921417

research-article2020
ICS0010.1177/1367877920921417International Journal of Cultural StudiesDawson

International Journal of Cultural Studies

1­–16
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1367877920921417
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920921417
journals.sagepub.com/home/ics

Original Article
Hashtag narrative: Emergent
storytelling and affective
publics in the digital age

Paul Dawson
School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Australia

Abstract
This article investigates the role that narrative plays in the emergence of cultural movements from
the networked interactions of users with the algorithmic structures of social media platforms. It
identifies and anatomizes a new narrative phenomenon created by the technological affordances
of Twitter, a phenomenon dubbed ‘emergent storytelling’. In doing so, it seeks to explain: (a) the
multiple concepts of narrative that operate at different levels of hashtag movements emerging
from the dynamic forces that circulate in and through Twitter; (b) the interplay of narrative
cognition with stochastic viral activity and the invisible design of social media algorithms; and
(c) the varying rhetorical purposes that narrative is put to in public discourse about viral
movements. Using #MeToo as a case study in the generation and reception of ‘affective publics’, it
clarifies how iterative appeals to the experiential truth of individual stories manifest as narratable
social movements in the networked public sphere.

Keywords
affect, algorithms, complex systems, emergent behaviour, #MeToo, narrative, virality

On 15 October 2017, Alyssa Milano posted a tweet to her followers, inviting them to
reply with the phrase ‘me too’ if they had experienced sexual harassment or assault. The
stated aim was to derive a sense of how widespread this experience was, and the first
reply was Milano’s own ‘me too’. The latent narrativity of this phrase encouraged the
sharing of personal stories, and the technological affordance of the hashtag enabled the

Corresponding author:
Paul Dawson, School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
Email: Paul.dawson@unsw.edu.au
2 International Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

call to arms to spread virally across personal networks. Looking back on this moment a
year later in The New York Times, Maya Salam (2018) wrote: ‘It wasn’t long before
#MeToo wasn’t just a turn of phrase – it was a movement.’ In this article I want to ask:
what role does narrative play in the emergence of cultural movements from the net-
worked interactions of users with the algorithmic structures of social media platforms?
#MeToo is a prime example of what Zizi Papacharissi (2015a) calls ‘affective pub-
lics’, which she defines as ‘public formations that are textually rendered into being
through emotive expressions that spread virally through networked crowds’ (2015a: 14).
This definition revolves around two key terms of media studies – virality and affect –
both of which are, essentially, non-narrative. At the same time, Papacharissi states that
she is concerned with explaining the ‘soft structures of storytelling’ provided by Twitter
which enable collaborative narratives to be formed through the organizational logic of
hashtags. The #MeToo movement, I suggest, is not only one of the most prominent and
internationally significant viral phenomena of recent years, it is an example of a new
narrative phenomenon created by the technological affordances of social media plat-
forms, a phenomenon I will call emergent storytelling. I use this term because networked
crowds exhibit what scientists call emergent behaviour, in the sense that they possess
properties which do not exist at the level of the individual agents whose interactions
comprise them. In this instance, what was essentially an informal call for data produced
ambient responses in the form of stories of personal experience attached to the hashtag,
stories that in the aggregate created a large-scale phenomenon that could be expressed as
data (1.7 million tweets in the first week) but which acquired political significance only
when narrativized as a social movement. To interrogate the role of narrative in the net-
worked public sphere, then, we must ask not only how narratives go viral, but how the
causal logic of narrative itself processes viral behaviour.
In what follows I will trace the connections between current scholarship on digital
network culture and scientific research on emergent phenomena in complex systems.
The value of drawing out and developing these connections, I argue, lies in their capacity
to help explain: (a) the multiple concepts of narrative that operate at different levels of
hashtag movements emerging from the dynamic forces that circulate in and through
Twitter; (b) the interplay of narrative cognition with stochastic viral activity and the
invisible design of social media algorithms; and (c) the varying rhetorical purposes that
narrative is put to in public discourse about viral movements. Using #MeToo as a case
study in the generation and reception of ‘affective publics’, I will seek to clarify how
iterative appeals to the experiential truth of individual stories manifest as narratable
social movements in the ‘networked public sphere’. In using this term, I refer to work by
Benkler (2006) and Friedland et al. (2006) which extends Habermas’s original formula-
tion to describe the transformation of public discourse produced when the flow of infor-
mation in traditional mass media opens up to the complex, self-organizing nature of
global networked environments.

Twitter and narrative

In recent years there have been attempts to address the specifically narrative elements of
hashtag movements on Twitter, such as Yang’s (2016) study of narrative agency in the
Dawson 3

use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, and Giaxoglou’s (2018) sociolinguistic, discourse

