Living in the Now: Real-time narratives of the self on Twitter

Conference: Narratives of Self in Art and the Everyday

Dates: 12-13 May 2016

Abstract:

Uri Margolin (1999) has argued that contemporary culture is characterised by a preference for stories that relate not what has happened, but what is happening, and that place the emphasis on telling the story ‘as you live’. This is nowhere more evident than on social media which constantly reiterates the need to update stories in ‘real time’. Meanwhile, John Fiske’s (1987) concept of ‘nowness’ in television has been extended to social media (Page 2011; Thomas 2014) to account for the ways in which the sharing of stories in real time can produce a powerful sense of engagement for followers, bringing them back time and again for updates on even the most trivial of events.

This paper will focus on Twitter and how both real and fictional accounts manage to convey the ‘nowness’ of individuals’ everyday experiences. The paper will detail some of the ways in which this sense of ‘nowness’ is conveyed, as well as focusing on the affective responses of followers. It will also examine critiques (Basar, Coupland and Obrist 2015) which question whether the preoccupation with the ‘extreme present’ results in an inability to look at life as a meaningful story, and turns lives into a mere series of tasks.

Source: Manual