“Nobody Is Ever Alone”: The Use of Social Media Narrative to Include the Viewer in SKAM
2021; Wiley; Volume: 54; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/jpcu.13015
ISSN1540-5931
Autores Tópico(s)Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media
Resumo“Because even though it sometimes feels like it, nobody is ever alone.” These words are taken from the speech Jonas gives at Sana’s Eid party in the final episode of the Norwegian teen drama show SKAM, a television/social media hybrid that gained cult-like popularity with fan communities around the world in 2016 and 2017. SKAM did not just tell its audience that we are not alone, it enacted collectivity in its narration. SKAM used social media to engage its viewers and invite them to comment on and discuss the show. That has become a fairly common technique in contemporary television. What SKAM did beyond this, and beyond the emphasis on the group in the story’s content, was to expand the narrative voice to a we-narrative that included the viewer. Although this inclusive we is touched upon throughout the show, it only becomes explicit in the final minutes of the final episode, in Jonas’s speech, at the Eid party where Sana and her family are surrounded by Muslim and non-Muslim friends, all together after a season of conflicts and misunderstandings, finally happy and united. “Because even though it sometimes feels like it, nobody is ever alone,” Jonas says. Third-person plural narration—the narrative “we”—has recently been theorized in relation to print literature by narratologists including Monica Fludernik, Natalie Bekhta, and Uri Margolin. I build upon this work, and upon recent research on social media narratives and fandoms, to develop an understanding of how the collective voice is expressed in audio-visual narratives. This essay begins with an overview of SKAM, followed by an analysis of the final speech, where the use of the inclusive we-narration is made most explicit. Next, the theoretical idea of the we-narrative as discussed by narratologists is examined, followed by an analysis of two narrative techniques SKAM uses to develop this third-person plural narrative voice: temporality and mirrored storyworlds through social media. Finally, the transmedial and fan-driven aspects of the collective we in SKAM are analyzed. SKAM was a fictional Norwegian television show for teens, written and directed by Julie Andem for Norway’s public broadcasting company, NRK. Mari Magnus was in charge of social media content. The show had four seasons and ran from September 2015 to June 2017. Each season, the show followed a different teen in an Oslo high school, and it dealt with topics such as sexual harassment, mental illness, same-sex relationships, drug use, and Islamophobia. The word “skam” means shame in Norwegian. Although NRK has announced that they will not produce more seasons of SKAM, rights have been sold to producers in other countries, and there are multiple adaptations of the show, including in France, the United States, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. A key feature of SKAM is that it was published online first, in daily or more frequent posts to SKAM’s website. The content of these posts varied between short video clips, screenshots of text message chats between characters, and Instagram posts from the lead character. In addition, fictional characters from the show shared Instagram and YouTube posts that were not published to the official website but that were picked up and shared by fan groups on Facebook and elsewhere. Video clips from each week were compiled into traditional television episodes of 20–40 minutes that were broadcast on Friday nights. SKAM was developed based on extensive interviews with teens and had an explicit mission statement based on the needs the team identified among their very specific target audience. In a conference presentation, the creators describe their mission statement: “SKAM aims to help 16-year-old girls strengthen their self-esteem through dismantling taboos, making them aware of interpersonal mechanisms, and showing them the benefits of confronting their fears” (Andem and Magnus). The show became popular well beyond its original target audience. According to polling by the Norwegian Citizen Panel in March 2017, about 30 percent of the Norwegian population over the age of 18 followed SKAM to some extent, and in the 18–25 age group, over 80 percent of Norwegian women and 60 percent of Norwegian men watched it. In addition, the show had a large international fan base providing pirated versions of the television episodes (to work around the region block that made the website inaccessible from outside of the Nordic countries) as well as translations of subtitles and social media content into languages including English, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, and Chinese.11. Some sense of the intensity and the international nature of the fans can be seen in the many stories fans tell about