analytic approach to the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag as a resource for narrative stance-taking
in which users become participatory tellers framing an event, an approach that ‘fore-
grounds narrative – rather than affect – as a circulatory drive for significant moments,
which are nonetheless affectively invested’ (2018: 19). Mendes et al. (2019) analyse how
‘digitized narratives’ of sexual violence are mediated and shaped by the affordances of
particular social media platforms, and the affective experiences these produce and facili-
tate, including the role of hashtags as a ‘narrative and connective device’ which functions
as a ‘placeholder’ for direct accounts of an experience (2019: 1302). Neil Sadler (2018),
on the other hand, emphasizes narrative interpretation as a way of reading Twitter in rela-
tion to the Arab Spring, whereby the affordances of the platform provide ‘incipient narra-
tivity’ that becomes transformed into coherent mental narratives through creative reading.
‘In brief,’ Sadler argues, ‘hashtag incipience in sharing on a global scale arguably starts
with the marking of a keyword via its recurrent and iterative use in microstory making
practices, before it becomes an integral part of shared stories, transportable across con-
texts in association with different positions to the events’ (2018: 19).
This work gestures towards a more comprehensive understanding of how narrative
operates in relation to Twitter, but it also demonstrates that narrative itself is not a singu-
lar concept, for it has a variety of meanings derived from a range of disciplinary perspec-
tives. What characterizes viral movements in the networked public sphere is a dynamic
tension between this variety of meanings and the recursive logic of emergent behaviour.
While in principle emergent storytelling could apply to any hashtagged movement, I
have chosen #MeToo because it is founded on storytelling, on the exhortation to share
stories of personal experience, with a prototypical narrative encoded in the phrase itself.
As the hashtag gained early momentum, a common refrain among users was this one:
‘For all the women that are too pained to recount the story they want most to share . . .
#metoo’ (@cassandrasteele, 17 October 2017). This indicates the experiential basis of
individual stories, their affective resonance scored in the body, but also that at the heart
of #MeToo is the concept of sharing (with ambivalence registered over the fact that shar-
ing is both empowering and potentially exploitative). The phrase is both an expression of
solidarity and a narrative signifier, a shorthand reference to the shared experience of all
individual stories. The particulars of narrative experience do not have to be detailed, as
this tweet by @jvymee indicates: ‘my story doesn’t need to be told, just know it hap-
pened. #MeToo’ (17 October 2017). The function of the hashtag as a ‘placeholder’ in
facilitating digitized narratives, according to Mendes et al., ‘may be what in fact allows
for narratives of assault to be digitally rendered in such high numbers, as we saw with
#BeenRapedNeverReported, or more contemporary hashtags such as #MeToo’ (2019:
1301–2). The narrativity signalled by the hashtag, then, is not the conventional structured
representation of a sequence of causally related events, but the core features of experien-
tiality (Fludernik, 1996) and eventfulness (Schmid, 2003). What is vital to understand,
though, is how these fragmented and elliptical references to the individual experience of
an event interact with and relate to competing concepts of narrative at different levels in
the complex system of Twitter.
These competing concepts of narrative are: (1) shared stories at the micro level of the
individual user, a concept derived from sociolinguistics (Page, 2018) to refer to tweets
4 International Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

with weak narrativity which gain larger storytelling significance through the rhetorical
framing of the hashtag and characterized by co-construction of meaning through multi-
ple tellers; (2) cultural narratives at the macro level of the indexed hashtag, a general
concept in discursive psychology (Bruner, 1986) and cultural studies (Lyotard, 1984
[1979]) which refers to a cultural script, or interpretive framework, that shapes large-
scale collective perspectives on events, history or national identity, and is characterized
by an absence of tellers, a kind of interpretive resource in the public domain which can
nonetheless be mobilized by individual tellers; (3) narrativization, a concept derived
from cognitive psychology (Polkinghorne, 1988), hermeneutics (Ricoeur, 1988) and his-
toriography (White, 1980) which holds that we are storytelling animals (MacIntyre,
1981) with an evolved cognitive capacity to make sense of experience by imposing a
temporal logic of cause and effect on events. This last concept is vital to explain how the
process by which the aggregate of individual tweets produced by viral behaviour becomes
understood as a social event and framed as a ‘movement’ by a cultural narrative. A con-
ventional view of how narrative relates to the diffusion of ideas through social networks
is that narratives themselves go viral, as indicated by the title of Robert Shiller’s (2019)
recent book Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic
Events. For Shiller, narratives are explanatory stories with emotional resonance that
spread contagiously to influence masses of people. However, as with the concept of the
meme, the question is whether these ‘narratives’ can be said to have a substance that can
be circulated. To more fully appreciate the dynamics at play, I would argue, we need to
address not so much the idea that the #MeToo ‘narrative’ goes viral, as that a narrative
emerges from the viral activity generated by the hashtag itself.

Digital virality and emergent behaviour

Scientific studies of virality typically seek to explain and predict the spread of ideas on
social media by identifying a meme and determining whether it spreads like a complex
contagion (requiring multiple points of contact for behaviour to be adopted) or simple
contagion (requiring a single point of contact). This spreading activity is analysed by
computer modelling the relationship between echo chambers (or homophilic clusters of
users) and larger networks with weaker ties (see Guilbeault et al., 2018; Romero et al.,
2011; Törnberg, 2018; Weng et al., 2013). More conceptually oriented work in media
studies, especially that influenced by assemblage theory, challenges the neo-Darwinian
reliance on natural selection to explain why some memes replicate themselves (i.e. their
‘fitness’ for social reproduction), instead arguing that virality is a relational flow of
affects that exceed any putatively measurable unit of transmission, such as a hashtag.
For instance, in his book, Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks, Tony
Sampson (2012) offers a powerful theoretical repudiation of the analogical application of
memetic theory to network culture, ranging from academic computer modelling to cor-
porate manipulation of trends. As a corrective, Sampson resuscitates Gabriel Tarde’s
sociological theory of the dynamics of crowds, reconfigured for the age of networks
through Deleuze’s theory of assemblages, specifically to challenge an Enlightenment
model which posits the rational individual as existing separate from the natural world.
Memetics also eschews individual agency, but it does so in favour of the blind
Dawson 5

