ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore the ethical implications of narratives that play with the boundary between reality and fiction. We begin with an exposition of app fiction in which we show how it can invite the reader to become part of the storyworld through engagement with spatiality, characters, and plotlines. We examine online reader reviews and reading group discourse to show how readers individually and jointly negotiate their responses to Blast Theory’s app fiction Karen. We utilise the cognitive model of reader self-positioning proposed in Chapters 2 and 3 – comprising authentic, reluctant role-player, willing role-player, and rejecter, and analyse the way that these four positions dynamically affect reader engagement with the narrative. We analyse the interpersonal relationships that are formed between readers and characters, add a “parasocial response” to our medium-conscious reader-response methodology to account for them, and address the ethics of such fictional involvement. We show that, while all narratives that play with ontological boundaries can theoretically generate ethical responses, Karen foregrounds that experience because of its focus on and invocation of the reader’s personal life against the critical backdrop of surveillance culture and the medium specifics of its mobile fictional involvement. We empirically operationalise Phelan’s print-based ethical situation model for its application to reader data and develop it further to account for the participatory nature of ethical positioning across and beyond digital narratives.
