Sunday, October 8

How Demon Wife Became a Media Star




TOKYO -- Six years ago, a Japanese businessman went online to vent about his domineering wife. Blogging daily under the pen name "Kazuma," he detailed how she grabbed food from his plate, sent him shopping in a typhoon, and made him sleep in the living room when he caught a cold.

Now, his terrifying spouse is famous as Oni-yome, or "demon wife," the star of a book, a television drama, a comic-book serialization, a videogame and, coming soon, a movie.

"Demon Wife Diaries," as the book and its spinoffs are titled, is at the forefront of a trend in new media emerging in Japan: Blogs, chat rooms and other Internet formats are increasingly providing the inspiration, and in many cases the verbatim content, for books, television shows and other old-media products.

Blogs, in particular, are contributing to the vast reservoir of online content. Stories that incorporate the Internet and that unfold in its anonymous, abbreviated writing style are proving to be especially popular -- perhaps because they represent real, spontaneous conversation, not an author's massaged prose.

Full article is here.

Now this is an interesting synthesis of blogging and anime. This blogger accidently becomes a "prosumer", a combination of producer and consumer as coined by Alvin Toeffler. I seeing more and more instances of intregation of medias to satisfy consumers also, enabling consumers to replicate the goods in soft form such as this. Using blogging and turn it into manga is pretty brillant idea, in my opinion.

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