Written by: Osvaldo Cleger
Abstract: This article examines a genre of digital storytelling that briefly flourished in the early 2000s, which I here define—borrowing from Bekhta (2020)—as online we-narratives. These were stories not just told to an audience, but told with them, collectively shaped in real time through blog comments, forum replies, and other online interactions. I focus on two of the most emblematic cases from that moment: the Japanese forum-based story Train Man and the Argentine blog-novel Weblog de una mujer gorda. Both unfolded during periods of intense neoliberal restructuring—in Koizumi’s Japan and post-crisis Argentina—and both gave rise to large, participatory communities of “wreaders” who did more than just consume content: they helped co-author it. What interests me here is not only how these stories were built, but also how they unraveled. In both cases, the collaborative spirit that made these narratives so compelling eventually gave way to more traditional, monetizable forms—books, plays, movies—that sidelined or erased the communities that had sustained them. By comparing these two cases, I outline the key features of this short-lived genre and reflect on the kinds of learning communities it enabled: spaces where storytelling, social bonding, and peer-to-peer exchange briefly offered an alternative to the isolating ethos of neoliberal individualism in early 2000s internet culture.