they have control over the world’, and stories ‘inform our emotional lives’, helping us to gain empathy and conscience (Delistraty, 2014). One of the reasons that experts offer for the decline in the influence of the novel, then, is that the Western culture’s desire for a narrative is increasingly being fulfilled through non-fictional or semi-fictional media. This includes the rise of what is referred to by sociologists as ‘infotainment’, a hybrid of informational and entertainment-led narratives often exemplified in social media, newspapers and magazines, and television programmes like America’s ‘The Daily Show’ which report and comment on the news or give semi-fictional interviews in a comedic or satirical manner. As Rachel Donadio argues in her August 2005 article for ‘The New York Times’: ‘The Truth is Stronger than Fiction’, this means that ‘the line between truth and “truth” is growing ever more blurry, readers thirst for a narrative’…’and will turn to the most compelling one’. Similarly, because of the quick, constantly- updating nature of modern news reporting and social media, it is becoming impossible for novels, which can take years to write, edit and publish, to be as topical and therefore as ‘compelling’ as informational or ‘infotaining’ narratives that become available in seconds. The growth of social media as a source of not only personal news narratives, but also as a vessel for learning, sharing and commenting on public news stories within seconds of their occurrence, is an especially modern example of non-fiction narratives engaging and fulfilling in the ways that Delistraty describes fictional ones doing.

Social media and news narratives have another modern advantage: they are often short, concise, and explicit, and so don’t require very much time commitment on the reader’s part to fully understand them. Facebook, for example, provides an onscreen tab of headlines that users can hover over for a 10 word summary of a story as it takes place, and Twitter only allows its users to communicate in 140 characters or fewer. This means that indivi