1 Post-print version Mäkelä, Maria & Samuli Björninen 2022. “My Story, Your Narrative: Scholarly Terms and Popular Usage.” In Paul Dawson & Maria Mäkelä (eds.), Routlege Companion to Narrative Theory. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 11–23. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003100157-3/story-narrativemaria-m%C3%A4kel%C3%A4-samuli-bj%C3%B6rninen Maria Mäkelä & Samuli Björninen, Tampere University My story, your narrative: scholarly terms and popular usage Amidst the contemporary storytelling boom, one might at first be led to think that anything can be called either narrative or story, and for whatever rhetorical purpose. Narrative scholars have not been too eager to study the connotations and denotations of contemporary non-academic storyspeak, but this should be considered an important task which could, at best, result in a fertile dissemination of narrative-theoretical knowledge among audiences. The various storytelling professionals and influencers of the story economy are already taking selective advantage of narrative studies, highlighting the overall beneficiality, universality and authenticity of the narrative form. In this genre of praise for storytelling, folk narrative psychology merges with the hard competitive ideals of the postindustrial business world, together fostering the neoliberal ideal of the upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial individual empowered by stories (see Fernandes 2017, 18). At the same time, the politically polarized post-truth climate of postindustrial Western societies, supported by a somewhat biased interpretation of “postmodern relativism”, urges actors from individual social media users to political parties and presidential candidates to label any opposing stance a ‘narrative’, implying either conscious or unconscious ideological revisionism of facts on the part of others and objective clear-sightedness on one’s own part. What does it say about our 2 relationship to storytelling as citizens and members of various audiences – and indeed, as scholars – that I usually have a ‘story’ while the other has a ‘narrative’? We aim to demonstrate that contemporary narrative studies in fact provide both academics and non-academics with descriptive tools with which to make sense of the unregulated use of ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ in public parlance, yet without any intention to delimit the plethora of the words’ denotations and connotations. We argue for the existence of two major tensions that characterize the varying lay uses of ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ that have their equivalents in narrative-theoretical debate: a tension 1) between situated and inferred narratives; and (2) between authenticity and manipulation. We draw examples from political contexts, the storytelling consultancy industry, and the viral narrative environments of social media – three mutually overlapping discursive realms where the first one (politics) represents a societal sphere with the most dangerous potential outcomes of unregulated storyspeak; the second (storytelling consultancy) a business model commodifying ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ as products or services to be purchased, for example, by the PR department of a political party; and the third (social media) constituting the most influential storytelling platform for the contemporary instrumentalization of both storytelling and storyspeak, with its particular narrative affordances that promote certain conceptions of ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ over others. We will conclude by sketching a simple and tentative classification of the popular uses of these key words as well as outlining their narrative-theoretical implications. The generalizations on the popular conceptualizations of ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ presented in this chapter are grounded in our work on the research project Dangers of Narrative (2017– 2020) where we crowdsourced on social media for examples of instrumental storytelling. This exchange with audiences, conducted mainly on the project’s Facebook page but 3 increasingly, as the project gained widespread popularity among different professional groups from artists and educators to journalists, influencers and marketers in Finland, in the mainstream media, public lectures and training, provides us with a comprehensive perspective on how other societal actors besides narrative theorists understand these words and their use. When arguing for the popularity of particular notions of ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ we thus partly rely on a Finnish corpus of ca. 1000 “instrumental” narratives that members of the audience have reported to our project, and, even more importantly in the context of this chapter, the prefatory words of their reports, often including reflection on or hesitation about whether what they are sending is or should be labeled “storytelling” in the first place. Moreover, we draw from the understanding of ‘narrative’ perceptible in our wide-ranging and sometimes polemic exchange with various professional storytellers, other professional groups and members of the audience. The broadening scope of ‘narrative’ – and what it means to contemporary usage Roland Barthes’ famous introduction to the study of narrative structure from 1966 cast narrative as a ubiquitous cultural form: “Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural” (237). Barthes’ essay marks one of the starting points to the “narrative turn” within academia. Yet more than half a century after Barthes, it can be said that the entire capitalist West witnesses a veritable storytelling boom (Salmon 2010; Mäkelä et al. 2021). It is not just narratives that permeate the different spheres of life, but also discourses about narratives. However, the referent of “narrative” has undergone a change between 1966 and the 2010s. For Barthes, narrative was evident in a host of representational practices: 4 Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa Ursula by Carpaccio, for instance), stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation. (Barthes 1966, 237) Today, this seems a rather conservative inventory of narrative genres, media and forms. As expansive as Barthes’ scope of narrative may have been in its time, the range of things considered narrative has broadened considerably since the mid-1960s. Indeed, Matti Hyvärinen identifies “the broadening range of reference” as one of the consequences of the narrative turn (Hyvärinen 2006, 21). Over the past few decades, instrumentalized and strategic storytelling has become one of the megatrends of Western culture. Propelled by the advent of the Internet, as well as the success of consultancy entrepreneurship and self-help culture in the neoliberalist marketplace, storytelling has become a centerpiece of communication in various areas of life ranging from journalism to politics, and from identity work to marketing (Mäkelä et al. 2021). At the same time, emerging and in-vogue scientific disciplines from evolutionary biology to neuroscience have managed to popularize their views of narrative as a prime purveyor of empathy and other forms of interpersonal understanding (see Mikkonen 2021, 1–3). This has posed a challenge to contemporary narrative scholars. In Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind, Christian Salmon wonders about this turn: 5 How could Roland Barthes’ idea that narrative is one of the great categories of knowledge that we use to understand and organize the world come to dominate political subculture, management methods, and advertising? What are we to think of the new vulgate that tells us that all discourses – political, ideological, or cultural – should adopt a narrative form? (Salmon 2017, 9) When we compare this to Barthes’ list of the vehicles of narrative, we see that Salmon’s articulation of the question already hints at the answer: narrative is thought of less in terms of representational artefacts and more in terms of understanding and organizing experience. Increasingly, the category of narrative is seen to span beyond the stories we tell by particular means and through particular media to the human processes of understanding both the world and our experience of it. There are several disciplinary and, in particular, interdisciplinary developments behind this increase of conceptual span. During the so-called narrative turn the need to study narrative as a cognitive form or a means of sense-making arose in psychology, sociology, history, and also other fields. Narrative hermeneutics is a multidisciplinary approach that exemplifies the broadening understanding of ‘narrative’ while also articulating why there is no going back to simply studying “the vehicles of narrative”, as Barthes once had it. Hanna Meretoja writes: Narratives are dialogical in that they always take shape in relation to culturally mediated narrative models of sense-making, which they implicitly or explicitly draw on, perpetuate, or challenge. But instead of doing this automatically, they do this via the interpretative agency of human subjects who use, interpret, and reinterpret the narrative traditions in which they are enmeshed. (Meretoja 2020, 6 31) The hermeneutic view of the reciprocity between particular storytelling instances and cultural narrative models gives us a subtler, and quite possibly more accurate, picture than the formalist models that operationalize a somewhat simplified distinction between concrete textual forms and abstract cultural ‘masterplots’ (Abbott 2021). Yet the formalist line of thinking comes with a certain explanatory clarity, for instance allowing Kent Puckett to extend the term narrative theory over all those theories that study “the relation between life and the forms that life takes when we attempt to represent it from one or another point of view” (2016, 94). There is no doubting the value that current philosophizing about the scope of narrative thinking and narrative theory has for the narrative studies community. When such ideas encounter discourses about narrative at large, however, they may have the opposite effect of muddying the terminological waters. In our earlier studies of instrumental storytelling we have emphasized the distinction between particular instances of storytelling and culturally circulated models that enable them. We have also found it possible to discern certain narrative forms that are particularly amenable to instrumentalization in contemporary narrative environments, such as the experiential narrative prototype (Mäkelä et al. 2021; see also section “Personal stories cum instrumental narratives” below). While the distinction between particular narrative articulations and more or less inarticulate narrative models does not correspond to terminological choices evident in the varieties of contemporary ‘storyspeak’, it arguably prefigures many discourses about narratives on a conceptual level. The following sections demonstrate this by probing into the uses of ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ in various contexts, such as politics and storytelling consultancy. 7 From contesting narratives to the relativization of knowledge as ‘narrative’ Let us begin this subchapter with an anecdote, as that would be any professional storyteller’s advice, with an academic essay being no exception to the rule. Our Dangers of Narrative project was recently asked to present at a meeting of economic influencers organized by the Confederation of Finnish Industries. The scientific director of the Confederation had a suggestion: perhaps we could discuss the recent economic “narrative” concerning public debt, that of the abrupt change from pre-Covid austerity to a situation caused by the pandemic where debt is suddenly no longer a risk. The suggestion encapsulates two recurring conceptions of ‘narrative’ that are particularly typical of political contexts: a neutral one denoting temporal succession, causality and change (cf. E. M. Forster’s classical early 20th century definition: “The king died, and the queen died of grief”), and a critical one, hinting at ideological biases in how the world is both seen and represented. Much of contemporary talk on ‘narrative’ can be characterized as an amalgamation and sometimes an awkward mixture of these two meanings. In our example, the representative of the Confederation, by using the word “narrative”, simultaneously hints at ideological biases (perhaps mainly on the side of the current left-wing government increasing the public debt in the name of stimulus) and attempts to steer clear of any claims to subjectivity by representing political debate an sich as “narrative”. Narratives themselves as well as the contemporary discourses on narrative are routinely deployed in ideological contest. We have suggested above that the connotations of “(my) story” tend to be about self-realization and identity work (also Dawson, “Bad Press”, forthcoming). In contrast, the use of “narrative” often hints at someone else’s manipulative strategy or, at least, an ideological blindness to their own position. While in many areas of 8 society “storytelling” is seen as an asset that can be learned, coached, and employed in exciting ways, the flipside is that such forms of storytelling become amenable to being criticised as ideological supports to a harmful “narrative”. The broad perception of storytelling as a skill and an asset, and narrative as ideological, puts the contemporary discourses on narrative in a particular rhetorical context. In this frame a host of representations and rhetorics become “narratives in contest” (Phelan 2008) – even if narrative scholars might hesitate to call some of them narratives in the first place. The treatment of various kinds of accounts and arguments as narratives also opens them up for the strategic use of counter-narratives. Thus it is that an argument for a political strategy of controlling the Covid-19 pandemic can be pitted against individual experiential stories of mild flu-like symptoms and vaccine inefficiency. Because of the excessively broad “range of reference” (see Hyvärinen), the debate can be cast as a contest of narratives, and it may play out as if these arguments belong on the same playing field. In our earlier work, we have discussed the different uses of ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ at play in the contexts of politics and communications (Mäkelä et al. 2021), and also sciences (Björninen 2019). The findings fall roughly along the lines drawn above: story connotes empowerment and storytelling comes across as an asset, while narrative is more dubious. Both terms have a range of meanings from particular experiential accounts to cognitive sense-making processes and to cultural or “grand” narratives that explain or rationalize states of affairs. The latter use, therefore, is closely related to how ‘ideology’ is understood in the Althusserian branch of ideology critique – as “our affective, unconscious relations with the world, [...] the way we are pre-reflectively bound up in social reality” (Eagleton 1991, 18). 9 Politics is the most obvious context for contesting narratives, as well as the forum which most frequently witnesses accusations of other parties advancing a ‘narrative’ beneficial to their cause. This usage of the term is prevalent today, especially, it seems, as many Western cultures are going through a period marked by a strong polarization of the political spectrum. Unsurprisingly, therefore, our contemporary Western post-industrialized societies are rife with competing discourses seeking to unveil the duplicitious narratives distorting everyone’s views – everyone’s but one’s own, that is. In contrast to the ideological blindness such uses of ‘narrative’ connote, politicians are more and more gravitating towards experiential storytelling on media, and especially on social media. These storytelling gestures are often praised for their apparent authenticity and bravery among the teller’s own cohorts, while being open to criticism for being a strategic means for promoting the politics they represent. These uses are so thoroughly immersed in the polarized political field that they have lost much of their potential subtlety. What seems like a signal of authenticity from one side can look like a cynical communicative strategy from the other. “My story” is therefore always susceptible to turning into “your narrative”. A possible context for the political use of ‘narrative’ in the ideological sense is, indeed, ideology critique. The Marxian tradition theorizes a self-concealing mechanism of ideology that involves recasting contradictory aspects of the status quo in a diachronic or narrative form. A concise example would be the phrase “A man’s home is his castle”, which seems to suggest a continuity between two incompatible forms of ownership. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes with reference to Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate, the phrase erases the boundary between the capitalist worker’s mortgaged home and the feudal lord’s inherited castle (Sedgwick 2016, 14). Furthermore, it recalls the feudal world where the organization of property and rationale for labor was different – “the peasant had his bit of land, the artisan his 10 tools” (Mitchell 1971, 153). Sedgwick describes the narrative logic thus: It is important that ideology in this sense, even when its form is flatly declarative (“A man’s home is his castle”), is always at least implicitly narrative, and that, in order for the reweaving of ideology to be truly invisible, the narrative is necessarily chiasmic in structure: that is, that the subject of the beginning of the narrative is different from the subject at the end, and that the two subjects cross each other in a rhetorical figure that conceals their discontinuity (Sedgwick 2016, 14–15). While the Marxist tradition aimed to lay bare the invisible, naturalized ideologies of the dominant class, its methodological reasoning has been diluted into a rhetorical strategy across the political board. It is quite common today for the causes of marginalized groups and identities to be attacked as grandiose ideological machinations. Sedgwick herself acknowledges this possibility with a turn of phrase that brings to mind recent work on counter-narratives: the contradictory binds of ideological narratives “become most visible under the disassembling eye of an alternative narrative, ideological as that narrative may itself be” (Sedgwick 1985, 15; cf. Hyvärinen 2020). In less polarized fields that are still defined by debate, we can see ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ lending themselves to a more diverse spectrum of uses and meanings. Scientists, too, have been encouraged to become better storytellers, but the idea of narrativizing science has also been met with fierce resistance. Narrative models have been suggested for communicating research results within the scientific community (e.g. Krzywinski & Cairo 2013). Here, the virtues of storytelling are found in its affective or inspirational qualities: “Stories have the capacity to delight and surprise and spark creativity” (ibid.). Those who adopt a less 11 enthusiastic attitude towards this idea have pointed out that storytelling is based on selection, emplotment, and streamlining of data, which seems to contradict the more widely accepted idea that data has to be presented as comprehensively and without bias as possible (Katz 2013). In this debate the notion of storytelling is clearly linked to a particular ordering of available information and its presentation, and the positive and negative judgments about the affordances of storytelling employ a roughly similar concept of narrative. Comparable rather carefully delimited notions of narrative have arisen across sciences. Unsurprisingly, this is especially true of those disciplines that have a historical connection to the so-called ‘narrative turn.’ Historian Alex Rosenberg expounds his use of the term narrative, perhaps echoing Hayden White: “When I say ‘narrative,’ I don’t mean a chronology of events; I mean stories with plots, connected by motivations, by people’s beliefs and desires, their plans, intentions, values” (Chen 2018). Hayden White’s earlier, highly influential writings, which treat narrative as a type of discourse (e.g. White 2010) have given rise to a tradition of discursively oriented approaches within the discipline. Rosenberg’s How History Gets Things Wrong (MIT Press, 2014) argues that historical storytelling leads us to misunderstand history. The book builds its argument about the fallibility of historical narrative on neuropsychological theories and evolutionary biology, among other scientific frameworks, and some of its ideas have been labeled speculative at best (e.g. Goodrum 2020). The concept of narrative, however, is defined very clearly. Even though such strong narratively oriented traditions are only found in a limited number of fields, it is evident that the notions of what ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ mean tend to be more crystallized in sciences than in other types of public discourse. 12 In entrepreneurial or marketing contexts the expression “our story” almost invariably refers to a type of PR text found on official web pages and press materials. Since the texts labeled ”our story” may operate in different genres – company history, personal and experiential stories, statement of values, statistics, and so forth – it is tempting to think that this text type is a kind of impure narrative, interspersed with heterogeneous discourses. However, texts one finds on “our story” pages perfectly illustrate one currently prominent and overwhelmingly positive way of understanding ‘story’. “Our story” is a product of successful self-reflection, an articulated act of soul-searching, a company’s way of stating what it is all about. However, for all its sheen of authenticity, this type of story is one that can actually be bought and sold, as we will show in the next section. Storytelling consultants and the “compelling story” One of the decisive 20th century developments contributing to the storytelling boom and the trending of the word ‘story’ in public parlance was the emergence of “management gurus” in the United States from the 1980s onward. Consultants, celebrity CEOs, and academics cum inspirational keynote speakers preaching the gospel of storytelling have, according to some critics, appropriated the role of evangelists in the post-industrial West, and they can be held accountable for the now widely popular idea of storytelling as a shamanistic practice and stories as an omnipotent miracle cure (Salmon 2010, 43–50; Greatbatch & Clark 2005). To get an idea of the genealogy of the vocabulary of storytelling currently dominating the world of marketing and consulting, it is particularly helpful to look at the booming genre of business storytelling blogs and manuals. As the storytelling boom has turned these professional storytellers to coaches of both management and employees in public institutions and private businesses alike, an analytical look at this genre reveals some preconceptions and 13 strategies of contemporary storyspeak much beyond any corporate bootcamp. In this context, a striking contrast arises between the previously discussed politicized take on competing narratives and the storytelling consultancy rhetoric that sells narrative as a talisman that takes us to the universal campfire where the exchange of great and compelling