The Story Logic of Social Media: Co-Construction and Emergent Narrative Authority

Abstract

. What happens when we share a story online? And how does that story become part of a larger narrative? This article seeks to explain how the digital architecture of social media platforms produces new narrative phenomena that complicate both narratological theories of collective voice and socio-linguistic theories of co-construction. The article identifies and anatomizes two separate but complementary modes of narrative co-construction produced by the story logic of social media: emergent storytelling and the viral exemplum. In doing so, it demonstrates how the #MeToo movement and the viral “MAGA Hat kid” video give rise to emergent forms of narrative authority where individual and collective voices become detached from their storytelling agents.

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