watchmaker of cultural evolution, and Sampson argues that while memetics has ‘an
empirical requirement for a material unit of measure’, his proposed ‘nonsubstance analy-
sis’ of digital virality emphasizes ‘the mechanism independence of assemblages, events,
environments, and affect’ (2012: 70). This critique of deterministic approaches to cul-
tural evolution argues that constructing the meme as the product of a genetic algorithm
fundamentally misrepresents the process of virality. ‘There is an interaction between
code and environment’, Samspon argues, ‘in which the circulation and interruption of
productive flows exceed the causality of an evolutionary code’ (2012: 74). There is an
instructive parallel here between media network theory and recent investigations into the
limits of narrative explanation when accounting for evolutionary behaviour and other
complex modes of causality.
While the meme has become a pervasive concept for explaining the spread of ideas
between people, appeals to narrative have become omnipresent in public discourse as a
way to shape the influence of these ideas. Hence the persistent rhetorical exhortation in
political discourse to ‘change the narrative’, a curious phrase which employs the definite
article but which refers to no artefact and can be attributed to no individual teller. If
memetics is derived from the analogy with the gene established by Richard Dawkins in
his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, we can also trace the narrative turn in the humanities
and social sciences to this period, and particularly to the influence of psychology, which
approached narrative not as an artefact but as a mental process. The paradox pointed out
by scholars such as Richard Walsh (2011) is that if narrative sense-making is an evolved
mode of cognition, it is nonetheless incommensurable with the emergent process of evo-
lution that produced it. This is because narrative privileges a chain of causality over the
recursive networks of interaction which characterize variation and selection (Walsh,
2016). In similar fashion we might say the problem of memetics is that to express an
evolutionary algorithm as ‘survival of the fittest’ is ultimately a form of narrativization
that enables us to recognize the effects of emergent behaviour while misrepresenting the
complexity of evolution itself.
To describe emergent storytelling in the networked public sphere, then, I turn to com-
plexity science which has directly influenced sociology in the case of Niklas Luhmann’s
systems theory, and more generally inspired it, as in the case of Brian Massumi’s (1995)
account of the ‘autonomy of affect’, which likens affect to the ‘bifurcation point’ in com-
plex systems to explain how it exceeds the structure of narrative sequencing (1995: 93).
Complexity is the property of a biological or social system in which the dynamic, self-
organizing interaction of component parts creates emergent behaviour at a higher level.
While this interaction may appear to be random and therefore unpredictable, there are
nonetheless patterns of behaviour involving individual agents adapting to their immedi-
ate environment which collectively generate larger patterns through their recursion over
time.
Complexity theory has been especially vital to molecular biology but has also been
drawn upon to explain a whole range of dynamic systems, from ant colonies to the stock
market to crowd behaviour (see Castellani and Hafferty, 2009). In this sense, it ultimately
can be understood as a method, founded on the observation that emergent properties at
the system level are not derivable from or reducible to the rules that govern component-
level activity because they arise from a non-linear process that cannot be described by a
6 International Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

simple logic of cause and effect (Mikulecky, 2001; Phelan, 2001). Some work in com-
puter science has approached Twitter as a complex system in order to model emergent
behaviour (Birdsey et al., 2015; Gatti et al., 2014), but this scholarship does not engage
with critical approaches to networked publics developed in media studies. At the same
time, while we have witnessed what John Urry (2001) has called ‘the complexity turn’ in
the social sciences and cultural studies, there have been few explicit and systematic
accounts of emergent behaviour in relation to social media platforms.
In recent years, however, critical studies of viral hashtag movements on Twitter
(Payne, 2018; Sharma, 2013) have gestured towards such an account by extending the
concept of affective publics in order to focus on the role of digital infrastructure in not
just facilitating but actively producing viral behaviour. In this view, multiple acts of
tweeting and sharing are more than organic expressions of rational autonomous users
participating in a cultural Zeitgeist because the contagious affective encounters of users
with online content are brought about by the invisible design of trending algorithms
themselves. These algorithms are created by software codes based on data analysis of
traceable user activity which thus anticipate the very publics they are designed to connect
and which constitute these publics with unevenly distributed power relations. At the
same time, the contingency of these encounters indicates that viral movements cannot be
dismissed as purely the product of algorithmic design because they arise from the
dynamic interaction between individual users, contagious flows of affect, and the invis-
ible algorithmic structures of Twitter which call into being and constitute new subjec-
tivities through virally circulated hashtags. These subjects are considered emergent
properties of such an assemblage.
Sanjay Sharma (2013), for instance, proposes a materialist ‘digital-race assemblage’
by looking at racialized hashtags under the rubric of what he calls ‘Black Twitter’. For
Sharma, ‘Blacktags reveal the contagious effects of networked relations in producing
emergent racial aggregations, rather than simply representing the behaviour of an inten-
tionally acting group of Black Twitter users’ (2013: 48). Robert Payne (2018) argues that
the Je Suis Charlie hashtag is a performative utterance producing an ostensibly universal
subject position in which ‘social media users identifying with Charlie were called into
being by the combined forces of social media algorithms and the affective and political
intensities coursing through and around them’ (2018: 288). For Payne, while users expe-
rience a sense of agency through habitual acts of circulating and reacting to online mate-
rial, ‘their very ontological status as users is an emergent property of the shifting
dynamics of the digital assemblage’ (2018: 286). Bearing this is mind we could say that
the emergent subject called into being by the utterance ‘MeToo’ is both a gendered sub-
ject and a narrating subject because the phrase itself is predicated on the implicit report
of event: ‘(this happened) to MeToo’.
In their study of the #Ferguson hashtag, Sarah J. Jackson and Brooke Foucault Welles
(2016) make oblique reference to the emergent dynamics of Twitter in relation to narra-
tive by tracing how networked counterpublics form around a hashtag to create an ‘emer-
gent counterpublic structure’ (2016: 398). Drawing upon scientific research on the
scale-free qualities of the world wide web, whereby certain nodes or hubs attract prefer-
ential attachment, the authors analyse how retweets and mentions of posts by ‘crowd-
sourced elites’ or influencers enabled counterpublic narratives to spread and contest
Dawson 7

dominant narratives about racial profiling and police brutality. What they don’t address,
however, is the role of narrative itself and its multiple functions as a representational act,
an artefact, a rhetorical strategy and, ultimately, a cognitive process. In what follows I
will argue that Twitter functions as a complex system producing emergent behaviour in
the networked public sphere that requires competing concepts of narrative at different
levels to explain its dynamic nature. I want to make more explicit how the concept of
emergence works in relation to hashtags, and then to explain how narrative operates in
relation to the system.

