Social Media in Contemporary Novels

Abstract

Social media are modern means of communication, allowing people to share information. They can be a useful tool for chatting and approaching other people, but at the same time they may become a tool of control and power. Many contemporary American novels deal with the topic of social media as a particularly topical problem. One of them, The Circle, a novel written by a twenty-first-century American writer Dave Eggers, depicts a story of a young girl who uses social media and experiences their negative influence on the society. Other interesting American novels examining the problematics of social media from different angles are Feed by M. T. Anderson, Need by Joel Charbonneau, and Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. All of these books depict social media in a hypothetical future. The aim of this paper is to analyse in detail social media in novel The Circle, supplemented with the information about social media from other novels. The objective of the thesis is to show how social media influence moral aspects and humanity from the dystopian point of view.