Narrating ME? Self-Narration on Social Media

Social media has increasingly democratised the publication of texts. All you need is a working internet connection and an email address and you can participate in online discourse, share your opinions with the world, and document your life. In a study conducted by the New York Times Customer Insight Group, 68% of people say they share on social media to communicate who they are and what they care about. But why do some of us feel the urge to share our identities with strangers online?

In his essay “You Don’t Say”, Navneet Alang observes that “[w]e now live in an era in which text has exploded to be everywhere, most prominently on the screens so many of us keep with us at all times.” These texts are created by all those of us who participate in social media, blogging, or other forms of online communication. And thus, so he argues, “we are all authors now.” With the rise of social media as a vehicle of publicising texts, “authorship as a performance of publicness is no longer merely the domain of, say, novelists. It is everyone who has a public-facing online account.” Moreover, there is a tendency to link the post to the person who made it – which completely defies the claim made by Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” that texts should always stand by themselves, without being forcibly linked back to and interpreted in light of their author. It seems like our profiles are frequently seen as direct stand-ins for us, and Alang stresses that there is now a strong tendency to link online utterances to the person behind the profile, the author of the posted text.

Our social media profiles are our narrators: selective, curated personas of who we are, who we want to be, what our values are and what actions we take.

However, when analysing texts, literary scholars employ the model of narrative communication, which describes the intermediary levels of textual communication between author and reader. One important literary element is the narrator, a fictional persona that tells the story. This narrator is not a direct representation of the author’s person. If we are all authors, as Alang claims, and the social media posts we produce are our texts, where did our narrators go?

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Levels-of-narrative-communication-again-This-model-distinguishes-between-the-levels-of_fig4_344239602

We use narrative techniques every single day, even if we do not write a single word. In his book The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr explains why humans as a species are so obsessed with storytelling and narration. He argues that we need narration to make sense of who we are. Our personalities are all made up of “a riotous democracy of mini-selves” with “different goals and values” which are “’locked in chronic battle’ for dominion.” For example, there may be one mini-self in us that wants to go to the gym and eat healthily, while another mini-self wants to be happily snuggled up in bed eating a cheese-stuffed pizza. Whether we go to the gym that day or not is a question of which mini-self wins. In order for us to make sense of these conflicting identities and urges, we all have our own internal narrator whose sole job it is to create a unifying, logical narrative about who we are and why we do what we do, to “stitch together a pattern of logic to our daily lives”. In other words, we are constantly telling stories about ourselves to ourselves.

In short, telling stories about ourselves is a form of self-making and self-narrating – and it is inherently human. Self-narration is precisely what we do on social media. The stories we tell there portray us in a certain light: they emphasise certain aspects of our personality, conceal others, give more attention to those mini-selves of ours that we love (those that go to the gym and have a smoothie) while we hide those that we do not want the world to see (those that stay in bed and eat cheese-stuffed pizza). We are all authors, as Alang claims, but our social media profiles are not direct representations of our personalities in all their multiplicities. Our social media profiles are our narrators: selective, curated personas of who we are, who we want to be, what our values are and what actions we take. The posts we upload on social media constitute the narratorial persona of our profile. It is through this narratorial persona that we tell our stories, amplifying or omitting elements that do not align with who we want to be seen as. Personal profiles on social media are the inherently human self-making narration made textual and public.