Hashtags and narrative levels on Twitter

First, we can formally describe Twitter as an archive of retrievable tweets which operates
as a folksonomy, a bottom-up, user-generated system of classification. As Michele
Zappavigna (2018) points out, social media discourse is a form of ‘searchable talk’; it
leaves electronic traces that can be recuperated through a search of indexed data, and the
key ‘semiotic resource’ for searching is the hashtag. Zappavigna (2018: 2–3) suggests
that a hashtag functions both as metadata ‘in the sense that a particular instance of a tag
is associated with all other instances of the same tag in the social stream’, and as meta-
discourse ‘in the sense that it encapsulates, at a higher order of abstraction, the interper-
sonal meaning being made in the tweet’. So at the macro level hashtags are used to index,
classify and search particular topics. At the micro level of the individual user, however,
they operate as inline metadata for the purposes of topic marking, but they are also cru-
cially employed to establish interpersonal connections with an imagined audience; to
express value or indicate an attitudinal stance through that invoked connection; and to
provide metacommentary on the language and content of the tweet itself.
Considering these insights we could say that the affiliative function of the hashtag at
the level of users enables the indexing function at the macro level, but the emergent
patterns of a hashtag-indexed movement cannot be predicted by the asynchronous inter-
action of individual acts of tagging. Zappavigna (2015) argues that Twitter is primarily
used for social bonding through the sharing of values. ‘The connections are “ambient”,’
she writes, ‘in the sense that other users are potentially present within the social network,
but not necessarily linked together through connections between user accounts, or by
direct conversational exchanges’ (2015: 274). This idea of ambient affiliation as a form
of social bonding chimes with Zizi Papacharissi’s (2015b) description of new modes of
online civic engagement in her book Affective Publics.
Papacharissi (2015b) investigates how political movements such as the Arab Spring
and Occupy swell from the accumulation of intensities proliferated by individual engage-
ment with social media hashtags and virally circulated memes. While her theoretical
framework is established by updating Raymond Williams’ structures of feeling through
contemporary affect theory, the phenomenon that Papacharissi is ultimately concerned
with describing, I would argue, is emergent storytelling. Papacharissi’s focus is the
instantaneity of news on Twitter, where unfolding events are reported as they happen
‘through processes that instantly turn events into stories’ (2015b: 44). Regarding the
hashtag #Egypt in relation to the Arab Spring, Papacharissi argues that ‘[t]he connective
potential of the tag as a storytelling device materialized as distinct personal frames were
8 International Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

collaboratively woven into a narrative that framed the movement as a revolution’ (2015b:
70). If we ask ‘woven by whom?’ the answer must be: no-one but the complex system
itself, enabled by the technology of the hashtag and the algorithms of Twitter. At the
same, though, our capacity for narrativization is precisely what enables such a movement
to be articulated as a revolution.
One of the earliest attempts to address the limits of specifically narrative knowledge
when faced with the complex origins of emergent activity is Porter Abbott’s ‘Narrative
and emergent behavior’. In this 2008 article Abbott draws attention to the evolutionary
design of narrative as a cognitive process: its capacity to help us understand the relation
of events in time around which we can build stories that underpin cultural identity. The
strength of this capability, he argues, ‘has made it difficult for us a species to grasp modes
of causality that cannot be accommodated to narrative form, modes like relativity or
quantum mechanics or emergent behaviour’ (2008: 230). Our default mode when
encountering complexity is to search for a narrative of centralized control, of intention
arising from individual agency (such as positing a leader of a flock of birds), but narra-
tive, Abbott argues, can articulate emergent systems only at the micro and macro level:
it cannot map sequentially the complex relation of individual agents that enable the
movement from the micro-level agent to the overall system. ‘The difficulty, then, that
emergent behavior introduces into narrative understanding,’ Abbott suggests, ‘is not sim-
ply the absence of centralized causal control, nor the operation of chance, but the absence
of a narratable thread’ (2008: 233).
Papacharissi’s (2015b) account of what she calls ‘the immediate and improvised con-
tributions to developing events and issues’ that occur on Twitter indicates that there is no
necessarily narratable link between the micro-level activity of individual users engaging
with unfolding events and the macro-level narrative that can be observed emerging out
of the connectivity fostered by hashtags (2015b: 130). Her final argument is that affec-
tive publics constitute a kind of digitally communicated primary orality in which evolv-
ing stories enable ‘individuals to claim semantic agency by telling their own story and
thus potentially making meaning of and contributing to how a greater narrative is formed’
(2015b: 135–6). The question remains: what is the relationship between an individual’s
‘own story’ and the ‘greater narrative’ these contribute to? Or rather, how do we narrate
the emergence of one from the other, and the subsequent feedback loops between them?
To do this, I think we need to define how narrative functions at different levels in the
networked crowd.
To understand narrative at the micro level, I turn to Ruth Page, who approaches the
hashtag as a rhetorical resource for storytelling by establishing a link between ambient
affiliation and what she calls ‘shared stories’. In her 2018 book, Narratives Online, Page
endeavours to extend the paradigm of small stories, or narratives that depart from both
the prototypical narrative of aesthetic artefacts studied in narratology, and the coherent
narratives of personal experience studied in sociolinguistic accounts of ‘natural’ conver-
sational storytelling. Small stories are non-canonical, quotidian, and ephemeral social
practices in specific communicative contexts. Shared stories are essentially online ver-
sions of small stories which circulate in a culture of connectivity. The shared story,
according to Page (2018: 197), is ‘a retelling, produced by many tellers, across iterative
textual segments, which promotes shared attitudes between its tellers’.
Dawson 9

