LOOKING INTO CYBER SPACE : FAN FICTION ONLINE AS A CREATIVE WRITING Irana Astutiningsih Abstract. Artikel ini ditulis sebagai upaya menawarkan strategi pembelajaran creative writing melalui penulisan fiksi di media internet. Sebagai media yang menciptakan ruang cyber, ruang maya yang menawarkan anonimitas dan ‘kebebasan’, media ini memungkinkan siapapun untuk berpartisipasi didalamnya tidak sekedar sebagai konsumen teks, namun sekaligus sebagai produsen aktif. Situs www.fanfiction.net adalah salah satu situs yang marak dengan karya fiksi penulis non profesional yang lazim disebut fanfiction. Dalam situs ini, para penulis fanfiction bebas berkreativitas melalui tulisan mereka tanpa diketahui identitas aslinya. Dalam konteks ini, ruang cyber dan fan ficton dapat dipahami sebagai satu alternatif strategi pembelajaran creative writing yang cukup efektif. Key words: media internet, ruang cyber,fan fiction, creative writing Introduction Today, internet exclusively used at its early emergence has included almost all aspects of human kinds. Not only is internet used for informational purposes, but also for entertaining ones. Internet users are able to easily get access to any news, music, song lyrics, as well as literary works. Furthermore, various kinds of anonymous writing including fiction and non- fiction unpublished in offline world and written by non-professional writers have widely emerged in the internet, including fanfiction as the object of discussion in this article. Fan fiction (also known as fanfic/fic) is a fiction written by a fan of a certain text (source text) which borrows the characters, plot or settings of the source text. The widespread of anonymous writers with their anonymous writings cannot be separated from internet characteristics that offers anonymity and ‘freedom’ enabling every user to be actively involved in expressing ideas without being known as the ‘real person’ in offline world. Internet has created a cyber space; a space of fluidity enabling ‘the absence of identity. The term cyber was originally created by Gibson in his cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. The formulation of cyberspace written in Gibson’s Neuromancer runs as follows: Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by millions of legitimate operators….A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellation of data. Like city light, receding. (Gibson, 1984: 67). brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Jurnal Pengembangan Pendidikan