THE TRANSFORMATION OF NARRATIVE IN THE AGE OF DATA REGIMES

Author: Dr Ferhat Atik

ABSTRACT

With the centralization of digital platforms in everyday life, narrative has begun to lose its historically established functions as a meaning-making structure, a vehicle of identity formation, and a carrier of social memory. Rather than operating as a reflective practice through which individual and collective experience is interpreted within temporal continuity, narrative is increasingly reconfigured as a measurable, optimizable, and economically valorized content form. In particular, the dominance of data-driven algorithmic systems in the field of communication has fundamentally altered the epistemological status of narrative: what circulates as “story” is increasingly evaluated through metrics of attention, engagement, retention, and shareability. This study critically examines the transformation of contemporary narrative through the conceptual framework of data regimes. Data regimes refer not merely to technical infrastructures or digital tools but to integrated power formations in which economic interests, ideological orientations, and cultural norms converge. Under these regimes, narrative ceases to function as a structure that seeks truth through interpretation and instead becomes a mechanism of data generation shaped by the imperatives of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017) and surveillance-based value extraction (Zuboff, 2019). Moreover, data regimes do not simply “use” narratives; they reorganize the very conditions under which narrative becomes intelligible, visible, and socially consequential—through algorithmic ranking, modulation, and predictive governance (Bucher, 2018; Pasquale, 2015). Drawing on theories of surveillance capitalism, network society, algorithmic power, performative identity, and digital publicness, the article offers a multi-layered analysis demonstrating how narrative’s historical attributes—depth, continuity, context, and silence—are systematically eroded. It argues that narrative in the age of data regimes is experiencing not only a formal transformation but a profound epistemological and ontological crisis, necessitating a rethinking of narrative’s capacity for knowledge production (van Dijck, 2014). In this respect, the article contributes a conceptual and critical intervention to communication studies by reframing narrative as a contested site where power reorganizes time, subjectivity, and truth in datafied publics.

Keywords: data regimes; digital narrative; algorithms; platform capitalism; communication; transformation

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