Das narrative Subjekt. Erzählen im Zeitalter des Internets

Story telling is as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing (Wittgenstein 1960). This also applies to the young network actors and bloggers from different regions of the world whose stories lie at the heart of this book. For them, digital networks are their stages, their tools, the very subject matter of their tales. Six types of narrative were identified in an empirical study: networking, self-staging, dealing and selling, managing boundaries, transformation and conquering new frontiers. These narratives reflect the story tellers` attempts to explain the world and find their place in it so that they can become capable of acting. They can be read as narrative responses to current socio-cultural and autobiographical challenges. Just to mention a couple of examples: in the narratives on self-staging, it`s primarily a question of making oneself visible and being seen in the digital arenas. The narrators tell of their worries that they will be overlooked in an unoverseeable world. In contrast, the tales of networking focus on relationships with others. They document the individual`s struggle with a "you" that is in danger of going missing in a society where there`s great pressure to be mobile. Narratives on managing boundaries tell of attempts to stake out borders, such as between the public and the private, boundaries which are being eroded as society becomes increasingly digitalized. The digital media accommodate these wishes like no other medium with their structural features of interactivity, network structure and globality. They play a self-evident and indispensable role in these narratives. Fascination for them lies in the fact that they are not only open to professional story tellers but also to everyday people like you and me, at any time and in any place. They open up new narrative spaces for multimedial, transmedial and collaborative stories. They initiate innovative forms of narrative in which texts, images and sounds are intertwined. But they also conceal risks, for example, when narratives break free of their creators and turn against them because they have been changed by somebody else. You shouldn`t imagine that the stories which are told here by the internet generation flow in a linear fashion with a clear beginning and a clear end. Rather, they consist of pieces of a narrative jigsaw puzzle which present episodes, scenes and fragments which only make sense as a narrative once they have been analysed from an academic perspective. Generally, there is no ending either; these are narratives with pervious perimeters, a perfect reflection of the fragmentation of modern-day life. The book offers insights into new narratives and new forms of story telling which arose because the "what" and the "why" of narration is not independent of when and where we live. It is the inconsistencies and uncertainties, the tensions and contradictions which urge us to tell a tale. For those who wish to find out more about how cultural and autobiographical upheavals are reflected in the thoughts and feelings of the young internet-oriented generation and how narratives arise in interaction with digital tools, this book is for you.