The cybercultural characteristics present in the digital story The Boat (2015)

The digital story The Boat (2015) by Matt Huynh revolves around the Vietnamese teenager Mai who had to emigrate from Vietnam to Australia in a boat. Mai had to endure poor living conditions such as hunger, thirst, and emotional distress caused by the war. In this context, the digital story narrates those hardships and provides an immersive, interactive reading experience by incorporating cybercultural features into the narrative. Despite the prevalence of cyberculture in the narrative, recent studies about The Boat (2015) focus either on movement-related features (Lehman, 2020) or utilize the story as an emotional healing, and pedagogic online tool (Kwak, 2021; Miles & Boltin, 2024). Therefore, our study aimed to identify and analyze the cybercultural characteristics incorporated in The Boat (2015) by proposing an analysis of selected scenes after applying meta-analysis and systematic methods. We have identified three dominant characteristics of The Boat (2015): immersion, interaction, and platform. Those characteristics are often presented in overlapping layers since the cyberculture features such as anchor texts, GIFs, and sound effects require a platform and create a propitious environment for the audience to interact and immerse themselves in Mai’s story.