ABSTRACT
Some forms of viral storytelling should be considered as part of the general storytelling boom of the 21st century that tends toward instrumentalizing stories of personal experience in the public sphere. While the public discourses on storytelling are being usurped by storytelling consultants that urge individuals and organizations to tell “compelling” stories of personal change, inspiration and emotional upheaval, the mechanisms of collective and co-constructive storytelling are becoming less and less reducible to individual narrative agency. This chapter presents a narrative-analytical approach to the mechanisms of social media storytelling that distil universal truths from arbitrary stories of personal experiences going viral. Not all social media activity is “narrative” or “storytelling”; the chapter suggests that viral phenomena that are particularly narrative in nature build on strong moral positioning, transform experiential, particularized narratives into shared cultural stories, and emphasize the universal in the particular. Only by looking at this collectively produced narrative didacticism can we postulate a narrative agency and authority that is emergent in nature.
