The move from apartheid to postapartheid in the early to mid-1990s is momentous not only for the more obvious reasons, but also because it roughly coincides with globalisation and the rapid growth of digital media. The sprawl of the new media has coincided with new emphases in data consumption: visual salience, speed, brevity, and the predominance of surface over depth. Actuality, often in seemingly raw and semi-processed form, rides high in this environment, whereas older forms of ‘deep’ literature, and expectations of close reading, fare less well. In addition, the relatively passive media consumers of earlier generations have morphed into interactive media agents: screen readers and content makers – ‘writers’ of an entirely new kind – who consume and also produce media in quantum loops (Surette 14).

As if to corroborate these trends, in which the ‘real’ and the actual are pushed, publishing in South Africa, especially in the postapartheid period, has seen nonfiction increasingly outsell genre as well as literary fiction. In addition, several high-calibre South African writers, among them Van Niekerk, Krog and Malan, have observed that postapartheid conditions are such that nonfiction appears to be a far more serviceable mode of writing than fiction, as noted earlier. This stands in contrast to the apartheid period, when realist fiction in the Gordimer ‘history from the inside’ mode, and metafictional fabulation with a focus on ethical agency, in the manner of JM Coetzee, were paramount. The conjunction of the new media, as a ‘glocal’ digital emporium and a dominant site of reading and writing, on the one hand, and a trend towards nonfiction, on the other, underlie a sea-change in South African writing (a necessarily larger category than ‘literature’). These shifts in modes of writing and forms of address, and in audience, medium and reach, have produced a transformed space of literary production, one that is modelled to a lesser or greater extent on the continuous, looping ‘content’ (a blend of fact and commentary) of the new media. It is as if ‘writing’, including the ascendant category frequently referred to as creative or literary nonfiction, cannot but align itself with the energy, form and flow of the new media in the information age, of which it is an integral part. This is a site where practitioners have, to some degree, abandoned the academic cloisters and joined the 24/7 media wrap.