Page eschews the more general sense of narrative as a cultural script used to describe
broader patterns of social behaviour or belief, and exemplified by Lyotard’s concept of
grand narratives. ‘The analysis of shared stories’, Page asserts, ‘is rooted in the empirical
analysis of concrete examples of interaction. To understand shared stories, we need a
narrower definition that allows researchers to identify the textual objects that count as a
“narrative”’ (2018: 6). At the same time, she argues, both narratological and sociolin-
guistic definitions are inflexible, requiring a ‘fuzzy’ approach to stories that possess
narrativity on a scale. One example Page provides is a tweet from Barrack Obama in
2016, in response to the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series:

It happened: @Cubs win World Series. That’s change even this South Sider can believe in.
Want to come to the White House before I leave?

Page argues that a feature of small stories is precisely their weak narrativity, possess-
ing only eventfulness as their core without any standard structural feature. In this case,
the phrase ‘It happened’ is enough to qualify the tweet as a narrative. Furthermore, she
argues, what is significant is the potentially large-scale nature of these ‘small stories’
because of their viral potential and their capacity to engage with large public events, and
hence ‘their macro-social potential to project common ground between tellers’ (Page,
2018: 206).
This macro-social potential brings us to the question of the ‘greater narrative’ at the
higher level. If the simple adaptive rule followed by users is the tweeting of a hashtag,
the interface design of the Twitter platform facilitates narrativization, with tweets appear-
ing in news feeds in reverse chronological order, and with both trending algorithms and
the search function gathering all instances of a hashtag into a sequence. Scrolling through
this sequential arrangement invites a sense of narrative progression, although the emer-
gent collective movement is not the result of a chain of cause and effect between each
tweet because they are drawn together by a connective logic. This connective logic is the
result of specifically designed algorithms, which requires us to consider the extent to
which such a design both produces narrative phenomena and is itself subject to
narration.

Narrativizing algorithms
The capacity of social media algorithms to generate subject positions and shape online
publics, along with the broader economic imperatives and political consequences of
algorithmic thinking in contemporary capitalism, have become topics of acute scholarly
interest in the past decade, as witnessed by the 2017 special issue of Information,
Communication & Society on ‘The Social Power of Algorithms’. Much of this scholar-
ship has been concerned with elaborating how big data constitutes and controls publics
in the interest of commercial enterprise rather than neutrally facilitating democratic
flows of information. The most recent and insistent prosecution of this case is offered by
Shoshana Zuboff in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Zuboff (2019) argues
that behind the algorithms, machine intelligence and other modes of technology which
orient human communication and interaction in the digital age lies the ideology of
10 International Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

‘surveillance capitalism’, characterized above all by a ‘disregard for the boundaries of

private human experience and the moral integrity of the autonomous individual’ (2019:
19). I will look briefly here at how narrative is invoked in this diagnosis. For Zuboff, the
algorithms which select and order search results on Google and news feed content on
Facebook are driven by the commercial manipulation of user-generated content. Users
are thus the authors of the ‘first electronic text’ by virtue of providing this content, but
surveillance capitalism is the author of the second ‘shadow text’, which analyses the
material of the first in order to shape the ‘public text’ presented to us. Zuboff writes:

When it comes to the shadow text, surveillance capitalism’s laws of motion compel both its
secrecy and its continuous growth. We are the objects of its narratives, from whose lessons we
are excluded. At the source from which all the treasure flows, this second text is about us, but
it is not for us. (2019: 187)

This formulation seems to imply that raw material is shaped into narrative form by the
algorithms of social media platforms and hence by surveillance capitalism itself, and
therefore that encoded in the public text presented to us is another narrative that requires
exegetical divination. What are the narratives of surveillance capitalism which takes us
as its objects? These narratives, I suggest, take shape from our own tendency to explain
social forces in narrative terms. Clearly we must attend to the role of Twitter itself in the
generation of hashtag activism such as #MeToo: not only the connective logic of its
technological affordances, but the filtering functions that replicate existing social power
structures by providing increased visibility to certain users, and the algorithms designed
to maximize user interaction for the purpose of data mining and revenue generation. At
the same time, we need to be wary of installing the invisible algorithmic design of Twitter
as some kind of panoptic author and omniscient narrator in the way evolutionary algo-
rithms have assumed a deterministic status in the field of memetics.
In Algorithms of Oppression Safiya Noble (2018: 24) offers a similar diagnosis by
arguing that the results of Google’s search engine yield ‘algorithmic conceptualizations
of a variety of people and ideas’. These ‘algorithmic conceptualizations’ become inter-
changeable with narrative when she claims that ‘Google’s dominant narratives reflect the
kinds of hegemonic frameworks and notions that are often resisted by women and people
of color’ (2018: 24). It is clear that Noble uses narrative in the broad sense of a cultural
script when she points to ‘the Jezebel whore’ and ‘the Mammy’ as the dominant racist
narratives of Black women (2018: 98). In arguing that these hegemonic narratives are
inscribed in the algorithmic structures of Google itself, Noble points out that ‘digital
media platforms and algorithms control the narrative about people’ (2018: 109). By
explaining in this way the conscious and unconscious human biases that underpin both
the algorithmic designs of search engines and their effects, Noble demonstrates the per-
sistence of narrative thinking as a way of understanding the function of digital technol-
ogy in perpetuating social power relations.
Tarleton Gillespie (2016) encourages a more tempered and nuanced approach when
he cautions against reifying ‘the algorithm’ as a force acting upon the world which
requires explanation. Rather than looking at how algorithms have changed culture in ‘a
cause-and-effect story’ (2016: 52), Gillespie suggests we attend to how they have both
Dawson 11

shaped and become a part of culture. By this he means that trending algorithms may
anticipate and frame in real time what is considered culturally important, but culture
itself is aware of this shaping force, enabling us to debate the significance and value of
these trends which ‘crystallize popular activity into something legible, and then feed it
back to us, often at the very moment of further activity’ (2016: 60). He points out that
trending algorithms both measure and announce what is important, and generate publics
as a result, but in representing culture they become themselves cultural objects. The
recursive interaction between algorithms and cultural interpretation being described here
again opens up a space to think about the role of narrative, something which Gillespie
himself invokes:

