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Social Media Narrativity

How does social media affect practical agency, the capability to shape your character and actualize a conception of the good? I will answer this question by considering social media as a narrative technology with which users build online autobiographies. My strategy is to examine two central affordances of this technology – the ability to share photographs and the ability to collect audience feedback – and explore how these incentivize users to adopt a particular narrative self-conception, which I call social media narrativity. In this self-conception, users see themselves from an external, impersonal, public perspective, leading them to overlook their particularity and cede self-interpretive authority. This erodes the ability to make commitments. I conclude that social media narrativity undermines practical agency.

► This event is in-person. Join in person at the Centre for Ethics (Larkin Building room 200).

Tim McKee

Philosophy
University of Toronto

Wed, Jan 15, 2025
12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin