The Feed Has Become the Story
Something strange has happened to the novel over the past decade. Open up almost any work of contemporary fiction aimed at readers under forty and you will find a peculiar new grammar woven through the pages. There are screenshots. There are timestamps. Characters speak in the clipped cadence of text messages and reveal themselves through carefully curated Instagram captions. The narrative voice, that old companion of the novel form, now shares space with notification sounds and the blue glow of screens.
This is not merely a cosmetic change. When writers began incorporating social media into their fiction, they did not simply update the setting of their stories. They fundamentally altered the architecture of how stories get told. The social media platform has become a narrative device as potent and flexible as the letter once was in the eighteenth century epistolary novel. And in some ways, it has become even more powerful. Because unlike letters, social media posts carry with them an entire ecosystem of meaning. A single Instagram post contains not just an image and a caption but also the number of likes, the comments beneath, the implied audience, and the vast web of cultural assumptions about what it means to share something publicly in the first place.
Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About This arrived in 2021 and felt like a dispatch from a new country. The book’s first half consists almost entirely of fragments that mirror the experience of scrolling through a feed. Short paragraphs. Disconnected observations. Memes referenced but never explained. The protagonist, known only as she, spends her days swimming through the collective unconscious of the internet. Lockwood captures something true about how digital natives think. Our minds have become palimpsests of trending topics and viral moments. The novel asks whether a coherent self can exist when consciousness has been colonized by the scroll.
But Lockwood is hardly alone. The past ten years have seen an explosion of novels that treat social media not as window dressing but as fundamental to their storytelling strategy. From Sally Rooney’s email heavy Beautiful World Where Are You to Janice Hallett’s The Appeal, which unfolds entirely through messages and social media posts, writers are finding that digital communication offers something the traditional close third person narration cannot. It offers gaps. It offers performance. It offers the delicious space between what characters say publicly and what they actually mean.
Why the Old Forms Were Ready for Reinvention
To understand why social media works so well as a narrative device, we need to look backward. The epistolary novel, that form composed entirely of letters, dominated English fiction in the eighteenth century. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa. The scandalous Liaisons Dangereuses. These novels understood something crucial about storytelling. Human beings reveal themselves differently when they think they are writing to a specific audience. A letter is always a performance, even when the writer believes themselves to be sincere.
This insight translated beautifully into the novel form because it allowed for a natural kind of dramatic irony. Readers could see what characters could not see about themselves. We could watch someone construct a version of their experience and recognize the gaps between that construction and the reality the narrative revealed through other letters. The epistolary form was built for exploring self deception, manipulation, and the way intimacy gets performed rather than simply felt.
Then the epistolary novel fell out of fashion. The nineteenth century brought us the omniscient narrator and the deep third person perspective. Modernism gave us stream of consciousness. The letter as a primary narrative vehicle became a curiosity, something occasionally revived for specific effects but no longer central to how fiction worked.
And then came the internet.
Social media has resurrected the epistolary tradition but amplified it beyond anything Richardson could have imagined. A letter goes to one person. Maybe a few. But a tweet goes to hundreds or thousands or millions. Every post exists in a state of potential virality. Every caption is written with multiple audiences in mind. The performative element that made letters so interesting for fiction writers is exponentially heightened when the platform is public.
Consider what a novelist can do with an Instagram post. The image itself tells one story. The caption tells another. The comments section reveals how others perceive the character. The number of likes quantifies social approval in a way that would have seemed dystopian thirty years ago. And beneath all of this runs the question of what the character chose not to post, what selfies were discarded, what moments were deemed insufficiently aesthetic for public consumption. A single social media post contains multitudes. It is dense with meaning in a way that serves fiction beautifully.
The Unreliable Narrator Finds a New Home
Every creative writing student learns about the unreliable narrator. It is one of the oldest tricks in the fiction writer’s toolkit. But social media has given unreliability a new texture. Because we are not just dealing with characters who lie or misremember or have limited perspectives. We are dealing with characters who perform.
In real life, everyone who uses social media engages in some form of identity construction. We choose what to share. We edit our captions. We select the most flattering angle. This is not necessarily dishonest. It is simply how the platforms work. But it creates an interesting problem for novelists. How do you depict a character authentically when that character is always engaged in self presentation? How do you write interiority when consciousness itself has become performative?
Some writers have embraced this tension directly. Megan Angelo’s Followers tells the story of a woman whose entire life has been engineered for reality television fame from birth. The novel shifts between a near future surveillance dystopia and the social media obsessed present of the 2010s. Angelo uses the frame of content creation to explore how aspiration warps identity. Her characters do not simply use social media. They have been formed by it. Their sense of self cannot be separated from their online personas because there is no clear boundary between the two.
