Bad Influences: A Blog Fiction

Bad Influences was a blog fiction that told the story of the spread of a global flu pandemic in real-time for almost a year, from the perspectives of four character-bloggers based in Beijing, London, New Jersey and Canberra.
The blogs interacted with one another and invited readers to participate by contributing their own (diegetically consistent) stories in the blogs' commentary. This, combined with the real-time serialisation inherent in the blog form, created a metalepsis, prompting relational interactions between writers, readers, characters and the story's themes of online identity creation and how we relate to our communities through the stories we tell about ourselves.

Bad Influences was a disaster fiction told over four blogs by fictional characters, who each narrated their experience of a global flu pandemic over the course of almost a year. Readers could join the story by posting in the blog comments and giving their own account of their responses to the events in the narrative.