Social Media Narratives and Experiential Knowledge: A Few Hypotheses

This article studies the nexus between social media narratives and the production of knowledge about a factual situation, using the example of an Instagram "story." First, I will observe how the specific narrative functions rely on a set of properties and can induce different types of knowledge. Then, I will underline a "cognitive bias" well known by media theories: individual narratives of personal experience can generate the feeling of a systemic knowledge about a sociopolitical situation. Finally, I will propose five hypotheses that help to problematize this cognitive bias as a "narrative effect." These hypotheses are based on considerations related to the plurality of narrative scales in world-modeling, the nature of the protagonist, the management of trust and identification by narrative intentionality, affective responses to the plot, and finally the cognitive satisfaction induced by live storytelling.