"'Do it for the plot': Metanarrative Autofiction and Social Identity Online

In the last ten years, social media platforms such as X, TikTok or Instagram have provided a digital dimension to the social function of the agora. Like in the past, we cultivate our social identity (Jenkins 1996) in shared spaces, albeit in a quicker and augmented form: thanks to the logics of exponential spread found in memes, a concept is generated by a single user on a specific platform, which is then replicated by other users in different variations. A similar phenomenon happens to language, often merging characteristics of off-line and online “vernacular English [...] jargon, slang”, which ends up being exponentially shared, even by non-native English speakers (Kostadinovska-Stojchevska and Shalevska 159). The replicated use of language rests often on a lexico-syntactical basis, with words and sentences such as “yapping” or “chat is this real” routinely appearing and disappearing after periods of time as a shared term is then substituted by a newer form and made obsolete. However, another type of language has surfaced in recent years, which borrows its form and meaning from the lexis around the practice of creative fiction writing. Users on social media platforms have been using terms such as “main character energy”, “entering my villain era” or “for character development reasons” as a way to frame and understand their own lived experience through the narrativization of actions and events. While using narrative structures to make sense of lived experiences is a common practice particularly explored in postmemory studies, where the issue of narration is central to the problematics of the representation of truth (Gudmundsdottir 2016), language describing the construction of one’s narrative belongs to what Hanna Meretoja defines “metanarrative autofiction” (Meretoja 2022). Social media platforms, I argue, act as the digital square where social identity is represented from a post- modernist stance, envisioning the self as characters of products destined for (our own) consumption.