When CNN discusses ‘what’s trending’ on Twitter it is using Trends as an index of the popular,
and treating that index as culturally relevant. Measures of what’s popular tell stories about the
public, and are made to tell stories by those who generate and attend to them. (2016: 64)

Here we can see that if data mining and predictive analysis operate with what Mark
Andrejevic (2013) calls a ‘post-narratival and post-intentionalist logic’, the correlative
patterns they generate are still subject to the causal logic of narrative at the level of rep-
resentation. Narrative cognition itself compels us to describe in human terms and thus in
political contexts the emergent properties that result from the interaction between code,
environment and affective intensities that circulate in and through Twitter.

#MeToo as emergent storytelling

At this stage, it is important to indicate how emergent storytelling relates to what
computer scientists have called ‘emergent narrative’. Ruth Aylett (1999) uses the term
as a way to negotiate the tension between pre-scripted narratives and user freedom in
Virtual Environments, particularly in relation to video games. Experiments in this
area are geared towards designing programs that will enable users to interact with
characters in a virtual world in order to generate a bottom-up narrative. The online
environments of social media are clearly different from those of video games, and
Twitter is not explicitly designed for a narrative experience. Nonetheless, it does
facilitate the construction of cultural narratives from the participatory interaction of
users with the overall design of the platform, and the affective encounters this interac-
tion produces. Walsh (2011) argues that the very theory of ‘emergent narrative’ dem-
onstrates the incommensurability of emergence and narrative because although user
interactivity in simulated environments produces emergent behaviour, this behaviour
is not inherently narrative. According to Walsh, ‘emergent behavior is narratable;
emergent narrative is legible’ (2011: 80). By this he means narrative is a sense-mak-
ing process enabling us to narrate systemic emergent behaviour at a higher level,
while ‘emergent narrative’ ought to denote a form of systemic representation that can
be interpreted at a higher level. Emergent storytelling, in my formulation, refers to the
dynamic interplay of storytelling acts and political stance-taking at different levels in
a complex system rather than the artefactual production or immersive experience of a
narrative.
12 International Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

A key feature of complex systems is that scientists can run models of the micro-level
interactions of different components to try and predict or control emergent behaviour, but
they cannot describe the overall process with a single language because they require dif-
ferent models for different levels. If we return to the #MeToo movement, we can see that
it mobilizes multiple and competing concepts of narrative facilitated by the different func-
tions of the hashtag. Which is to say, to describe the micro-level tweet of an individual
user in narrative terms requires a language different from the one required to describe the
macro-level movement. The former must be understood as a narrative of personal experi-
ence in the sociolinguistic sense, and may also be understood as a shared story with vary-
ing degrees of narrativity but with clearly a high degree of tellability. There is a point to
each story. The latter, however, must be understood in the looser sense of a cultural narra-
tive that gives coherence to each tweet on a different timescale: not only a timescale
beyond the asynchronous acts of narration produced in an online environment of ambient
affiliation, but one with a larger historical context of feminist activism.
These different concepts of narrative are in fact necessary because the metadiscursive
experiential and interpersonal function of the #MeToo hashtag at the lower level is dif-
ferent from its function as metadata on the higher level. Most importantly, the dynamic
process which produces the #MeToo movement out of the aggregate of individual stories
is not a narrative process because, rather than a linear sequence of cause and effect
which can be traced, it involves the recursive activity of individual users following the
simple rule of attaching a hashtag to their tweet, which in the aggregate creates an emer-
gent movement that has properties not found at the lower level. This process is character-
ized precisely by what Abbott (2008) calls the absence of a ‘narratable thread’.
To return to Alyssa Milano’s initial tweet, we should note that is not a call for narra-
tive responses. In fact, it seeks the opposite of narrative: data. It invites followers in
Milano’s personal network only to indicate whether they have been harassed or assaulted
in order to indicate the ‘magnitude’ of the problem, but of course the invitation is also a
call for collective solidarity, for sharing an experience through iteration of a lyric refrain.
The narrative element is latent in the phrase ‘Me too’, however, for it implies ‘this hap-
pened to me, too’ and therefore could be said to constitute a narrative in the sense of
eventfulness. This latent narrativity was called forth as women elaborated on what had
happened to them, turning the weak narrativity of the phrase into a shorthand for a more
structured story of personal experience. The culture of connectivity also meant that the
collective solidarity encoded in the phrase would lend itself to a hashtag, the key semi-
otic resource for sharing beyond personal networks, and for metadata classification, ful-
filling the macro-level desire to measure the magnitude of the problem, and to personalize
it through narrative.
The macro-level concept of narrative is defined most importantly by the fact that it is
not told by anyone. Cultural narratives are large-scale scripts that emerge from and are
attached to national identities, institutional bodies or specific communities, and speak to
a collective sense-making process. By script, I mean that cultural narratives provide a
template for framing and representing socio-historical activity and for guiding individual
and collective behaviour. Narrative in this broader sense tends to be used in public dis-
course to describe either a partisan perspective on a reported event, or a consensus opin-
ion about the causes behind a cultural phenomenon or sentiment. Vital to emergent
Dawson 13