This blurring feels authentic to how many people actually experience social media. The division between online and offline selves has become increasingly artificial. For someone who grew up posting, whose adolescence was documented on multiple platforms, whose friendships were maintained through DMs as much as face to face conversation, there is no authentic self hiding behind the profile. The profile is part of the self. Fiction that grasps this point can achieve something genuinely new.
The unreliable narrator in social media fiction is not lying exactly. They are performing. And the reader’s job is to read the performance, to notice what is being left out, to intuit the anxiety or desperation or loneliness that sits behind the carefully crafted post. This requires a different kind of reading than traditional fiction demands. We have to be literate in the codes of online communication. We have to understand what it means to leave someone on read, to soft launch a relationship, to post a thirst trap after a breakup. The social media novel assumes readers who have this fluency. It rewards that fluency with layers of meaning that would be invisible to someone unfamiliar with the platforms.
Fragmentation as Aesthetic and Argument
One of the most striking features of social media fiction is its fragmented structure. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This. Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts. Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation. These novels share an episodic, almost aphoristic structure. Short sections. White space. The sense that we are being given pieces of something rather than a continuous narrative.
This structure mirrors the experience of using social media itself. The feed is not a story. It is a collage. We encounter information in fragments, disconnected from context, juxtaposed against other fragments in ways that can be jarring or illuminating or simply random. Our attention moves constantly. We scroll past tragedy and comedy and advertisement in seconds. The fragmented novel replicates this experience on the page.
But fragmentation is not just mimicry. It also makes an argument. By structuring a novel like a feed, writers suggest something about contemporary consciousness. They imply that the traditional bildungsroman, with its arcs of growth and change, may no longer map onto how people actually experience time. The social media generation does not live in narratives. They live in moments. And fiction that wants to capture this experience must find forms adequate to that temporality.
Oyler’s Fake Accounts is particularly interesting in this regard. The novel’s narrator spends the first section constructing a coherent story about her boyfriend, his secret Twitter account where he posts conspiracy theories, their relationship, her plans. Then she discovers he has been lying about fundamental aspects of his identity. The novel’s second half abandons narrative coherence. It becomes a series of dating profiles, awkward encounters, meditations on authenticity and performance. The fragmentation is not just structural. It is thematic. Once the narrator realizes that she has been performing a version of herself all along, the novel can no longer pretend to offer a unified self.
There is something honest about this approach. Traditional novels often struggle to depict characters who spend significant time on their phones. The realist novel wants to describe rooms, faces, gestures. But if a character spends four hours a day looking at a small screen, where is the novel supposed to go? The fragmented social media novel solves this problem by matching form to content. It does not describe scrolling. It replicates it.
The New Intimacy of the DM
While public posts offer performance, the direct message offers something else. The DM is both private and written. It creates a space for a different kind of intimacy, one that unfolds in text rather than speech. Contemporary novelists have recognized that this textual intimacy has its own grammar and its own emotional register.
In Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments, an IT guy falls in love with a woman by reading her work emails. The novel predates Instagram and TikTok, but it anticipates something important about digital intimacy. When we read someone’s written words over time, we construct a version of them in our minds. This construction is both real and imaginary. We know them and we invent them simultaneously. The novel that uses DMs or emails as a primary mode of character revelation captures this strange state.
Sally Rooney has been particularly influential here. Her novels are full of email exchanges. In Beautiful World Where Are You, much of the emotional work happens in the long emails between two friends. These emails allow for the kind of intellectual intensity that would feel stilted in dialogue. Characters can quote philosophers, analyze their own emotional states, make arguments about politics and love. The email gives them space for reflection that conversation does not always allow.
But the DM is different from the email. It is more casual, more immediate, more responsive. A DM conversation can feel like dialogue, but it retains the quality of writing. Messages can be screenshot and shared. They create a record. This record becomes important in fiction because it allows writers to show readers exactly what was said. There is no need for the character to remember or paraphrase. The message is right there, with its typos and its timestamps and its read receipts.
Read receipts are a small detail with large implications. To see that someone has read your message and not responded creates a particular kind of anxiety that previous generations did not experience. Fiction can now deploy this anxiety as a narrative tool. A character sends a vulnerable message. The other person reads it. Minutes pass. Then hours. The lack of response becomes its own form of communication. This is new territory for the novel, and writers are just beginning to explore it.
The Comment Section as Chorus
Greek tragedy had the chorus. A group that commented on the action, provided context, expressed the emotions the protagonist could not express. Social media fiction has discovered something similar in the comment section.
When a character makes a public post in a novel, the comments offer a chorus of reactions. Supportive friends. Jealous acquaintances. Trolls. The ex who should definitely not be commenting but does anyway. These voices create texture. They show how the character exists in a social web, how their self presentation is received and interpreted by others.
Janice Hallett’s The Appeal uses this technique to brilliant effect. The novel unfolds entirely through emails, text messages, and social media posts related to a community theater production. We never get direct narration. Instead we piece together the story from the fragments of communication between characters. The comment section equivalent here is the group text, the forwarded email, the message that was meant to be private but gets shared. We see how information circulates, how rumors start, how people perform differently depending on their audience.
