E-literary creativity on the dark web: Covid-19 W hatsapp bot’s interactive storytelling in WhatsApperature

: 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”. Palavras-chave:


Introduction
First and foremost, electronic literature in the general sense is any text one reads on the tactile screen using either finger and/or mouse pointer to move within the writing and technological constraints. The advent of the social media apps' affordances has actually prioritized automatic interactive digital narratives aspect on combating misinformation and fake news about the spread of Covid-19 in Nigeria under the aegis of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and UNICEF. The duo launched on the U-Report platform on the 11 th November 2020, the first Nigerian multilingual SMS-based interactive chatbot or automatic assistant to run on all popular mobile telecommunication and social media networks: MTN, GLO, Airtel and 9mobile, WhatsApp and Facebook Messengers to alert the Nigerians about their health risk (UNICEF Nigeria, 2020 Thread by Mei, the same genre, were sold in 2007. These nano-novels' impact surged to the extent that they were adapted for Film, Manga and Anime in Japan two years later (CROUZET, 2013;HJORTH, 2014). Ever since these successes in Japan, Germany and the USA, this digital literary art has inspired a lot of writers to channel their creativity towards SMS narrativity owing to the location, affordability, accessibility, portability and wider coverage of mobile telecommunication networks and the network of readers. Nieves (2018) defines WhatsApp as a free popular encrypted SMS Messenger. WhatsApp SMS chatbot has capacity to repetitively generate texts, emoji, video, macros, stickers, gif and pictures or the remix of all multimodal functions mentioned above when interacting with it. But, this particular WhatsApp bot in question, generates only a composite of text and emoji. Thus WhatsApperature is gaining ground in Africa and Nigeria especially due to the network's ubiquity, easy manipulability and affordability of the smartphones among the youth and the aged as means of accessing the Internet even in the rural areas. For instance, the creation of the South African funeral insurance company's Uk'shona Kwalenga, the first ever WhatsApp drama series, has proved to the whole world that WhatsApp is a creative tool for digital storytelling. The influence of this financial service award winning, seven-episodic stories about patriarch burial in Soweto has increased up to 146% led conversations with 46 000 WhatsApp subscribing readers in South Africa (KING JAMES GROUP ; SANLAM, 2019). Since then, WhatsApp has gained a lot of recognition with companies especially its bot that is coded to serve as automated customer care or automatic assistant though many readers do not know its operation and automatic literary creativity. Hence, Lacuna is inevitable in reading and procedural literary creation.
This essay focuses on describing the WhatsAperature system and its automatic interactive digital narrative properties to enhance readability and e-literary creativity on the platform.
Why choose WhatsApp bot in this study and why are NCDC and UNICEF using it? What is the interplay between the reader, technotext and the technology of discourse that make the bot effective means of reaching out to the public? I will answer these questions and explain how to make a WhatsApp bot, employing the Pedro Barbosa's wreader theory to analyse techno-discursively some extracts of the dialogical enunciations before my conclusion. I will employ symmetric or ecological linguistics and the interactivity as approaches of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) because WhatsApp as an App or technology of discourse runs on operating systems. These enable it to display discourse on a tactile screen as well as activate a dialogue between wreader (human) and the machine. This is a form of reading modality which Pedro Barbosa 's wreader theory explains. This Pedro Barbosa's wreader theory preamps readers as players of three simultaneous roles: reading, writing and rewriting (VUILLEMIN 1999) which constitute the three aspects of this theory. It means, by extension, while reading the generative texts of the bot, reader inputs special words to particularly serve as co-authors of the dialogical narrative with the programmer and even the bots itself.

Why choosing WhatsApp Bot
Varrela (2021) reports on the Statista website that WhatsApp is the most popular social media in Nigeria patronised by teenagers from 16 years to 64 years old veterans. It is used by 93% of all 28 million social media users in Nigeria. Our motivation to choose Covid-19 WhatsApp Bot is based on its widespread use. WhatsApp has been tagged the most used instant messaging social media in healthcare also owing to its simplicity, WhatsApp's tools for social communicability cannot be invalidated. In essence, the choice is not inappropriate since emphasis was placed on the message and the end users.

