Pre-Produced Self-Narratives in Social Media – An Arendtian Perspective

Abstract Building upon Hannah Arendt’s notions of acting and producing, and their implications for the public sphere, we introduce the concept of “pre-produced self-narratives”, arguing that the practice of self-narration in the digital realm becomes like producing rather than acting. We analyze the structural features of “pre-produced self-narratives” such as materialization, the necessity of staging, altered temporality, the primacy of the visual, reward structures, and the pressure to narrativize experience. Finally, we explore the potential harms of this transformation, arguing that the dominance of pre-produced self-narratives not only constrains individual identity formation but also reconfigures the public sphere itself, shifting it from a space of plurality and interaction to one of market-driven self-presentation.