what SKAM meant to them on the Instagram page “Thank You SKAM,” at https://www.instagram.com/p/BOj2EPzDS3p. The international fans also engaged in extensive discussions and analyses on Tumblr, Facebook, and other sites. The speech given by Jonas at the Eid celebration at the end of the last episode is the point in SKAM where the audience is explicitly included in the narrative voice. In a quite literal sense, the narratee is turned into a narrator, as the episode ends with images of words written by audience members on the screen. The speech only lasts for 2 minutes and 20 seconds, but it is densely packed with meaning and can be divided into three sections, with the narrative focalization twisting from section to section. Of course, we only hear Jonas’s voice throughout the speech. He speaks in the third-person plural: “we,” at first speaking to Sana, who is “you,” but soon his “we” expands to include a much larger group of characters in the fiction and, finally, even the audience. Visually, the images clearly show the shift in focalization from fictional characters to the actual audience (Figure 1). As Jonas begins to speak, the screen goes black. He begins with politics. “Dear Sana,” he says, “what you’re inviting us to today, overthrows American presidents tomorrow.” As he starts his second sentence, “We’re living in a chaotic world, where it is difficult to understand the rules,” we see a succession of rapid, jerky images moving from what appears to be a warzone through ambiguous images that could show fighting or protests or crowds celebrating before arriving after a few seconds at a series of video selfies of characters in the show. The selfies are joyful but confusing. “Why are some people refugees, while others are safe?” Jonas asks, as a fighter jet apparently dropping a bomb appears for a split second, followed by a jerky image of people running that at first looks like people fleeing bombs, but that turns out to show two of the main characters running joyfully on an Oslo street. The videos are brief and jerky, often selfies with the camera held close to the face, and the lighting in these clips is usually poor, distinctly different from the professional cinematography of the rest of the show. Some of the snippets shown are clearly from scenes we have seen, but they are from new perspectives that we have not seen before, and we move from clip to clip very fast. “It’s not surprising that people give up, that we stop believing in good,” Jonas says. The screen goes black again. The verbal soundtrack of the speech is clearly narrated by Jonas, although he stated before beginning that the speech was not written by him but by three of the other guests at the party. The visual material, on the other hand, undergoes a shift in focalization in this first section. Before the speech, the camera shows the Eid party from a standard, more or less external third-person perspective, alternating between showing us the whole group and individual people or couples. The video selfies in the first section of the speech turn the visual focalization around, showing us how the fictional characters see themselves. The characters are not shown alone, but in twos and threes and larger groups, laughing and smiling together. And their videos do not stand alone: They are cut together in a chaotic stream, interspersed with images from wars and protests. Their selfies are part of something larger, like the streams of images in a Snapchat feed or the images of friends flickering through an Instagram feed. The screen goes black again, the sound from the videos is abruptly silenced, and then, we see a professionally shot series of videos. The screen shows the audience of the speech: first Sana alone, as Jonas says, “Thank you for not giving up, Sana.” Music softly accompanies his next words, which can be read as the key words of the entire show: “Because even though it sometimes feels that way, nobody stands alone.” The camera cuts to Isak and Even, their heads against each other, and finally Sana in the middle of the larger group, as Jonas says, “Each and every one of us is part of the great chaos, and what you do today, has an effect tomorrow.” So, as Jonas describes how we are not alone, the camera confirms his words, moving from the individual to the couple to the group. Let me hug you for this comment ❤ you’re so right. Love conquers all <3. I feel this group has become a big, beautiful, alternative family. Just thank you! All is love. Yes, I am gay. And Evak22. Evak is what the fans call Even and Isak, the gay couple at the center of season 3. opened the door. Crying, because Vilde is me. Then, we see just a series of red heart emojis, enlarged and pixellated at the center of the screen. These are comments with no words, just hearts. The wordless hearts are the final image of the show. The inclusion of the audience’s comments is the most explicit inclusion of the audience in the narrative voice, but once we begin to look for this inclusion of the