stories revives the shared core values embraced by the whole humankind. The bestsellers and influencers of this genre draw conspicuously yet selectively from the academic field of narrative studies, regularly embracing not only classics in rhetoric and the anthropology of storytelling, but increasingly more recent studies that can be considered to provide scientific verification for the overall beneficiality of narratives. Aristotle and the centrality of plot development loom large in storytelling manuals (e.g., Nossel 2018), as well as Vladimir Propp’s fairytale morphology (see Salmon 2010, 44–45) and anthropologist Joseph Campbell’s (1949) “hero’s journey” or the “monomyth” theory (e.g., Sachs 2012, 146–157). Cognitive studies and experimental psychology that provide empirical evidence for the link between storytelling, empathy and increased ability to attribute mind states to others are however gaining more and more ground in this genre. The storytelling consultants’ adherence to both fictional models for narration (drama, fairytale, myth) and the universal cognitive storytelling schemata of the human mind together fall under the discourse that we call the campfire rhetoric. The point of the campfire rhetoric is to highlight the universal and thus completely “natural”, unmanipulated essence of narratives across ages and cultures, while effectively downplaying the commodification of storytelling for manipulative purposes by these very professionals. The title of corporate storyteller Evelyn Clark’s book Around the Corporate Campfire: How Great Leaders Use Stories to Inspire Success (2004) is emblematic; we may also consider this sales pitch for 14 Murray Nossel’s Powered by Storytelling: Excavate, Craft, and Present Stories to Transform Business Communication (2018): What’s your story? It’s a question human beings have been asking each other since we first gathered around a campfire. Millennia later, this human need for storytelling hasn’t changed. We communicate most effectively through our personal stories—and our professional success depends on it. [...] (https://narativ.com/book/) Two paradoxes, emblematic of contemporary storyspeak, immediately arise. First, if storytelling comes so naturally for us, why an entire business branch to tease the stories out, with the necessary help of precise steps and formulae? Second, how can your personal experiences – not to mention your individual rhetorical goals in the particular storytelling situation – be transformed into something universal? Again we find ourselves amidst the two elementary tensions, the one between concrete situatedness and narrative inference; and even more so between authenticity and manipulation. Why do we need a new business model to reinvent the campfire? These tensions can also be reconceptualized as a wilful confusion between the cognitive and the ethical. By invoking the tribal setting and the ancient functions of community-building through oral storytelling, the corporate storyteller is able to efface institutional hierarchies and cultural inequalities; moreover, the intrinsic quality of narrative form as focusing on the ethics of individual encounter rather than the ethics of societal structures (see Mäkelä 2020) becomes harnessed in the service of such neoliberal storytelling doctrine. This is how the viral marketing guru Jonah Sachs in his book Winning the Story Wars. How Those Who Tell – and Live – the Best Stories Will Rule the Future (2012), likely the most read storytelling 15 manual published in the 21st century, describes the connection between narrative universalism and the allegedly shared core values of the whole humankind: Great stories are universal because at their core, humans have more in common with each other than the pseudo-science of demographic slicing has led us to believe. Great brands and campaigns are sensitive to the preferences of different types of audiences, but the core stories and the values they represent can be appreciated by anyone. Universality is the opposite of insincerity. (44) What Sachs means by “core stories and the values they represent” remains, of course, vague. Instead of stopping to reflect on these alleged moral universals, Sachs moves smoothly from an anthropological emphasis on the “update” and “enactment” of ancient myths to a much more mundane understanding of the “campfire”, not as a site for stories of heroic conquest but of lived experience: Stories are how we humans arrange and recount our experiences of the world so that others will want to listen to and learn from them. They allow us to create order out of the chaotic, otherwise meaningless experience of our senses by editing out irrelevant details, defining a cause for each effect and providing meaning in the string of things we have seen, felt or even just imagined. (20–21) Here Sachs echoes the long line of hermeneutic, narrative psychological and cognitive narratological traditions of conceiving narrative as an everyday “sense-making” tool indispensable for human cognition and therefore, when stripped to essentials, universal. Benevolently considered, the leap from ancient and universal myths to stories of personal experience, follows, of course, the narrative-hermeneutic understanding of narrative 16 sensemaking as a constant negotiation between “cultural” narratives and everyday sensemaking and identity processes (see Meretoja in this volume). Recurrent tips by story coaches for a “compelling story” moreover mix and match elements that can be found from fairly recent cognitive narratological definitions of a “prototypical narrative”, as the one by David Herman: a representation most commonly framed as a narrative by the receiver’s cognition is a situated account that conveys an ordered temporal and causal sequence of events, a storyworld with particulars, an event that disrupts this storyworld, and the experience of what it is like for a