1.1 Narrating Numbers
In November 2019, Instagram announced an experiment with a segment of profiles where the Like score was to be visible only to the profile owner/poster and not to followers. This initiative was explained by Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, as an attempt to ‘depressurize’ the platform, tone down popularity evaluation among users and thereby help to support mental health. Removing barriers for sharing ‘the ordinary’, and ultimately for extracting more knowledge about users, could however be seen as a less altruistic motivation. Although the long-term consequences and implications of this experiment are difficult to foresee at this point, it nevertheless seems to indicate that social media platforms are beginning to acknowledge the widely circulating critique of their heavy reliance on metricizing social relations and interactions. The crux of the critique is that such metricization renders communication too restrained, too polished and too overtly preoccupied with comparison and social performance. The visible quantification of shared content and storytelling has created a sociality of comparative assessment, which is not always healthy for humans—and maybe also not for business, at least if we read Mosseri’s statement as an effort to ensure that more users will share their more or less mundane stories on Instagram.
In a world where everything and everybody is ranked, super-popular subjects and highly rated individuals, such as Influencers, can ironically also end up having the kind of power that takes power away from a social media platform that enabled them with its metrics to become popular in the first place. Consider Influencer Kylie Jenner’s (cf. 25 million followers on Twitter) tweet back in February 2018 about Snapchat: ‘sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me… ugh this is so sad’ (Jenner 2018). Seen from one perspective, this tweet was but one among many in the social media posts of an internet celebrity. From another perspective, however, this particular narrative came with extraordinary consequences. Subsequently to the tweet, the stock of Snapchat began to fall, and it continued to drop by over 6% through to the following day. That added up to a roughly $1.5 billion loss in market value, according to Reuters.1
Numbers and measurements have also become crucial aspects of the actual stories shared on social media and their mobilization of users and action. In the summer of 2019, 13-year-old Marcus from Denmark was diagnosed with a rare brain tumour. The tumour could not be treated in his home country. It could be treated in the United States, but in order to initiate this treatment, 4 million Danish kroner (approximately €530,000) was needed, of which Marcus and his family had none. His friends decided to raise the money by collecting bottles, each paying 1 krone. The initiative reached broadcast media and spread from there to social media as a story of childhood friendship that mobilized people to help. Over a short period of time, 30,000 people became members of a Facebook group, sharing the collective goal of amassing the funds needed. They succeeded in crowdfunding the money in less than a month, and the story’s unfolding and development became highly entangled with numbers and counting: the story ended when the total figure sought for the treatment was achieved.
Numbers can also generate content in more playful ways. Anyone in contact with the YouTube platform will probably have encountered what is known as ‘challenges’, where the poster engages in various types of often bodily experiments or social games such as eating weird combinations of food without vomiting, pranking friends and relatives or performing tricks that are unlikely to succeed. One popular format is what is known as the 100 layers or 100 coats challenge (YouTuber ‘Simply Nailogical’’s ‘100 coats of nail polish’ has 25 million views). To complete it, one must cover oneself in 100 layers of, say, foundation or pieces of clothing. Each process becomes a shareable story, and the format of the challenge decides its distribution of excitement: each layer furthers the plot by bringing the ending one step closer as the story is quite literally a story about a process counting. This challenge has no particular purpose besides staging experiments that make users laugh—by, for example, being difficult, going wrong, restraining the body—and creating or maintaining relationships between YouTubers and their subscribers.
These four examples offer glimpses of emerging relationships and feedback loops between stories, numbers and value production on social media platforms, but also of shifting levels of users’ agentive influence on platformed communication. The 100 layers challenge combines storytelling and counting in a format that bodes well with the engagement design of the YouTube platform and offers avenues for personal expression and positive connections while generating trackable value in the form of engagement on the platform and, ultimately, options for advertising. The crowdfunding activity around Marcus, the Danish boy, is made possible by the story of the numbers generated by the activity. Not only are Jenner’s storytelling practices nested in and conforming to a platform whose interface lets her value materialize in the form of a number (25 million followers); the stories she tells may, in turn, affect the value of other platforms. And Instagram’s experiment with the visibility of the Like score shows that social media measurements shape social relations and human communication in fundamental and sometimes disturbing ways and that platforms continuously transform and innovate in order to motivate as much commodifiable user activity as possible.
All the above cases are premised on how storytelling on social media platforms is intertwined with a ubiquity of numbers, metrics and rankings. In this book, we set out to explore stories as quantified activities on social media, aiming to show how the multiple levels of quantification that communication on digital platforms is subjected to have profound consequences for what stories can be told, distributed, become available and how, how stories are engaged with and how tellers present themselves and their lives through stories. Our analyses will address the following questions:
- How and to what extent is quantification oriented to and constitutive of a story’s plot and ways of telling? How do metrics create preferential conditions (or directives) for the telling of specific stories about specific types of experience, both about mundane, everyday life and about complications?
- What stories, lives and types of self become more or less (in)visible and available on platforms as a result of what processes and practices of quantification? What is the role of power-users in this?
- How do metrics facilitate and promote the distribution and mobilization of specific stories as vehicles for community (re)formation and belonging? What is the role of users’ creative (re)workings of stories in this?
- How do metrics shape the ways in which stories are designed and launched by platforms and equally shared and engaged with by audiences?
Through addressing the above questions, we aim to bring to the fore the kinds of story tellability and values for the tellers that are foregrounded and sought after or equally silenced as a result of the quantification of stories. Our three cases represent different storytelling practices on different social media platforms: personal storytelling about illness on Instagram (Chap. 2), the use of stories in collective mobilization rhetoric on reddit (Chap. 3) and the design of stories as quantified activities with metrics becoming an integral part of their plot, telling and tellers’ self-presentation on Snapchat and Instagram (Chap. 4).
The purpose of this introductory chapter is twofold. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of our questions and interests, we find it necessary to go to some length in situating our approach in relation to two largely distinct bodies of work: ‘social media metricization and quantification’ (Sect. 1.2) and ‘stories on social media’ (Sect. 1.3). Section 1.2 looks into recent work in media studies and sociology on metricization, quantification and social media platforms. Section 1.3 looks at recent work in narrative studies on interdependencies between engagement with s...