Social Media Usage in Lauren Oyler's "Fake Accounts" (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2022 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Siegen (Fakultät 1), course: Epochen der Literatur-, Kultur- und Mediengeschichte, language: English, abstract: In the following term paper, I will investigate how the narrator's usage of social media is portrayed in Lauren Oyler's "Fake Accounts" and how that reflects on the social media behaviour of contemporary young generations in real life. Following this introductory chapter, I will present theoretical approaches on the topic of affect and social media in the second chapter. In addition to that, I will discuss how intertwined processes of online presence and identity creation work within the sphere of the digital world. In the last part of the second chapter, I will briefly reflect on social media influencers and to what extent their roles and performances on social networks differ from average users. The third chapter constitutes an analysis of Oyler's novel "Fake Accounts", as a recent autofictional novel thematizing common issues such as social media usage of young adults, by analysing the novel in the light of the theoretical framework of affect and unaffectedness. I will briefly take a look at the genre of autofiction and investigate to what extent the inclusion of autobiographical elements poses an important factor in regard to the overall topic and my research question. Moreover, I will determine how identity creation and self-staging is performed by the narrator in "Fake Accounts" and how real-life social media behaviour on behalf of young generations is mirrored or even criticized.