Selfies and Stories. Authentizität und Banalität des narrativen Selbst in Social Media

Abstract

The paper discusses autobiographical representations and constructions of the self in two prominent recent devices of social media, namely Selfies and Stories. Selfies taken during the users’ vacations strive to convey the impression of in­formal and individual authenticity by applying, paradoxically, highly conven­tional features. Snapchat’s Stories exhibit everyday situations of a surprisingly evanescent and banal nature. Both of these social media dispositives depict ‘instantaneous selfs’ that lack diachronic narrative features; ‘shared selfs’ that legitimize themselves through social affiliation rather than deviation; ‘auto­matic selfs’ that are co-authored by algorithmic procedures.