particular individual to live through this disruption (2009, 14). In the language of storytelling consultancy, as exemplified by Matthew Dicks in his manual Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling (2018): “You must start out as one version of yourself and end as something new” (26). Most recent additions to the cognitive-narratological toolbox of business storytelling are immersionist and enactivist; what gets highlighted is not simply narrative immersion and its effect on the attention span, but the moral lesson of stepping into another person’s shoes through storytelling. Lani Peterson writes in her blog entry entitled “The Science Behind the Art of Storytelling” at harvardbusiness.org: For example, sensory details like the client was as excited as if he had won the lottery engage a listener’s sensory cortex. Action words like drive this project home engage the motor cortex, all leading to a more connected and richer experiencing of the message. In short, the more a speaker conveys information in story form, the closer the listener’s experience and understanding will be to what the speaker actually intended. 17 Neuroscientists are still debating these findings, but we know from experience that when we’re listening to a good story — rich in detail, full of metaphor, expressive of character — we tend to imagine ourselves in the same situation. So we have both first wave cognitive narratologists, foregrounding the representation of embodied experience in narrative, and second wave cognitive narratologists, emphasizing the vicarious audience enactment of that experience, to thank for the notions of ‘story’ currently dominating the world of business and marketing and effectively leaking to other areas of life. So far so good, but the most problematic aspect of corporate storyspeak concerns empathy. In recent years, ‘empathy’ as a catchword has almost replaced ‘story’. An emergent concept among corporate storytellers appears to be “empathetic storytelling”, which basically means turning the attention from a company’s own “story” to that of the customer’s. Google search with this term yields almost exclusively business-related training and consultancy material (“How Empathetic Storytelling Drives Success”; “How Great Leaders Use Storytelling to Activate Empathy in Their Teams”). In the above quotation from harvardbusiness.org, the disclaimer on “neuroscientists still debating these findings” is in order, as psychological and neurological reading experiments that have attempted to forge a link between narrative immersion and empathy have to some degree been compromised by the replication crisis (e.g. Camerer et al 2018), or simply do not yield evidence that would be unambiguous enough to be turned into simple recommendations. A case in point is the research article by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano (2013) in Science, by far the most quoted study in contemporary storytelling consultancy whenever the empathy-enhancing qualities of stories needs to be evoked. The experimental research indicated that being subjected to literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction, non-fiction, or no text at all in control groups) for only a couple of minutes enhances 18 theory of mind, that is, our ability to infer mental states to other people, as demonstrated in the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test developed to measure social intelligence. The results practically went viral on a global scale, with The Guardian proclaiming that “Reading literary fiction improves empathy, study finds” (Bury 2013); and The New York Times that “For better social skills, scientists recommend a little Chekhov” (Belluck 2013). That was of course not the case with several subsequent studies questioning the replicability of Kidd & Castano’s results (e.g., Samur et al 2018) . Thus the most flagrant interpretations appropriated by the storytelling consultancy business owe more to the headlines than to the actual research setup or the conclusions drawn by the research community studying the effects of reading. With the considerable help of mainstream media and commercial advocates of both literature and storytelling, Kidd and Castano’s study was subsumed by generalizing and universalizing storyspeak and can still be found featuring in diverse contexts from cultural policy documents to teamwork manuals. But is it the power of fiction, storytelling, or intellectual effort and persistence that we are celebrating, with the help of Kidd & Castano’s experimentalempirical evidence (Mikkonen 2021, 95)? Indeed, one more prominent strand in the quasiscientific argumentation of storytelling consultancy is the celebration of the power of fiction as self-improvement and inspiration. Often this means reading “great literature” and manifests, for example, in the lists for recommended reading shared on business influencers’ LinkedIn profiles. In sum, storytelling is marketed with the cognitive vocabulary of essentiality, universality, embodiment, naturalness, and cognitive empathy, and yet it is precisely these features that are considered efficient rhetorical tools, or even weapons in the “story wars”. Such neoliberal, streamlined interpretation of cognitive rhetoric is effective in effacing individual backgrounds of storytellers and audiences, and this can be considered as one of the great societal risks brought about by contemporary storyspeak. (See also Mäkelä & Meretoja 2022.) Everyday 19 oral narratives, inspirational non-fiction and the great Western literary canon are treated on a par, with the virtues of art projected on corporate talk – and vice versa. This collapsing of storytelling contexts and genres feeds on the general tendency of contemporary storyspeak to efface the line between fiction and non-fiction, in favour of the general “compellingness” of narrative. We will now move on to social media as storytelling