From the cafè to tweet: digital Literature as global literature. Positioning of digital literature in Spanish.

The life of man and his mental structure is the food for literary material. The vision of the world held by each group of humans, its cerebral conception of reality is what literature collates over the course of time. Society of the 21st Century is progressively changing its structures towards a global society brought about the enormous improvements in communications, particularly those related to the digital revolution. Taking this conception of literature as a baseline with respect to the world, these changes will be taken into account and affect literature in the digital era. One of the evolutions brought about by the hyper connectivity is globalization. It is possible to state that we are experiencing the birth of a global literature in the sense expressed by Damrosch and by Tabbi: it is a new way of getting closer to the world and communication that is growing without any spatial and time barriers and can reach any type of receiver. It is also possible to identify universal patterns that are repeated in the digital literature that converts it in global literature. The global virtual space itself is built on part of the collective imaginary of digital literature. Digital literature written in Spanish fits in perfectly with the set of artistic creations as part of a global movement. Another of the essential characteristics of this global literature is the possibility of recombining and reworking the materials into new formats. Examples of these in which the whole work consists in reworking of another analogue traditional work are Góngora Wordtoys by Belén Gache, or Don Quixote for iPad. On other occasions, one verse is sufficient as a starting point to build our digital creation (Ara vus prec) or well-known phrases by known writers and thinkers are inserted to support the post-it of suicidal and desperate people that are escaping from a reality in which communication seems impossible (Mitos muertos y suicidas). These resources of the active and dynamic cultural memory foment new formats and are adjusted to the concerns of the new generations. In this way they become attractive works to digital natives. In this sense, digital literature is disguised as a local phenomenon taking over and inheriting traits from traditional literature. We are witnesses of the first literary works of a literature without frontiers in which the creators and readers know they are immersed in a new global reality: the virtual world behind our screens is contagious and communicates in an osmotic fashion the rest of the information. At the heart of the LEETHI group of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, we have created as a group of investigators that have been working since 2013 on setting up a repository of works of digital literature in Spanish called Ciberia. Currently it holds seventy works and has been exported to CELL. This in itself, constitutes an example of globalization of this literature through sharing metadata that facilitate the exchange and the will to promote universal access to this literature.