Online retellings and the viral transformation of a twitter breakup story

The retelling and sharing of stories is not a new phenomenon. Many narrative analysts have devoted research to these processes. But the culture of participation (Jenkins 2006) in the digital world has brought sharing to a completely new level by allowing users not only to broadcast their opinions and evaluations of a story but also to reappropriate it and recontextualize it in infinite recursions. We focus on such process of transformation of a narrative in different media and social media outlets through the analysis of the viral spread of a story posted by an individual Twitter user in 2015. Specifically, we illustrate how participation frameworks change from one retelling to another and how the original story becomes "nested" into a new meta-story centered on the twitter user as a character and on the viral spread of the story.