platforms where all these neoliberal virtues of storytelling find their culmination yet one that constantly risks transforming my story into your narrative. Personal stories cum instrumental narratives: storyspeak and social media Social media as the most prominent platforms for contemporary instrumental storytelling intensify the previously discussed tensions between inferred and situated narratives as well as between authenticity and manipulation. Whether in marketing, journalism, activism, politics or personal life, the story’s “compellingness” is primarily measured by its likeability and shareability (see Georgakopoulou, Iversen, and Stage in this volume). Much of contemporary storyspeak is moreover generated and supported by the very narrative affordances of social media: for example, the Instagram “Stories” in their ephemerality reinforce the association between “my story”, authenticity and personal experience (see Georgakopoulou and Page in this volume); then again the affordance of “sharing” highlights community building and collective identity formation as the functions of storytelling, while downplaying the manipulative use of social media virality and algorithms. The above discussed campfire rhetoric of professional storytellers is permitted by none other than social media, which is the primary breeding ground for use and talk on inspirational personal stories and manipulative, biased narratives (such as conspiracy theories, see Dawson in this volume) alike. Moreover, as we have demonstrated in our previous research (Dawson & Mäkelä 2020; Mäkelä et al 2021), the story logic of social media significantly reinforces the general 20 tendency to draw universal “lessons” from narrative accounts of individual experience and foreground the “deep truth” conveyed by them, irrespective of their accuracy or even referentiality as “true stories”. We claim that this social media fuelled culture of collective narrative interpretation, turning stories of individual experience into inspiring or moral exempla, is one of the most pivotal developments shaping the contemporary public’s ideas about narratives and what they can do. When crowdsourcing for “instrumental narratives” in the Dangers of Narrative project, it became clear to us early on that the narrative genre most commonly recognized as “instrumental” was a story of personal – often disruptive – experience, with relatable storyworld particulars and a clear moral positioning. From a cognitive-narratological perspective, as already noted above, such a story is prototypical, and as such, it works well in the service of professional storytellers who look for stories that make the best out of the audience’s attention span. So one of our key findings was that the very “compelling” stories of the storytelling boom were the ones to raise the most suspicion among the critical audience, but for the most part the perceived “instrumentality” resulted from the collision between narrative prototype elements and the narrative affordances of social media. We recognized five types of social media masterplot (Abbott 2021) that dominated our crowdsourced corpus, all pertaining to the cognitive-narratological experiential prototype and with a remarkable potential to go viral on social media: “the Good Samaritan”; “individual vs. system”; “the deserving poor”; “the conversion story of the wellness entrepreneur”; and “illness as the hero’s journey”. The narrative-rhetorical logic of these “compelling stories” rests on exemplarity as defined by sociolinguists Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (2012, 98): in everyday storytelling a highly tellable personal experience is used paradoxically as both evidence and illustration of a general maxim that the speaker wishes to promote. Therefore these stories, originally very emphatically “my stories” 21 parading their deeply personal nature and authenticity, when shared by the affective publics (Papacharissi 2015) of social media, transform into collective cultural narratives that moreover often have a double afterlife in both reinforcing “our story” among a particular audience while emblemizing an ideologically biased “narrative” for others. Let us take an example that we have discussed on various occasions with different lay and professional audiences. In 2015, Finnish social media audiences witnessed a column by physician Tommi Koivu go viral and become that year’s most read piece in a respectable newspaper. The column itself had the ready appearance of a Facebook post: it’s an inspirational story of a disabled “Joni” working as a grocery bagger who, through a simple act of kindness toward the customers, made their day. Koivu advises all of us to live up to the example of Joni in bringing blessing to the days of our neighbours. The social media loved the story, of course, but as is often the case with such viral exempla, the amateur factcheckers were soon alerted to do their “research” – which, this time, resulted in the finding that Joni’s “story” is in fact a version of the inspirational story meme known as “Johnny the Grocery Bagger”. The origins of this international meme are difficult to trace but it features in various online contexts ranging from spiritual websites to self-help and business training manuals. The most common context for Johnny’s story is that of business consultancy addressing the issue of customer satisfaction (and not that of blessing your neighbour, although in contemporary storyspeak these are in fact often one and the same). Here is how Koivu replied to the critique in his post scriptum to the column: […] I had originally read about Joni from John Ortberg’s book […] where this was presented as a true story. […] Cold facts may speak to our reason, but they do not touch the heart and are quite useless when it comes to the most crucial things in life. […] Of course we cannot be certain of the story’s truthfulness, but