Georgakopoulou, Iversen, & Stage invite readers to rethink concepts such as narrative, interaction, tellership, and tellability, as well as the active role of numbers in and as social media stories. The authors draw attention to the power dynamics of quantified storytellings, especially how metrics and social media storytelling are intertwined, (re)producing larger social discourses, positioning identities according to specific values, within a tension between agency-focused and structure-focused positions. Thus, the authors underline the porous boundaries between user-generated content, interface logics, and algorithmic processing. Through such a lens, metrics are agentive tools. Through quantification processes, acts of inclusion and exclusion are (re)produced. Once they make narrative practices available and visible, they also silence other ones.

For the authors, the affordances of social media platforms organize social life. In this vein, the authors deal with personalized storytelling practices and collective interaction on a variety of social media platforms, such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit. For instance, they delineate how and with what effects self-measurement is developed as an integrated part of illness narratives on social media. By this token, counting is seen as an act of affectively orientating the self towards a potential future, of mastering its unpredictability. Measuring the self is seen as a navigational device, a way of transforming the affective value of the treatment and escaping the chaos. However, these processes also highlight how storytelling is shaped by media ecologies and how these logics reproduce limited notions of culturally desirable behaviors.

Accordingly, the authors argue that storytelling practices have increasingly been adapted to the algorithmic realities of social media platforms, influencing the way these realities develop. The metricized affordances of the platforms also affect the way narrative and rhetorical strategies are deployed. The authors explain that interface metrics and algorithmic metrics organize the distribution of visibility on media platforms and consequently impact on what is considered valuable, which includes the presentation of circulated stories as facts and the promotion of ideological views. This leads to changes that story genres and practices are undergoing, to distinctive types of platformed storytelling and the intermingling of metrics and practices of storytelling.

In addition, the authors delineate the role of metrics in the design of stories as distinct features on apps, especially how these metrics create preferential conditions (directives) for the consumption and production of stories. Seen this way, directives supported by app's features, tools, and functionality encourage certain actions, pushing users towards specific interactional and communicative practices. This process underlines complex matters such as the access and the (in)visiblity of tellers, tales, and audiences, including what types of stories and ways of presenting the self are valued on the platforms. Moreover, it shows how users try to make sense of digital worlds through agentive strategic adaptations. The book stands for an imperative necessity to reflect about equating participation in digital media with democratization, engaging readers in new narrative formats and the pervasive way quantification has entered our lives. It mobilizes a rethinking of key concepts, contributing to storytelling research and social media studies.