“Nobody Is Ever Alone”: The Use of Social Media Narrative to Include the Viewer in SKAM

Abstract

This paper analyses the way that the popular Norwegian television and web series SKAM (2015-17) included viewers in the narration. There has been a recent interest in narratives that use the third person plural voice (“we-narratives”) in print literature. This paper takes this narrative research and connects it to transmedia and social media storytelling, arguing that the we-narrative is characteristic of the digital vernacular of social media, which has accustomed us to narratives that are collective in nature. In SKAM, the narrative we is established by visual and narrative emphasis on the group, and the audience is included in this we through a storyworld that mirrors the audience’s world, using social media and temporality, and explicitly in the focalisation of the final scene of the show.