audience, we can see more subtle examples throughout the show. The following discusses some of the techniques used, including temporality, the use of fictional characters’ social media, and the invitations for fans to solve puzzles or interpret references. But first, a discussion of some of the recent research on “we-narrative.” A text that is written or spoken by a group, a “we,” is not uncommon. The US constitution begins in this way: “We the people,” it states, immediately establishing a group, a collective, a democratic union that stands together. Scholarly texts often use a “we” or an “as we will see” that includes the writer and the reader, or to be more specific, the “textually inscribed author and reader roles,” as Uri Margolin writes (122). The first-person plural “we” is far less common in fictional texts, but as noted earlier, there has recently been a small surge of interest in we-narratives from scholars. This research is concurrent to though not always directly connected to ideas of distributed consciousness in posthumanism, as theorized by N. Katherine Hayles, Victoria Flanagan, and others, to discussions of social minds in narrative (Palmer) and also to the social media environment that floods our phones and computers with newsfeeds consisting of constant small story fragments from many different people (Rettberg). Narratological work on the we-narrative so far has focused on the technique’s appearance in print novels. SKAM is evidence that the we-narrative is not only a literary form but can also be used in a multimodal, transmedia narrative. At one level, it would be possible to say that social media as such is a we-narrative. SKAM demonstrates how a fictional transmedia narrative can use this first-person plural narration and focalization quite explicitly. The collective, the group, is the center of SKAM’s fictional world. Each season shows the protagonist first in the group, then separated from it due to misunderstandings or lack of communication; then, the protagonist is finally reintegrated into the group and resolution is achieved. Monika Fludernik calls we-novels “the most extended form of communal narrative, putting the collective at their very center” (“Many in Action” 149), and it makes sense that SKAM would not just be a story told about the group but told as a group. In Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Brian Richardson notes that “the vast majority of ‘we’ texts valorize collective identity in no uncertain terms; ‘we’ is almost always a favoured term and a desirable subject position that is to be sought out and inhabited” (50). Although SKAM very clearly focalizes the narration through an individual in the group, except for in the last clip, the individuals’ roles as a member of one or several groups is frequently highlighted, not least by the frequent group shots. We very often see the five girls together in a shot, but we also see other groups: the PepsiMax girls, with their long blonde hair, the Penetrator boys in slow motion shots, or the Balloon Squad boys together at the gym as the five girls gape at them (Figure 2). Screenshots of group chats are also an important narrative element (Figure 3): The parties that conclude each season are also a way of pulling out the narrative focalization to show the different groups of friends as a collective. This alternation between individual and collective, or small group and large group, is also noted by Fludernik as a common strategy in we-novels, and particularly in depictions of crowds (“Many in Action” 147). The crowd is most visible in SKAM in the parties. While the school yard and canteen also have many people present, they tend to stand or sit in separate groups, whereas parties are crowded, and individuals move between groups. There is often a play between moments of community, when the lead character is shown feeling at one with the group, and moments of feeling alone. For instance, in season 4, Sana is shown as separate from the group when she goes into a room by herself to pray during a party, as well as in the meeting with the PepsiMax Girls (Figure 4). The party where Sana’s world crumbles, in season 4, episode 5, or the video clip published on May 12, 2017, very clearly shows the oscillation between being alone and being part of a group. The clip starts with standard party shots. Sana is distracted, hoping that Yousef will arrive at the party, and is shown ignoring her girlfriends as she texts her brother (he and Yousef are friends, and part of a group of five boys known as the Balloon Squad, as they were once shown with a big bunch of helium balloons) to ask where they are (Figure 5). Some people are singing karaoke, and soon it is Even’s turn. As he begins to sing “Imagine,” Sana and her friends turn toward him and smile, united again. The camera shows Even winking at Isak, his boyfriend, and then cuts to Isak and the other boys in their gang smiling encouragingly at Even, clearly showing this group’s togetherness and care for