storytelling at the macro level is the role of news media in narrativizing the viral spread
of the #MeToo hashtag on social media, first as an event to be reported, and then as an
evolving news story of potential cultural change to be commented upon.
Part of this narrativization has involved establishing an origin to the movement that
pre-dates the hashtag itself. In this context, the activist Tarana Burke has been recognized
and credited for anticipating the movement through her use of the same phrase on
MySpace in 2006 as part of a campaign to provide support for victims of sexual violence,
and particularly women of colour. Extending the reach of the #MeToo ‘movement’
beyond the immediate moment of the viral hashtag creates a larger time frame that
invokes competing narratives around its role in the history of feminist activism. In 2018,
Burke delivered a speech at Variety magazine’s annual Power of Women event, in which
she said: ‘I’m so desperate to change the narrative about the #MeToo movement before
it’s too late’ (in Bitran, 2018). Burke’s point was that ‘the narrative’ has been one of
bringing down powerful men by exposing their actions rather than one of effecting cul-
tural change by listening to and believing women. Burke’s intervention in the ‘narrative’
of #MeToo reproduces the dynamic of debates surrounding earlier hashtag movements,
such as #YesAllWomen and #YesAllWhiteWomen which Sarah J. Jackson and Sonia
Banaszczyk (2016: 393) examine to demonstrate how Twitter facilitates ‘multiple, over-
lapping counterpublics that sometimes contest one another, while working to critique
and influence dominant public narratives’.
In seeking to reframe the cultural script of #MeToo to foreground her original empha-
sis on empathy and empowerment, Burke appears to link #MeToo more closely to what
Tanya Seriser (2018) calls the genre of the ‘speaking out narrative’, or the story of per-
sonal experience developed by second wave feminists as a means of combating an
entrenched social disavowal of the prevalance of sexual violence. In fact, Seriser
approaches the #MeToo movement as an online version of this genre. The phrase ‘me
too’, she argues, denotes a collective story which lends authority to the collection of indi-
vidual stories attached to the viral hashtag. ‘The magnitude of this repetition,’ she sug-
gests, ‘bolsters the authority of individual stories and makes them simultaneously tell a
political and social truth’ (2018: 100). For Seriser, the challenge that #MeToo stories share
with speaking out narratives is to counter widespread disbelief by shifting the measure of
authenticity from the veracity of the story to the sincerity of the teller. This broad appeal
to the experiential truth of a narrative rather than its verifiable referential status, I would
argue, is heightened by the sheer scale of the #MeToo macro-narrative, for doubting or
disproving individual stories cannot undermine the overall truth of the shared experience.
In other words, the hashtag possesses different narrative properties at the higher level of
indexing than the lower level of tweeting. The evolving global phenomenon encapsulated
by the phrase #MeToo can thus be seen as part of an ongoing surge of affective intensities
in feminist activism (see Chamberlain, 2016), enabled and defined by the technological
affordance of the hashtag and given narrative meaning on a larger scale.

Conclusion
My aim in this article has been to explain how the transition from a turn of phrase to a
hashtag to a social movement has been framed by the causal logic of narrative cognition
14 International Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

even though the recursive process being described resists such framing. And here is
where we arrive at my very specific definition of emergent storytelling: a non-narrative
viral process which operationalizes competing concepts of narrative at different levels in
a complex system, but which nonetheless has value only in narrative terms. While I have
focused on #MeToo as an exemplar of emergent storytelling by virtue of the latent narra-
tivity encoded in the phrase itself, the theoretical framework I have elaborated can inform
the study of other types of viral activity which circulate through networked publics in the
form of hashtag activism. First, whether it’s #Ferguson, #Egypt, or #JeSuisCharlie, the
hashtag typically refers to an event while also responding to that event. Second, the viral
spreading or diffusion of this hashtag is a temporal activity, a recursive process that can
be narrativized as a movement at the level of the indexed hashtag and reported as an
event itself. Third, this process can mobilize cultural narratives or scripts to frame the
movement and its political significance. There is a feedback loop between the shared
stories emerging over time from the aggregate of individual tweets, and the macro-level
narratives which seek to make sense of this viral activity, influencing users’ subsequent
deployment of the hashtag as a cultural script itself.
Existing scholarship on social movements represented by virally circulated hashtags,
particularly scholarship concerned with affective publics and counterpublics, tends to
use the term ‘narrative’ in the broad sense of an authorless or collective cultural script
that can be rhetorically deployed by individual users or groups to contest existing domi-
nant narratives (see Milan, 2015). My focus has been less on individual tellers’ use of
hashtags to collaboratively construct a collective narrative, than on the process by which
the interaction of multiple agents with the algorithmic structures of Twitter produces
emergent networked crowd behaviour that is subsequently narrativized by our sense-
making cognitive architecture in the form of cultural narratives that have no tellers.
Specifying the ways that narrative operates at different levels in the complex system of
Twitter, I hope to have demonstrated, is vital to understanding how social movements
emerge from the simple activity of attaching a hashtag to a tweet.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

References
Abbott P (2008) Narrative and emergent behaviour. Poetics Today 29(2): 227–244.
Andrejevic M (2013) Infoglut: How Too Much Information is Changing the Way We Think and
Know. New York: Routledge.
Aylett R (1999) Narrative in virtual environments: Towards emergent narrative. In: Narrative
Intelligence: Papers from the 1999 AAAI Fall Symposium, Technical report FS-99-01. Menlo
Park, CA: AAAI Press, pp. 83–86.
Benkler Y (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and
Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Birdsey L, Szabo C and Teo YM (2015) Twitter knows: Understanding the emergence of topics
in social networks. In: 2015 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), Huntington Beach, CA,
pp. 4009–4020.
Dawson 15

