Narrative in Social Media

Stories broadcast in 140 or less characters over the course of a day may, at first, seem only a 21st century update of serialized micro-fiction, yet considering the strategies authors take to produce literary works involving social media, their creations resist easy definition.  This paper looks the broad notion of narrative as it plays out in the social networking site, Twitter, in works such as Adam Higgs et al’s  “Crushing It:  A Social Media Love Story," Jay Bushman’s “The Good Captain,” and Dene Grigar’s “The 24-Hour Micro-Elit Project.”  Specifically, the paper asks two questions:  First, how do narratives created for social media sites work against what has become the conventional way to describe e-literature?  Second, what do we learn about social media literature if we think about it in terms of non-narrativity? At stake are assumptions about what constitutes electronic literature and conventional views about narrativity in relation to works produced with and for digital media.

(Source: author's abstract)