each other (Figure 6). Then, we see Yousef and the other Balloon Squad boys arrive, filmed from Sana’s point of view, quickly followed by a cut to a shot of Sana smiling toward Yousef. But then we see Even, also looking toward the Balloon Squad boys, suddenly unsure and alone. He stops singing—but Isak walks up and sings for him, and Even starts singing again as first Isak and his close friends and then the whole room sing together. These few minutes show the precariousness but also the safety of the group, where individuals fall out of the collective and are pulled back into it again and again, and for different reasons. Sana is in love, while Even is worried about the resurfacing of old complications that he has not shared with his current friends. But it does not matter, because they are part of a group of people who care for each other. “A brotherhood of men,” the characters sing, as people hug and kiss, and Sana smiles to her friend Chris, “sharing all the world.” Unfortunately for Sana, the cohesion of the collective is shattered in the next few minutes, as four different sets of misunderstandings and betrayals unfold in rapid succession. Sana’s isolation is sudden, complicated, and dramatic, but it is also temporary, to be worked through and resolved by the final episode of the season. Although SKAM is not a we-narrative in its entireity, it has strong elements of collective storytelling. The following explores how this collective “we” is narrated, particularly looking at the way the audience’s world and the fictional world are positioned as mirror images of each other through temporality and the use of social media. The fictional time of SKAM perfectly matched the time of the audience, which is unusual or impossible in conventional narratives in print or on television or cinema screens. Generally, narrative time moves faster or sometimes more slowly than the reader or viewer’s time, with prolepses and analepses complicating the temporality. In SKAM, not only do the autumn, winter, and spring of the fictional world match the seasons of the actual viewer (at least in Norway), but even the weekdays and times of day match perfectly. So, the video from the final Eid party in the last episode was released on the actual evening of Eid al-Fitr on June 24, 2017, at 10:45 pm, a minute after sunset in Oslo that day. The shared temporality between the audience and the fictional characters allows the audience to experience the characters as peers. Social media scholars often refer to the “ambient intimacy” that social media allows for (Reichelt), and SKAM designed a narrative where viewers could feel this continuous, ambient sense of connection with the fictional characters, and importantly, with other fans. We knew that video clips and chats that were published on a school day would be different from those published on a weekend or on a holiday. When most Norwegian viewers were on their Easter break, and probably either skiing in the mountains or feeling as though everyone else was enjoying sun and snow in the mountains, we saw the girls from SKAM at a mountain cabin trying to have a great Easter holiday themselves. The frequent release of episodes that match narrative time is emphasized by the show’s creators as “real time publishing” (Magnus), and as Vilde Sundet notes, it is a way of erasing boundaries between the fictional and actual worlds. Following other peoples’ stories in real time is of course something we are familiar with from social media, but it is also a technique that was pioneered years ago in electronic literature. An early example was Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger, which was published serially in a discussion forum on the WELL starting in 1986, and in email and SMS narratives in the early 2000s (Rettberg, “Email Novels”). Real-time publication has been less common for transmedia shows that originate with a traditional television broadcaster. Some very popular shows have used the internet to share extra material between seasons (e.g., Lost 2004–10) or for fictional social media accounts for characters in the show, but in these cases social media has provided extra information rather than being used to distribute the main narrative. While shows similar to SKAM, like the UK Skins (2007–12), used webisodes to keep fans’ attention between seasons (Grandío), SKAM very strictly limited the time in which material is published, with no material published between seasons except a trailer for the next season. This concentration on the time of the narrative makes the seasons more intense. Fans often use Twitter as a “backchannel” for discussing televised events or shows. As Highfield, Harrington, and Bruns note, fan activity on Twitter depends upon synchronized viewing: “Users’ ability to participate in the real-time social media conversation around shared texts is crucially dependent on parallel, synchronized viewing by large audiences, thus providing a strong incentive for the live viewing even of