Measuring and Narrating the Disrupted Self on Instagram

The chapter explores how quantification is important for storytelling on social media through acts of self-measurement in posts shared by cancer patients. These self-measurements are aimed at positioning the self in a progressive time of hope and at inviting followers to support the patient’s movement towards a cure—and even to keep the teller in sync with the ideal of recovery. This logic of ‘teleological counting’ can be disturbed by various forms of ‘frustrated counting’ when progression is stalled or by the ‘tellability crisis’ occurring when the counting process reaches its goal and the narrative contract between teller and followers must be renegotiated. The chapter concludes that counting practices can be analytically approached as a way of adapting cancer storytelling to the affordances of Instagram.