ABSTRACT
The introduction establishes the starting point that we live in a world characterised by fragmentation, proposing that Twitter is emblematic of this shift in the way that its affordances compel users to communicate through very short posts. It proposes that narrative, nonetheless, continues to play a key role in everyday understanding and provides a basic means for coping with fragmentation by allowing otherwise disparate information to be grasped together within significant wholes. This is followed by an introduction to the three contexts from which examples are drawn throughout the remainder of the book, namely the Twitter posts of Donald Trump, the Spanish political movement Podemos and Egyptian activists writing about the 2013 military intervention in that country. The chapter concludes with an overview of the contents of the book.