pre-recorded programming” (317–18). By providing daily content, SKAM allowed fan activity to be continuous and synchronized. Highfield et al. describe fans’ use of Twitter during the Eurovision broadcast as “audiencing,” which they define as “the public performance of belonging to the distributed audience for a shared media event” (315). Clearly this is an aspect of SKAM’s fans’ activity on social media as well, but while Eurovision fans tweet in ways that mark their belonging to particular groups, for instance as fans of a particular artist, SKAM fans more typically tweet about their emotional investment in the story, or they offer comparisons and analyses of the story. Episodic narratives are often structured around cliffhangers that keep readers or viewers waiting for resolution. SKAM uses this, of course, but the irregular pace of clips and screenshots published on the site made the cliffhangers even more exciting. Fans were not just waiting for the next full episode on Friday night; they were checking the website regularly to see whether an awaited event had happened. They also needed to stay up to date with the story, or risk seeing spoilers in social media. There was no automated alert that the main website had been updated, but there were Facebook groups dedicated to letting fans know when new content had been posted to the official website. Many of the awaited fictional events occurred in social media, so the audience’s waiting to find out about a fictional event in social media mirrored the fictional characters’ experience of waiting for a text or a phone call, which again mirrors the audiences’ own experiences of such waiting. A notable example is the wait for William to respond to Noora’s many frantic texts and calls after he found out that his brother might have raped her in season 2. Noora is the main character in this season, and she and William have finally become lovers. In a two-and-a-half-minute video clip posted to the website on Friday, May 20, 2016, (so doubling as the final clip of S02E10), Noora learns that William’s brother has told William that he had sex with Noora. William confronts Noora but walks out on her before she manages to tell him the whole story (Figure 7). Over the weekend, we are shown many screenshots of unanswered and increasingly frantic texts from Noora to William, and between Noora and her friends, discussing why William has not answered. The hashtag #williammåsvare (“William must answer”) was used in a group chat between the girls on the official website33. “Vandrende Rompehull,” 23 May, 2017, 8:59 pm., http://skam.p3.no/2016/05/23/vandrende-rompehull/. and took off among fans on Twitter on the Tuesday night. By Wednesday, the hashtag was so popular that national newspapers started reporting on it: “Everyone wants to know what will happen to Noora and William,” the major daily newspaper Dagbladet reported (Graatrud). The same day, NRK released a new video clip titled #williammåsvare, thus incorporating the hashtag, and indirectly, the fan conversations, into the main narrative. At this stage, the “we-narrative” is still subtle. We see it in the feedback between the use of the hashtag by fans and fictional characters. Maybe we can also read it in the camera angle of the final shot of the scene where William walks out on Noora. The season is focalized through Noora, so usually we only see what is happening from her point of view, but in this scene, the camera stays at the window of the high school, watching Noora chase William out of the schoolyard, trying to stop him. It might seem as though we are watching with Noora’s friends, who were with her by that window when William confronted her. But soon we see the friends running across the schoolyard, too, chasing Noora to comfort her. The camera is alone at the window, and we realize that we the viewers are also alone. The fictional characters have left us, and we cannot follow them (Figure 8). A song plays as William rushes out the door and across the school yard, a snippet from “Noe bedre” (“Something Better”) by Feit’n fra Kolbotn. He only trusts himself, Feit’n raps, because he has learned that no one is there “when you really need help.” Unlike in season 4, where the protagonist Sana is isolated from the group, in the second season it is William, the protagonist’s boyfriend, who isolates himself due to misunderstandings and lack of communication. Noora and her friends try to reintegrate him into the group, but he runs away. The narration of the party in season 4 does not really include the viewer other than emotionally, though, whereas the camera angle at the end of the clip aligns the viewer with the external focalizer of the event. As viewers, we are visually isolated from the group by the distant perspective of the camera. As William disappears from the screen, we see Noora and her friends so small down on the school yard, and we viewers are left alone, unable to help. We are no longer held close to the characters we care about, but are