Article published in:
Storytelling in the Digital Age: New challenges
Edited by Anna De Fina and Sabina Perrino
[Narrative Inquiry 27:2] 2017
► pp. 311–333

Sharing the moment as small stories

The interplay between practices & affordances in the social media-curation of lives

| King’s College London
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.
Keywords: narrative stancetaking, story-linking, Facebook statuses, selfies, algorithms, showing the moment, knowing participation, Snapchat Stories
Published online: 19 October 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.27.2.06geo
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