Stories that become us: hyperreality and storytelling in 21st century social media phenomena

This thesis analyzes Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the orders of simulacra and puts forth a fourth order made possible by the surge of social media. This possibility of the fourth order is actualized through the power of storytelling and the history of storytelling is also explored to unveil the source of this power. The ideas of the three literary critics from different eras who have put forward varying ideas about what makes a story powerful, Aristotle, Roland Barthes, and Joseph Campbell, are then analyzed and used as frameworks for the social media case studies. Social media is reimagined as the ultimate tool of hyperreal storytelling, completely eradicating the line between real and unreal. This work follows a sincere fascination with the question of what constitutes real in an age where humans construct novel realities by assuming authorship of their own narratives through social media. Identifying several cases where people connected and responded to make-believe stories in twenty-first century more than what would be called hard facts produced by mass media in the twentieth century, the thesis uses social media case studies such as Lil Miquela and Dogecoin to underline the apathy towards the disappearance of the real. The absence of the real has effectively been replaced with stories, and only the most powerful stories have become the new realities, thus making the role of storytelling more crucial than it has ever been