Sharing the moment live, a built-in logic of many social networking sites, is, I claim, an invitation for creating plots, which has led to systematic practices. I single out taking a narrative stance on Facebook as such a practice and show the interplay between key-norms and evolving media affordances for pre-selection of story ingredients, localization, visualization of the experience, and audience selection. These contribute to showing the moment as opposed to telling it, with selected friends serving as knowing co-narrators and with story-linking allowing for allusive, transmedia links. I review these practices in the context of increased story facilities that notably bring together several social media apps. I argue that although this curation promises a move beyond the moment, it ultimately serves to consolidate sharing-lives-in-the-moment. I reflect on the implications of this for the direction of travel in relation to stories on many social media platforms.
Barton, D. & Lee, C. (2013). Language online. London, UK: Routledge.
boyd, d. (2010). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), Networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39–58). New York: Routledge.
Beer, D. (2009). Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. New Media & Society,
11
1, 985–1002.
Bell, A. (2001). “Back in style: Reworking audience design”. In Eckert, P. & Rickford, J. R. (Eds.), Style and sociolinguistic variation (pp. 139–168). Cambridge: CUP.
Berry, D. M. (2011). The philosophy of software: Code and mediation in the digital age. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bolter, D. J., & Grusin, R. (1998). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Brockmeier, J. (2015). Beyond the archive. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bucher, T. (2012). Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook. New Media & Society,
14
1, 1164–1180.
Chun Hui Kyong, W. (2009). Programmed visions: Software and memory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Constine, J. (2016). Instagram launches ‘stories’, a snapchatty feature for imperfect sharing. [URL]
Cooper, S. (2016). Snapchat versus instagram: The war of the stories. [URL]
De Fina, A., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2012). Analyzing narrative: Discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge: CUP.
Eyar, N. (2014). Hooked. New York: Penguin Portfolio.
Genette, G. (1980). Narrative discourse. New York: Cornell University Press.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2013b). Small stories research as a framework for the study of social media practices: Narrative stancetaking and circulation in a Greek news story. Sociolinguistica,
27
1, 19–36.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2014). Small stories transposition & social media: A micro-perspective on the ‘Greek crisis’. Discourse & Society,
25
1, 519–539.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2015). Sharing as rescripting. Place manipulations on YouTube between narrative and social media affordances. Discourse, Context & Media,
9
1, 64–72.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2016a). From writing the self to posting self(ies): A small stories approach to selfies. Open Linguistics,
2
1, 300–317.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2016b). Friendly comments: Interactional displays of alignment on Facebook and YouTube. In Leppänen, S., Kytölä, S. & Westinen, E. (Eds.), Discourse and identification: diversity and heterogeneity in social media practices (pp. 178–207). London: Routledge.
Gerlitz, C., & Helmond, A. (2013). The Like economy: Social buttons and the data-intensive web. New Media & Society,
15
1, 1348–13645.
Gibson, J. (1977). The theory of affordances. In Shaw, R. & Bransford, J. (eds.) Perceiving, acting, and knowing. Hillsdale, NJ: Elrbaum. 127–143.
Hine, C., Kendall, L., & boyd, d. (2009). Question one: How can qualitative internet researchers define the boundaries of their projects? In Markham, A. N. & Baym, N. K. (Eds.), Internet inquiry: Conversations about method (pp. 1–20). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Jaffe, A. (2009). (Ed.) Sociolinguistic perspectives on stance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jefferson, G. (1978). Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. In Schenkein, J. (Ed.), Studies in the organisation of conversational interaction (pp. 219–249). New York: Academic Press.
Jones, R. H. (2016). Surveillance. In Georgakopoulou, A. & Spilloti, T. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language and digital communication (pp. 408–411). London: Routledge.
Kaun, A., & Stiernstedt, F. (2014). Facebook time: Technological and institutional affordances for media memories. New Media & Society,
16
1, 1154–1168.
Kitchin, R., & Dodge, M. (2011). Code/space: Software and everyday life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Markham, A. N. (2013). Remix culture, remix methods: Reframing qualitative inquiry for social media contexts. In Denzin, N. & Giardina, M. (Eds.), Global dimensions of qualitative inquiry (pp. 63–81). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Page, R. (2012). Stories and social media. London: Routledge.