at least my naïve 22 heart which believes in love, dreams and happy endings wants to believe it’s true. (Koivu 2015; our translation) He continues in an interview in a news story entitled “Unbelievable story of Joni goes viral in Finland – author discloses the actual origin of the story” which reports the immense success of his column: Koivu points out that true or not, the story is good. According to him the moral of the story is more important. – The point of the story was to make people think how they could bring joy to their neighbour and make the world a better place. Makes me sad to think that the story loses its significance when people start asking if it’s true or not. True or not, it’s a brilliant example, says physician. (Hujanen 2015; our translation) The case exemplifies the narrative ethics and rhetoric shaping storyspeak both among social media interpretive communities and professional storytellers who are eager to piggyback on the success of “true stories” of private citizens online. Compellingness and shareability override referentiality, while storytelling is increasingly considered an art that catalyzes a chain reaction from experientiality (“my story”) to representativeness (“our story”) and all the way to normative conclusions on how things should be – competing ‘narratives’ which may concern issues ranging from nutrition and well-being to state policies, pandemics and immigration. While our chapter has taken a particularly critical stance toward business storytelling and its inclination to appropriate the aura of authenticity and universality associated with storytelling to a range of manipulative uses, the story logic of social media, turning subjective experiences and random storyworld particulars into moral exempla, makes us all accomplices 23 in narrative instrumentalization. Our Dangers of Narrative research team encountered harsh critique whenever we were thought to be tampering with authentic experiences that were conveyed for the best of purposes; to quote one influencer commenting on our Facebook analysis of her own fundraising story: “When a ‘research project’ analyzes someone’s lived experience, the agenda of the text clearly being to open the eyes of the privileged to make them help poor children, can’t help but wonder: is there any blood circulating in the veins of these people [that is, our research team], or is artificial intelligence already behind this?” (comment on the Dangers of Narrative Facebook page 9 Jun 2017). We understand the concern; a critical analysis of the dominant storytelling practices is made increasingly difficult as stories of disruptive and even traumatic experiences of individuals are being curated (Fernandes 2017), appropriated (Shuman 2005), and used to buttress political stances (Polletta & Redman 2020). Yet recognizing the rhetorical and ideological traffic between grassroots storytelling (‘stories’) and cultural ‘narratives’ shaping communities and institutions will provide crucial insight into the often tacit notions of ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ embedded in our collective and political imagination. A tentative classification of the popular uses of ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ and its narrativetheoretical implications To conclude we suggest a very simple and tentative classification of the popular uses of ‘story’ and ‘narrative’, mainly in order to inspire more narrative research on contemporary storyspeak, and perhaps also more societal interaction on researchers’ part, as popular lay notions are not to be corrected by academics but to be learned from and elaborated on in theory and critical analysis. 24 (1) ‘story’ as the authentic expression of the self Supported and inspired by once politically progessive ideas about “voicing” and the personal stories of the marginalized challenging non-individuating power structures, contemporary storyspeak has usurped the slogan “my story” to add authenticity and personality to any and all kind of communication (see Fernandes 2017, Shuman 2005). When this meaning needs to be activated, the choice of word is almost invariably ‘story’, while ‘narrative’ is reserved for less personal uses. It is precisely ‘story’ understood in this way that embodies the much-touted “compelling story,” encapsulating in itself the seeds for social media virality that will in turn transform ‘my story’ into ‘our story’ (no. 2 below) and ‘narrative’ into contest (no. 4 below). (2) ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ as a source of identity ‘Story’ or ‘narrative’ can be used to evoke a collective source of identity, as in cases of nationalistic appeals to a common heritage or values as (e.g.) “Finland’s story”. A smaller-scale version of this usage of ‘story’ is found in the contexts of communities, groups, and even corporate actors that call for their members to work together to “change the story”. (3) ‘narrative’ as a temporal organization, textual or cognitive In one of it’s most straightforward senses ‘narrative’ can denote a temporally structured account of a process or development. This sense or its somewhat more delimited version is often found in sciences and in attempts to popularize their findings. Ths use is closely related, on the one hand, to Aristotelian ideas of plot, and, on the other hand, to conceiving of narrative as a neutral and universal cognitive tool. 25 (4) narrative as a contestable version In political contexts, in particular, but also wherever else contesting views are argued for, ‘narrative’ often takes the meaning of a contestable explanation or a version of truth. In this use, ‘narrative’ usually suggests an ideological bias. All of the listed meanings bear traces of or resonances with narrative studies paradigms, most notably the cognitive (1, 3), the hermeneutic (1,2,4), and the rhetorical (4). 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