Stefan Iversen - Böcker

This book interrogates the role of quantification in stories on social media: how do visible numbers (e.g. of views, shares, likes) and invisible algorithmic measurements shape the stories we post and engage with? The links of quantification with stories have not been explored sufficiently in storytelling research or in social media studies, despite the fact that platforms have been integrating sophisticated metrics into developing facilities for sharing stories, with a massive appeal to ordinary users, influencers and businesses alike. With case-studies from Instagram, Reddit and Snapchat, the authors show how three types of metrics, namely content metrics, interface metrics and algorithmic metrics, affect the ways in which cancer patients share their experiences, the circulation of specific stories that mobilize counter-publics and the design of stories as facilities on platforms. The analyses document how numbers structure elements in stories, indicate and produce engagement and become resources for the tellers’ self-presentation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of narrative and social media studies, including narratology, biography studies, digital storytelling, life-writing, narrative psychology, sociological approaches to narrative, discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives.

From its beginnings narratology has incorporated a communicative model of literary narratives, considering these as simulations of natural, oral acts of communication. This approach, however, has had some problems with accounting for the strangeness and anomalies of modern and postmodern narratives. As many skeptics have shown, not even classical realism conforms to the standard set by oral or ‘natural’ storytelling. Thus, an urge to confront narratology with the difficult task of reconsidering a most basic premise in its theoretical and analytical endeavors has, for some time, been undeniable.During the 2000s, Nordic narratologists have been among the most active and insistent critics of the communicative model. They share a marked skepticism towards the idea of using ‘natural’ narratives as a model for understanding and interpreting all kinds of narratives, and for all of them, the distinction of fiction is of vital importance.This anthology presents a collection of new articles that deal with strange narratives, narratives of the strange, or, more generally, with the strangeness of fiction, and even with some strange aspects of narratology.

The dynamic nature of storytelling has long been one of the major concerns of narrative research, but relatively little scholarship has engaged with the relationship between storytelling dynamics and the underlying material forms of cultural texts. This volume seeks to remedy this by asking questions such as: How might the affordances of new media guide audience reception in subtle ways? How might the dynamism of legacy media be better recognized when examined through a multimedial lens? How do the physical processes of production define the horizons of both authorial activity and audience response? The insight that drives these investigations is two-fold: first, that functions and effects of narratives are deeply intertwined with material forces of production, distribution, and reception; and second, that an analysis of any specific narrative must include attention to these material matters and how they affect the unfolding of stories over time. The chapters in this collection explore interplays between material forces and narrative dynamics across a range of genres and intellectual arenas. In doing so, they both fill gaps in current methodological frameworks and call attention to the many gaps that are yet to be filled.