The Narrative Subject: Storytelling in the Age of the Internet

Storytelling is a new and specific form of traditional narration that emphasizes the intersubjective encounter when communicating thorough stories and the social process rather than the product of narration (Jackson, 2002). Thanks to the development of the Internet, forms of narration have increased recently as more people prefer to tell stories online to present their lives through texts, images, or videos to the world. This book, The Narrative Subject: Storytelling in the Age of the Internet, focuses on the narrative contents of the stories and considers the narrative subjects as an essential source of analysis. Christina Schachtner, the author of this book, pays more attention to young network actors and bloggers. From studying their feelings and the surrounding sociocultural contexts, she unravels the effects of the Internet and digital media that help online users reshape their images and interact with the world. With the innovative application of self-portraits, the study insightfully explains the sociocultural relationship between the narrative subjects and their surrounding contexts by digging out the dynamic motivations, diverse purposes, and sociocultural expectations of each narrative subject.

This monograph of 7 chapters can conveniently be divided into three sections: theoretical constructions, practical analyses, and sociocultural implications. Based on the theoretical constructions, the author conducts practical analyses of online users’ specific stories and presents sociocultural implications about the relationship between online narrations, narrative subjects, and sociocultural contexts. Schachtner generally introduces previous studies and theories, such as Grounded Theory, to build a framework for readers to understand narrations in terms of the Internet and digital media context in the first section (Chapters 1–3). Then she elaborates on the rich narrations and stories through a dual analysis, respectively, successfully discovering the enlightening relationship among subjects, narrations, and the sociocultural contexts in the second section (Chapters 4-5). At last, she clarifies the relationship in concrete sociocultural reality, with resolutions and implications provided in the third section (Chapters 6-7).

Section one (Chapters 1–3) builds a theoretical framework for analyzing the Internet and digital media context. Chapter 1 outlines the whole book and highlights the increasing significance of online narrations in the digital media era. The Internet blurs the boundaries of time and space, providing online narrators more chances and ways to tell stories. Schachtner innovatively shifts the focus from analyzing the content of the narrations to the narrative subjects’ personal feelings and their everyday realities beyond the Internet through the subject-theoretical approach and empirical analysis. In Chapter 2, Schachtner considers storytelling a cultural practice and life form of reflecting the narrator’s daily experience and feelings. Specifically, this chapter illustrates that the Internet can offer narrative subjects multiple functions, various audiences, and a newly developed space to tell stories, closely connecting with ‘the I’ (p. 16) and ‘the you’ (p. 16) relationship. In this sense, the author further dedicates a whole chapter (Chapter 3) to scrutinizing the structural characteristics of narrative “space” in the age of the Internet and digital media, and then she puts forward five key terms: interconnectedness, interactivity, globality, multimediality, and virtuality. In the first section, the book highlights the new trend of online communication and expressions and explicitly sketches the theoretical framework of online narrations, setting the direction for the following analysis.

In the second section, Schachtner elucidates a practical analysis based on the rich narrations of 21 participants from different countries through a dual analysis, respectively, in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. Chosen to represent Generation Y (born between 1985 and 2000), these participants are network actors and bloggers between the age of 11 and 32 (11 females and 10 males) from six European countries (e.g., Austria, German), four Arab nations (e.g., Bahrain, Saudi Arabia) and the USA. The participants have various identities, such as middle school students, college exchange students, artists, journalists, etc. The combined application and adoption of the self-portraits, interviews and multiple disciplines dig out a new way to analyze the motivations and expectations of the narrative subjects. According to the specific contents of the narrative subjects, the analysis in Chapter 4 concludes with six primary categories: stories about interconnectedness, self-staging, suppliers and sellers, managing boundaries, transformation, and setting out and breaking away. Through interviews and the explanation of the self-portrait, Schachtner proposes that people from distinct social contexts possess various self-motivation, purposes, expectations, and views online. For example, the online narrations of one network actor from Bahrain are greatly influenced by their country’s religious and political atmosphere, whose narrations often express the desire for freedom of speech. In addition, the six categories comprehensively reflect the main functions of the digital media, nearly covering all common expectations and problems faced by the network actors and bloggers in everyday life. However, after the analysis in Chapter 4, the author finds that the six categories are like narrative jigsaw puzzles, independent of each other. Therefore, in Chapter 5, Schachtner integrates the implicit and explicit elements of narrative jigsaw puzzles into four main relations reflected in the narrations mentioned in Chapter 2: subjects’ narrations and time; subjects’ narrations and space; ‘the self’ (p. 5) and ‘the you’ (p. 16); digital media as narrative constructions. Specifically, the author sheds much light on the relationship between digital media contexts, narrative subjects, and sociocultural factors. It may help integrate the narrative pieces of each individual and reshape their personalities from the historical and sociocultural dimensions.

The third section (Chapters 6-7) examines the relationship between narrative subjects and sociocultural contexts in concrete sociocultural reality and emphasizes the critical role of culture in narrating. The core of Chapter 6 lies in clarifying the relationship among subjects, narrative practices, and social transformation. Due to the interdependent relationship, the author proposes that the subjects’ narrations are tightly connected with their own experiences and social going-on. Therefore, one’s narrations potentially reflect the sociocultural background of the subject and are a truer and more direct way for outsiders to view the contents and meaning of the different cultures, lifestyles, etc. To make the communication of online narrations smoother, the author in the last chapter emphasizes the importance of considering the cultural elements such as the narrative subjects’ identities and sociocultural contexts in translating the various narrations.

We recommend this book for three reasons. Firstly, the theme of online communication and narration in the age of the Internet and digital media is innovative as it puts the study of narration in a new era. The author systematically draws a detailed map of online narrations from three dimensions: the contents, the narrative subjects, and sociocultural conditions. Secondly, the book adopts a multi-method approach to studying online narrations. The use of multimodal discourse analysis well explores every participant’s inner thoughts and true feelings, which assures the authenticity of the current research and presents a multi-layered image of each narrative subject. In addition, it reveals various disciplines such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, literary criticism, and culture studies. Thirdly, the application of the dual analyses (in Chapters 4 and 5) provides a more comprehensive interpretation of the complex narrations of today’s young adults and adolescents. On the one hand, it presents a direct analysis and categories based on the contents of each participant. On the other hand, it makes an integrated analysis according to the theoretical framework proposed by the author. However, it would be better to include more quantitative data in this study. For example, corpus-assisted discourse analysis of their narrations and interviews might provide more convincing and solid evidence for the analysis of the narrative subjects.

In a nutshell, this book does explore the uncharted academic territory of online narrations and the subjects, as it finds a new perspective to study narrations of online communication through specific subjects’ personal true feelings, self-portraits, and the sociocultural contexts. Without hesitation, the book is a must-read for different groups of people. It is a good resource for researchers in linguistics, sociology, and psychology who would benefit from updated knowledge and theory about intercultural communication and discourse analysis in the context of the Internet. In addition, it is also a valuable book for all young adults and adolescents as it provides practical ways they can use to harmoniously and safely communicate online and adequately deal with the conflicts they face. Furthermore, it offers valuable practical implications for intercultural professionals based on the participants’ experience. It could help psychologists understand the inner feelings of online users, help public policy workers make regulations to avoid possible misunderstandings, or help business managers take advantage of the function of the network to operate effective online business activities.