Agency in Search of a Narrative: Reconstructing Egyptian Identity via Facebook

Abstract

The production of meaning and organizing human experience to construct an identity yields a complexification when deployed on Facebook. Narrative Identity theory, with its three stages of prefiguration, configuration and refiguration, as proposed by Ricoeur provide a framework for unpacking the process of identity construction for social media users. Agency, both as promised potential by the literature on social media and its structure as well as by the imaginative experience entailed in narrativisation, lead to the ambiguities of empowerment and fragmentation. This study draws on digital anthropology and narrative identity theory in order to analyze a selection of posts from three widely visited Facebook pages with historical content. The construction of meaning through user engagement with text takes on wider significance imposed by the post- modern structure of the Facebook itself with implications on user construction of identity.