This technique reveals something important about social media that novelists have learned to exploit. Online communication is never fully private. There is always the possibility that a message will be screenshot, that a post will be seen by someone it was not intended for, that the boundaries between audiences will collapse. This possibility creates tension. Every DM contains the potential for exposure. Every private group chat could be leaked. Fiction that takes social media seriously must grapple with this ambient publicity, this sense that privacy is always contingent.
The chorus also allows for dramatic irony. If we see the comments on a character’s post, we may notice something the character themselves does not see. A friend who always likes their photos but never comments positively. A pattern of passive aggressive emoji usage. The character may be oblivious, but the reader, trained to read these signals, picks up on the subtext.
Crisis and the Collapse of Context
Social media collapses context. A post made for close friends might be seen by coworkers. A joke intended for one community can go viral in another where its irony is illegible. This collapse is one of the defining features of life online, and fiction has begun to explore its consequences.
The novel of cancellation has become its own subgenre. These stories typically involve a character who makes some public statement, often on social media, that is taken out of context and goes viral. The character’s life unravels. The novel becomes an examination of mob dynamics, of the gap between intention and reception, of the impossibility of controlling one’s own narrative in a connected world.
Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa does not focus on social media, but its framing responds to the discourse. The novel’s protagonist must reckon with how her experience gets interpreted by others in the context of the MeToo movement. The gap between her private understanding and the public narrative becomes a source of anguish. Social media fiction often explores this gap. What happens when the story you tell yourself about your own life does not match the story others are telling?
This collision between private and public narrative feels distinctly contemporary. Previous generations worried about gossip, about reputation, about what the neighbors might think. But social media has scaled these anxieties to a global level while simultaneously speeding them up. A reputation can be destroyed in hours. Context collapse can happen to anyone at any time. Fiction that wants to capture contemporary anxiety cannot ignore this vulnerability.
Screen Fatigue and the Limits of the Form
Not all novelists celebrate social media’s narrative possibilities. Some use the platform to critique it. The social media novel can be a vehicle for satire, for horror, for elegy.
In several recent novels, the protagonist’s relationship with their phone becomes a kind of addiction narrative. The scroll is depicted as compulsive, numbing, dissociative. Characters feel themselves becoming flattened by their online consumption. They recognize what social media is doing to their attention and their relationships but cannot stop.
Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This shifts abruptly in its second half. A family crisis forces the narrator off her phone and into the bodily reality of caring for a dying child. The juxtaposition is devastating. All that scrolling, all those memes and discourse cycles, they mean nothing in the face of actual mortality. The novel does not condemn social media exactly, but it insists on what it cannot reach. There are human experiences that remain stubbornly offline.
This limits the social media novel in interesting ways. The platform is wonderful for depicting performance, gossip, the circulation of information, the construction of identity. It is less equipped to handle grief, embodiment, the parts of life that resist representation. The best social media novels seem to understand this. They use the platform for what it can do while remaining aware of what it cannot touch.
Some writers deliberately contrast the glowing screen with the unmediated world. A character puts down their phone and suddenly becomes aware of their body, of physical space, of another person’s presence. These moments work because the novel has spent so much time in the disembodied space of the feed. The contrast makes both realities more vivid.
What Comes Next
The social media landscape keeps changing. The platforms that felt central five years ago have given way to new ones. TikTok has reshaped video culture. Twitter has become something stranger and less stable. Instagram has pivoted toward short form video. Each platform has its own grammar, its own mode of self presentation, its own anxieties.
Novelists will need to keep adapting. The books that feel cutting edge now may feel dated in a decade, their platform references as quaint as the references to MySpace in early aughts fiction. This is the risk of writing about technology. The contemporary becomes historical very quickly.
But the deeper insights of social media fiction may endure even as the specific platforms change. The understanding that identity is performed. The recognition that communication technologies shape consciousness. The formal innovations around fragmentation and multiple voices. These are not tied to any single app. They reflect something more fundamental about life in a connected world.
The novel has always been flexible. It has absorbed letters, newspapers, advertisements, television. It will absorb whatever comes next. And as long as writers are willing to experiment, the social media novel will continue to evolve. It will find new devices, new structures, new ways of capturing how it feels to be alive and online in whatever decade we find ourselves in.
What remains constant is the old work of fiction. To help us see ourselves more clearly. To reveal the gap between who we pretend to be and who we actually are. Social media, with its relentless pressure to perform, offers rich territory for this investigation. The platforms want us to present our best selves, our most likable selves, our most follow worthy selves. The novel can look behind that presentation. It can ask what all this performing costs us. And in asking, it can offer something the feed never will. The uncomfortable, necessary gift of recognition.
