Micronarratives as the form of contemporary communication

Narratives can be considered as a way for presenting and representing reality, going beyond time, space, aesthetic form, and medium of conveyance. From Aristotelian classical principles, to structuralist rules, to post-structuralist plurality, the aesthetics of narrative representation is constantly put into discussion. Narratives are composed by both constant structures and figures, which determines whether an object can be identified as a narrative, and variables which determine the way in which it is conveyed on different media. In this paper, we concentrate on contemporary narratives on social media. After declaring what are the main characteristics of the medium in terms of affordances, content, and role of the users, we analyse two existing case studies using the concepts of remediation and narrativity. The paper aims at bringing a contribution to the discussion about contemporary aesthetics in media design, considering narratives as a matter of design, and investigating on the role of the designer.