Bitran T (2018) Tarana Burke on MeToo: ‘It’s a mistake to think of this as a moment.’ Variety, 13
April. Available at: https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/viola-davis-tarana-burke-power-of-
women-1202751993/ (accessed 19 April 2020).
Bruner J (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Castellani B and Hafferty F (2009) Sociology and Complexity Science: A New Field of Inquiry.
Berlin: Springer.
Chamberlain P (2016) Affective temporality: Towards a fourth wave. Gender and Education
28(3): 458–464.
Fludernik M (1996) Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
Friedland A, Hove T and Rojas H (2006). The networked public sphere. Javnost – The Public
13(4): 5–26.
Gatti M, Cavalin P, Barbosa Neto SB, Pinhanez C, dos Santos C, Gribel D and Appel AP (2014)
Large-scale multi-agent-based modeling and simulation of microblogging-based online
social network. In: Alam SJ and Van Dyke Paruna H (eds) Multi-agent-based Simulation
XIV. Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 17–36.
Giaxoglou K (2018) #JeSuisCharlie? Hashtags as narrative resources in contexts of ecstatic shar-
ing. Discourse, Context & Media 22: 13–20.
Gillespie T (2016) #trendingistrending: When algorithms become culture. In: Seyfert R and Roberge
J (eds) Algorithmic Cultures: Essays on Meaning, Performance and New Technologies.
London: Routledge, pp. 52–75.
Guilbeault D, Becker J and Centola D (2018) Complex contagions: A decade in review. In:
Lehmann S and Ahn Y-Y (eds) Spreading Dynamics in Social Systems. Cham: Springer
Nature, pp. 3–25.
Jackson SJ and Banaszczyk S (2016) Digital standpoints: Debating gendered violence and racial
exclusions in the feminist counterpublic. Journal of Communication Inquiry 40(4): 391–407.
Jackson SJ and Welles BF (2016) #Ferguson is everywhere: Initiators in emerging counterpublic
networks. Information, Communication & Society 19(3): 397–418.
Lyotard J (1984 [1979]) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
MacIntyre A (1981) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame
University Press.
Massumi B (1995) The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique 31: 83–109.
Mendes K, Keller J and Ringrose J (2019) Digitized narratives of sexual violence: Making sexual
violence felt and known through digital disclosures. New Media & Society 21(6): 1290–1310.
Mikulecky D (2001) The emergence of complexity: Science coming of age or science growing
old? Computers and Chemistry 25: 341–348.
Milan S (2015) When algorithms shape collective action: Social media and the dynamics of cloud
protesting. Social Media + Society 1(2): 1–10.
Noble SU (2018) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York:
New York University Press.
Page R (2018) Narratives Online: Shared Stories in Social Media. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Papacharissi Z (2015a) Affective publics and structures of storytelling: Sentiment, events and
mediality. Information, Communication & Society. doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2015.1109697
Papacharissi Z (2015b) Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Payne R (2018) ‘Je suis Charlie’: Viral circulation and the ambivalence of affective citizenship.
International Journal of Cultural Studies 21(3): 277–292.
Phelan S (2001) What is complexity science, really? Emergence 3(1): 120–136.
16 International Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)

Polkinghorne D (1988) Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. New York: State University
of New York Press.
Ricouer P (1988) Time and Narrative, vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Romero D, Meeder B and Kleinberg J (2011) Differences in the mechanics of information dif-
fusion across topics: Idioms, political hashtags, and complex contagion on Twitter. In:
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on World Wide Web, 28 March–1 April,
Hyderabad, India, pp. 695–704.
Sadler N (2018) Narrative and interpretation on Twitter: Reading tweets by telling stories. New
Media & Society 20(9): 3266–3282.
Salam M (2018) One year after #MeToo: Examining a collective awakening. The New York
Times, 5 October. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/us/me-too-movement-
women.html
Sampson T (2012) Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Schmid W (2003) Narrativity and eventfulness. In: Kindt T and Muller H-H (eds) What Is
Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, pp. 17–33.
Seriser T (2018) Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Sharma S (2013) Black Twitter? Racial hashtags, networks and contagion. new formations 78:
46–64.
Shiller R (2019) Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Törnberg P (2018) Echo chambers and viral misinformation: Modelling fake news as complex
contagion. PlosONE 13(9): 1–21.
Urry J (2001) The complexity turn. Theory, Culture & Society 22(5): 1–14.
Walsh R (2011) Emergent narrative in interactive media. Narrative 19(1): 72–85.
Walsh R (2016) Narrative theory at the limit. In: Middeke M and Reinfandt C (eds) Theory Matters:
The Place of Theory in Literary and Cultural Studies Today. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Weng L, Menczer F and Ahn Y (2013) Virality prediction and community structure in social net-
works. Scientific Reports 3(2522): 1–6.
White H (1980) The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. Critical Inquiry 7(1):
5–27.
Yang G (2016) Narrative agency in hashtag activism: The case of #BlackLivesMatter. Media and
Communication 4(4): 13–17.
Zappavigna M (2015) Searchable talk: The linguistic function of hashtags. Social Semiotics 25:
274–291.
Zappavigna M (2018) Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media Metadiscourse. London:
Bloomsbury.
Zuboff S (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New
Frontier of Power. New York: Hachette.

Author biography
Paul Dawson is the author of two monographs: The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship
and Authority in Twenty-first Century Fiction (OSU Press, 2013) and Creative Writing and the
New Humanities (Routledge, 2005). He is currently an Associate Professor in the School of the
Arts and Media at UNSW.