Narrow Results

We investigate how citizens engage in storytelling on social media. We look at how citizens’ stories about a city’s industrial past are brought forward in a Facebook group. Institutional storytelling neglects parts of the city’s industrial area. We track how users establish a co-created counternarrative by means of sharing fragmented memories (posts) and how this narrative rests in parallel to the institutionalized narrative. Employing a case study approach, we applied a variety of qualitative methods, such as qualitative interviews and participant observation, as a means to investigate social media as a digital space for keeping memories alive. Consequently, we conducted a thematic narrative analysis of the data. Citizens use social media to tell their stories and share memories, and they value the opportunity to do so as provided by the Internet: First, users reminisce experiences connected to blue-collar work and the industrial past. Second, users acknowledge the benefits of post-industrial changes (e.g., less pollution) without devaluating the nostalgia. Third, users wish for the industrial past being included in institutional storytelling. Finally, the Facebook group is a space to vent about perceived conflicts of identity, here the elite, as included in the institutionalized narrative, and the working class, as glossed over. Our study provided theoretical insights on the notion of counternarratives, which get collected coherently when shared in a virtual space. These web-mediated narratives run parallel to institutionalized master narratives. In practice, governing bodies might benefit from these insights into class consciousness and storytelling and include citizens’ narratives in strategic communication.