Through the cracks in the safety net
Maria Mäkelä · 2020
The chapter argues that in the story economy of social media, counter-narratives have a considerable potential to dominate affectively and manipulate the users’ political consciousness in ways that are not even anticipated by the tellers themselves. I focus on personal stories in social media profiles and human-interest journalism countering the alleged master narrative of a foolproof welfare system in Finland. In these stories, the moral positioning and the ensuing social media virality through affective sharing is based on a caricaturized casting where the deserving individual encounters an inhumane system. A “master narrative” is thus understood in terms of a script-like status quo that becomes tellable only at the moment of its failure. The analyses and the arguments are based on a crowdsourcing project receiving reports of “interesting, funny or dubious examples of instrumental storytelling” from social media users. The chapter demonstrates how the narrative act of countering in social media-fed narrative environments is related to the experiential cognitive prototype of narrative and the story logic of social media, gravitating toward affective and moral consensus.