Literary Production in the Quasi-Digital Society

Vol. 25 No. 1, April 2025, pp. 47 – 56 DOI: 10.24071/joll.v25i1.9305 Available at https://e-journal.usd.ac.id/index.php/JOLL/index This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Literary Production in the Quasi-Digital Society M. Yuseano Kardiansyah & Laila Ulsi Qodriani Faculty of Arts and Education, Universitas Teknokrat Indonesia, INDONESIA Article information Abstract This article investigates the practice of literary production in the digital age, characterized by the spirit of using internet-based technological innovation, mainly social media. In this context, Indonesian literary writers often use social media platforms, especially Wattpad (a story-sharing website), to produce their literary works. Nevertheless, such a condition has not dampened the circulation of literary works in printed (conventional) form. Even though in one side they use Wattpad to publish their works, but in the other side they still follow publication system through conventional publishers. Accordingly, this particular study aims to examine the influence of technological advancement to literary production culture. Therefore, through a sociocultural approach and qualitative methods, this study is designed to observe how far the advancement of social media technology can stimulate specific behavior of literary writers in their creative process and presenting their works to the public. As a result, through exploration and analysis, it is found that social media technology could encourage digital literary production at a certain point. However, this cannot entirely make literary agents turn away from more conventional printing technology. It further reveals the strategy of literary writers with popular genre to deal with the doxa in the of Indonesian literary field. This social condition remarks the quasi-digital society. Received: 25 July 2024 Revised: 18 October 2024 Accepted: 31 October 2024 Keywords: Literary Production Practice; Conventional Publishing; Story-Sharing Website; Wattpad; Doxa; Quasi-Digital Society Introduction The development of digital technology has brought a socio-cultural implication toward global human life (Potter & McDougall, 2017; Marin-Lacarta, 2019). Digital technology significantly impacts Indonesian social and cultural life, particularly on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, 47 and Twitter. According to a social media overview by We Are Social Institute (2024), Indonesia had approximately 139 million active social media users. The data implies that around 49,9% of the 278,7 million Indonesian population now interact on digital social space. This condition shows how influential social media technology is for Indonesian sociocultural activities. It is no exception for literary production, especially by Indonesian writers. Journal of Language and Literature ISSN: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online) M. Yuseano Kardiansyah & Laila Ulsi Qodriani Far before the utilization of social media, the term cyber literature has been known in Indonesia since the late 1990s. Roekminto (2005) stated that the first Indonesian internet literary site was cybersastra.net. This platform was founded by three Indonesian poets (i.e., Nanang Suryadi, Yono Wardito, and Donny Anggoro) in 1999. Since cybersastra.net, an uncountable number of literary sites have emerged in cyberspace. At that time, it stimulated many narratives about cyber literature in Indonesia from literary writers, academicians, and the general public. However, he criticizes that there was no tremendous shift between cyber literary work and conventional work. According to him, cyber literature offers no particular literary characteristics besides using the internet as a medium of expression. In short, he strongly argues that the early Indonesian cyber literature only transferred the conventional way of writing onto the internet but gave less significant improvement to the literary works produced. previously, Wattpad is a popular digital platform that is specifically functional for a story-sharing website (Davies, 2017). After 18 years of operating as a social storytelling platform, Wattpad has reached 90 million readers and writers worldwide. It makes Wattpad the most extensive reading and writing platform in the world. Wattpad offers its readers free access to all available literary works as a social media platform. Wattpad also allows professional and beginner writers to share their novels, short stories, or poetry anthologies with global readers without undergoing the complexity of conventional publishing systems. To complete its characteristic as a social media platform, Wattpad provides a feature enabling asynchronous (non-real time) communication between writers and their readers. This feature results in a typical interaction among users that commonly occurs in general kinds of social media. Consequently, writers tend to maximize the function of Wattpad as a social media technology to produce their literary works and communicate with their prospective readers. Therefore, it is unquestionable that many people are interested in actualizing their literary enthusiasm through this platform. Along with the development of cyber or digital technology, social media platforms are also developed with various types and functions. Besides the platforms mentioned Picture 1: Wattpad Home Page (https://www.wattpad.com/home) Based on that explanation, it can be seen that Wattpad has become a digital social space where writers can produce any literary work and share it without necessarily undergoing the conventional publishing system. In this kind of space, they can even gain popularity due to the wide range of prospective readers they can encounter on the platform. On this point, the innovation of social media utilization seems disruptive for conventional publishing 48 systems. However, the fact that many Indonesian writers still publish their works in printed form raises two fundamental sociocultural questions regarding the existence of digital literary platforms in Indonesia: 1. “Does it disrupt conventional literary production?” And 2. “How significant has it changed literary production practice?”. In this case, a deeper investigation is needed to investigate the role of social media platforms, such as Wattpad, in Journal of Language and Literature ISSN: 1410-5691 (print); 2580-5878 (online) Vol. 25 No. 1 – April 2025 Indonesian literary production. This sort of study aims to reveal how far technological innovation can influence the dynamics of the literary industry in Indonesia. various issues of literary production. It addresses topics including how literary production practices affect social change and whether social variables affect the creation of literary works. In light of this, this study aims to learn more about the literary mode of production in Indonesian literature. Therefore, current common sense in the literary field pote (...truncated)