kept at a distance, helplessly unable to mend the shattered collective. The fictional world of SKAM did not just mirror the audience’s world in terms of time; it also mirrored the media of the narration. Parts of the story were told in social media, which is a central site for real-life relationships and friendships, especially among teens. Text messages were the most important form of nonvideo narration, and these were shown as overlays over video when they occurred during video clips (Figure 5) and as screenshots on the website when shown in addition to the video content (Figure 3) Several of the fictional characters were also active on Instagram and YouTube, platforms where the audience is also active. The style of narration in social media very closely mirrored the ways teens actually use social media. For instance, when Sana was feeling frustrated and unable to make a choice in the middle of season 4, she posted an image of tangled earbuds to her Instagram, with the text, “when you’re being tested” (Figure 9). This metaphorical use of social media is known as social steganography (boyd; Marwick and boyd), and is a common strategy used to share information with close friends without making the topic obvious to everyone else. Viewers of SKAM knew exactly what Sana was referring to, of course, and would thus feel included, as though they were close friends. The familiarity of the rhetorical move has a secondary effect too: By mirroring the viewers own social media practice, the fictional world seems to melt into the viewers’ actual world. Swedish viewers interviewed in the middle of season 4 by students Emelie Bengtsson and Rebecka Källquist said the fictional characters’ Instagram accounts made the characters feel more real. “It’s as though Isak is just anybody on Instagram. It doesn’t feel styled” (Det är som att Isak är som vem som helst på Instagram. Det känns inte styleat heller), one informant said. When another informant noted that it did not add anything to the story, the first agreed, but added, “But it really strengthens their personalities. Jonas is real, in a way, both on Instagram and in the clips. It makes them deep.” (Men det stärker verkligen deras personligheter. Jonas är ju verkligen på ett sätt, både på Instagram och i avsnitten. Det ger dom djup) (38). I often scroll and don’t check very carefully but just register, like, “Oh, some people went out last night” … So if I had the SKAM-characters in my feed I’d easily mix up if it was someone I’d seen on TV or someone I know or maybe my sister. (För jag gör ofta så att jag scrollar och inte kollar jättenoga men ändå lite någonstans registrerar typ “ja, men det var någon som var ute där igår kväll” … Och har man då Skam-karaktärerna i sitt flöde då hade jag lätt kunnat blanda ihop om det var någon jag sett på TV som varit där eller om det var någon jag känner eller var det kanske min syster.) (38) While binging the show is all-consuming in one way, watching the show in real time is all-consuming in another, but with the show itself replaced by the hour a day you spend Google Translating the transmedia elements and another few hours sifting through fan speculation or chatting with fellow viewers on Twitter. (McNutt) The narrative structure of SKAM is quite complex, and the full narrative experience includes the viewers. The fan activity is an extradiegetic level to the core narrative. As shown in Figure 10, the official website (skam.p3.no) is not the only place the story plays out. There is a fairly clear division between the diegetic level, or the story of the fictional characters, and the extradiegetic level, which is the frame story of the viewers and actors who are outside of the fiction. The official website contains most, but not all, of the diegetic content, as well as audience comments on each post, which belong to the extradiegetic level. Other diegetic material is available at other sites, such as the official YouTube and Instagram accounts of fictional characters and the full television episodes, which were published on the main NRK website and broadcast on linear television. Then, there is a mass of extradiegetic material produced by fans and also by the actors and creators of the show. This includes Instagram accounts belonging to actors and creators and accounts on various social media run by fans that offer fan art, fan fiction, discussions, archives, translations, interpretations, and translations. There is interaction between the diegetic and extradiegetic levels that blurs the boundaries between the actual and fictional worlds. When fans comment supportively to Instagram posts made by the fictional characters, they take on the role of confidante or friend, a peer to the characters. Steffen Krüger and Gry Rustad use the example of when Eva, the lead character in the first season, posts a selfie on Instagram showing her face half buried under her pillow, with a text explaining that she doesn’t want to go to the Halloween party (@evamo
Referência(s)