<h3 class="page">The Narratives</h3>

To see the narratives, click here.

To understand how narratives serve as building blocks for culture, let’s see how psychologist Jerome Brumer explains the role they play in our lives. For Bruner (1991), narratives are instruments of mind we use to construct reality. They have specific features that help us make sense of the world around us.

Narrative Features

The features that serve this function are:

1. Narrative diachronicity. We make sense of time by creating mental models of patterns of events. Narratives help us build these patterns.
2. Particularities. Each narrative has particularities that are embedded into more general types of stories. They distinguish one narrative from another of the same genre.
3. Genres. They can either be a way of telling a story, or represent different human plights. In any case, Bruner explains “they predispose us to use our minds and sensibilities in particular ways.”
4. Referentiality. This is about how we make sense of narratives and accept them as such—we partly interpret a story by making references to components within the story itself or from the narrative as a whole.
5. Hermeneutic Composability. Narratives are so flexible because they are open to interpretation. As Bruner puts it: “the telling of a story and its comprehension as a story depend on the human capacity to process knowledge in [an] interpretative way.” At the same time, there are also contextual factors that play a role in how we interpret stories. These include the issue of intention (for both storyteller and listener, why is the story told?), and how each interprets the other’s background knowledge.
6. Intentional State Entailment. This feature specifies that protagonists in narratives have active roles in what happens during the story. This is because not all narratives are worth telling – an idea linked to the next feature, too.
7. Breach of canonicity. Not every sequence of events constitutes a narrative, as narratives are more than that. There must always be an element that makes the story worth telling – an implicit canonical script or normative that is breached, violated or deviated from.
8. Context Sensitivity and Negotiability. Given the fact that narratives are so open to interpretation, they became great tools for cultural negotiation. They contain cultural information that is easily sharable.
9. Narrative Accrual. Narratives accrue; they make up a culture as they are made into a whole. When an online community collectively identifies, shares and interprets specific narratives, it is actively creating its own culture and providing itself with legitimacy and historical foundations.

The role of narratives

Narratives help channel participation when members use them as tools to build a community’s culture through an ongoing process of narrative accrual and sharing.

The process is fairly simple: when groups of people talk about problem-solving experiences they faced together, they begin to share a view about the world. A way to easily talk about these experiences is by referencing narratives that already mean something to community members.

To see how narratives play a role in my model, click here.

To explore the most prominent narratives I found in the first year of this community's history, see the table below.

The Green Brothers	Happy Dances	Nerdfighters
Foundation to Decrease World Suck	Kiva Lending Team	Project for Awesome
Hank's Songs	Harry Potter Nerdfighters	DFTBA