Deployment and creation of Covid-19 WhatsApp Bot
WhatsApp is a platform for procedural creativity. It is impregnated with role-playing narrative functionality and interactive chat affordances. Its storytelling build view comprises the writer's section and display section just like every traditional chatroom messenger on the Internet. On the writer's section, there are visible five icons: smiley: it is made to add every kind of emoji, stickers, and gifs into a chat or a storytelling creation.
paperclip or attach file icon is used to upload documents, picture and videos, import photo camera, gallery of stored pictures, live show/meeting room and contact sharing. Text Area or dialogue box is made to input text using synthesizer (keyboard) and finally microphone is used for recording voice or oral narrative to input into storytelling. These perceptible affordances inspire writers to explore the possibilities of digital multimodal text creation. It is all depending on the smartphone device and the versions of WhatsApp running on the mobile device. New versions of Android OS and WhatsApp display more functionalities than old versions which do not permit more functionalities such as meeting rooms when one clicks on the text area of WhatsApp. The updated/upgraded versions of both discourse tools display hidden functionalities such as Language linking to 148 languages and language variations across the globe, themes, custom etc. These are all potential affordances for whatsApperature creation (see fig.1). Nigerian languages for him/her to choose as listed and shown below (Fig. 2). The essence of building its view section based on an informative interactive game pattern is rightly upheld by Boyd (2021) that game has the power to offer new experiences that can be applied to many facets of life. Thus, it is in the case of Covid-19 WhatsApp Bot.
Unfortunately, it is not searchable on the mobile network because it is hosted on the dark web or deep web rather which uses only WhatsApp API software to fetch up the data to the screen from the existing Big Data. Consequently, it is a post-internet and dark web storytelling for its production is made possible via the support of the interfacial affordances of the WhatsApp platform, the generative linguistic, determinative algorithm and employing the principle of syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes.
When I mapped the interactive narrative patterns of the bot with the wreader using Twine, its arborescent storytelling design connects 56 complex multi-hyperlinks to 31 passages such as illustrated below ( fig. 3).

Pedro Barbosa's Wreader Theory
The weader theory is known as second degree writer's theory, theory of  This creative trend allows us to have our world at our fingertips, in our pockets as a result of the interoperability of Big Data and Internet of things but not without some constraints.
We control our digital narrative on the tactile screen of smartphones or eReaders. The narrative is no more flowing on the traditional paper sequential pages flipping to the closure. This is because it is configured in the e-literary evolution as Pisarski (2017) observes authors as sellers of their auctorial rights to the algorithms and the bots. It means authors employ machines to do their job via programming. With this algorithmisation and botification of micro-literary genre, machines are empowered to create, make decisions and reprimand human beings ethically and aesthetically in the same manner that fellow humans could do, as an art of post-digital practices. It is for this reason Balpe (1997), referred to algorithm as authors whilst litterateurs as meta-authors. Stanislaw Lem called them computhors (SWIRSKI, 2013). As for the readers, they become co-authors either with computers/bots or the author-programmers which make them according to Coover News." could be interpreted as no, it is bad to believe in the myths and the Fakes News about Covid-19. This visual language originally means "no entry". Having come after "D. Report a rumor spreading in your community", it is read as stop, guard against the spread of rumors in your community. Red Question mark that ends the phrase "E.
Other questions'' points to the wreader to further query the bot for more important information. The red colour indicates the importance of the quest for more information.
"G. Sharing "facts not fear" and prevent stigma" ends with an action emoji of revolving hearts and cheering megaphone . The emojis could also function as prosodic semantic units or translation in a text. For instance, the combination of two emojis are illustration and translation of the statement in option "G". The same could be seen in option "H" where the Mobile phone with a rightward arrow emojis ( ) illustrates "Get information from your government" meaning call government for more information.
the handshape emoji of backhand index pointing right is a gesture that points to share all pieces of information with our family members and friends. Emojis are just imagistic portrayals of the immediate extended text they complement, illustrate or translate as well as elicitors. They also interpret the psychological image of the storytelling in the wreaders' minds. This interplay between the text and the emojis imprints on the mind of the wreaders for meaningful understanding of the technotext.  (ENSSLIN, 2007). Therefore, the determinative algorithm system which produces the technotext on the screen as transient observable has influenced the WhatsAperature creativity vice versa. Therefore, wreader relates with the technotext as a second-degree writer as well as a reader or player of the mobile interactive digital storytelling as an art of gamifying reading and digital discourses. The gamification of wreading in this whatsapperary genre employs readers as agency or one of the characters or probably the protagonist as presented by Andersen and Pold (2021) because the settings of the story and the intrigue are accomplished via his/her intervention.

Conclusion
Finally, the interactivity between wreader, symmetric language(linguistic and extralinguistic sings) and the technology of discourse i.e. WhatsApp bot assists in producing a prosodic meaning of the technotext holistically. This research has described the functionality of the whatsApperature system in the Covid-19 WhatsApp bot and its automatic interactive digital narrative. The perceptive cognition and symmetric linguistic approaches or reading modalities of such post-digital mobile storytelling have focused on technology of discourse including its exploration of multimodality, multicursal, and multiple choice model to build story in the dark web. Pedro Barbosa's wreader theory buttressed the fact that the wreader of WhatsApperature of this genre proved the role of the co-author or second-degree author. Moreover, emojis extending the nano-technotext revealed the pathos, the tonality and the aesthetics of the narrative. Having known these, WhatsApp Bot's text should not pose difficulties to the new readers rather it should be seen as a platform of digital literary creation platform and reading gamifying tool foe pedagogy. However, if wreader or player experienced network glitches, reading fluidity will be affected. Therefore, I recommend a stable network to enjoy the interactivity with WhatsApp Bot particularly the Covid-19 WhatsApp bot.