Dangers of Narrative: A Critical Approach to Narratives of Personal Experience in Contemporary Story Economy

Abstract

The current storytelling boom across various spheres of life encourages actors from individuals to businesses and institutions to instrumentalize stories of personal experience, but the search for a "compelling story" is often blind to the possible downsides of experientially and emotionally engaging narratives. This article presents key findings of the project Dangers of Narrative that has crowdsourced examples of instrumental storytelling via Facebook and Twitter. We focus on three cases of political storytelling on social media, which foreground certain problems of using narrative in the public sphere: Donald Trump's anecdote about "Jim who stopped going to Paris"; a viral Facebook story by a Finnish MP about an encounter with a drug addict; and the social media controversy around the alleged confrontation between Covington High School students and Indigenous Peoples March attendants at the Lincoln Memorial in January 2019. Based on the idea in cognitive narratology of the experiential narrative as prototypical and on Caroline Levine's influential theory of colliding representational and social forms, we formulate a theory of how viral, affective storytelling may distort the intended rhetoric and ethics of narrative. We demonstrate how the prototypical narrative form, in collision with the formal affordances of social media, ends up contradicting the political or social forms that the teller or sharer of the narrative advocates. We describe the social media logic that creates a chain reaction from narrative experientiality to disproportionate and uncontrolled representativeness and normativity created by affective sharing, and we conceptualize this contemporary narrative phenomenon as the "viral exemplum."