aim of studying how cyberculture has influenced microtextual spaces that, consequently, they shape cyberliterature and the use of linguistic and orthographic norms in digital natives, millennials, and their way of creating content linked to literary creation on internet platforms and applications. To carry out this qualitative study, we start from a practical case: The Twitter application, with the so-called tweeterature, and the 10 micronotes of the micro-story by the Argentine writer Andrés Neuman.