2024. “It seemed right to keep some sort of history”: Performances of Digital Memory Work by Young Women in London During Covid-19. In The COVID-19 Pandemic and Memory [Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, ], ► pp. 23 ff.
Papa, Venetia & Nikandros loannidis
2023. Reviewing the impact of Facebook on civic participation: The mediating role of algorithmic curation and platform affordances. The Communication Review 26:3 ► pp. 277 ff.
Pool, Steve, Jennifer Rowsell & Yun Sun
2023. Towards literacies of immanence: Getting closer to sensory multimodal perspectives on research. Multimodality & Society 3:2 ► pp. 130 ff.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra
2022. Co-opting Small Stories on Social Media: A Narrative Analysis of the Directive of Authenticity. Poetics Today 43:2 ► pp. 265 ff.
2022. “People Inside”: Creating Digital Community Projects on the YARN Platform. In The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities, ► pp. 357 ff.
Roine, Hanna-Riikka & Laura Piippo
2022. Social Networking Sites as Contexts for Uses of Narrative: Toward a Story-Critical Approach to Digital Environments. Poetics Today 43:2 ► pp. 335 ff.
Blitvich, Pilar Garcés-Conejos & Alex Georgakopoulou
2021. Analysing Identity. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 293 ff.
Muñoz-Rodríguez, José Manuel, Arsenio Dacosta & Judith Martín-Lucas
2021. Digital Natives or Digital Castaways? Processes of Constructing and Reconstructing Young People’s Digital Identity and Their Educational Implications. In Identity in a Hyperconnected Society, ► pp. 15 ff.
Pilt, Maili
2021. “You Have No Story, Yet!” The Role of the Online Community in Shaping Women’s ‘My Stories’ About the Journey to Motherhood. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics 15:2 ► pp. 135 ff.
Silva, Jose, Daniel Raposo, João Neves, Rita Almendra, Daniel Brandão & Nuno Martins
2021. Narrative Benchmarking in Scenario Assessments for Digital Design. In Advances in Ergonomics in Design [Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, 261], ► pp. 3 ff.
Agarwal, Shantenu, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Oliver C. Robinson, Abigail Dunn & Lyle H. Ungar
2020. Examining the Phenomenon of Quarter-Life Crisis Through Artificial Intelligence and the Language of Twitter. Frontiers in Psychology 11
Anna De Fina & Alexandra Georgakopoulou
2020. The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies,
Fina, Anna De & Alexandra Georgakopoulou
2020. Rethinking Narrative: Tellers, Tales and Identities in Contemporary Worlds. In The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies, ► pp. 91 ff.
Georgakopoulou, Alex
2020. Small Stories Research and Narrative Criminology: ‘Plotting’ an Alliance. In Conflicting Narratives of Crime and Punishment, ► pp. 43 ff.
Georgakopoulou, Alex
2021. Designing stories on social media: A corpus-assisted critical perspective on the mismatches of story-curation. Linguistics and Education 62 ► pp. 100737 ff.
Georgakopoulou, Alex
2021. Small stories as curated formats on social media: The intersection of affordances, values & practices. System 102 ► pp. 102620 ff.
Georgakopoulou, Alex
2023. Online translinguistic practices of the Global South through the lens of ordinariness: Reflections on some extra-ordinary insights. Discourse, Context & Media 54 ► pp. 100712 ff.
Georgakopoulou, Alex, Stefan Iversen & Carsten Stage
2020. Analysing Quantified Stories on Social Media. In Quantified Storytelling, ► pp. 1 ff.
2020. Stories and design in tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 83 ► pp. 102950 ff.
Perrino, Sabina & Rachelle Jereza
2020. “They are just a danger”: Racialized ideologies in Northern Italy and the Philippines. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2020:265 ► pp. 33 ff.
Park, Joseph Sung‐Yul
2019. Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement. American Anthropologist 121:2 ► pp. 403 ff.
Robinson, Oliver C.
2019. Using longitudinal designs and online micro-narrative data to further our understanding of biography and the life course. Advances in Life Course Research 41 ► pp. 100279 ff.
Walkington, Zoe, Graham Pike, Ailsa Strathie, Catriona Havard, Virginia Harrison & Hayley Ness
2019. Entitlement to Tell on Police Facebook Sites. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 22:5 ► pp. 355 ff.
2021. Topics and Settings in Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 247 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.