Chapter published in:
The Construction of ‘Ordinariness’ across Media Genres
Edited by Anita Fetzer and Elda Weizman
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 307] 2019
► pp. 179–205

Constructing ‘ordinariness’

An analysis of Jack Ma’s narrative identities on Sina Weibo

| Fujian Normal University, China
| Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, China

In this chapter, we attempt, inspired by Sacks’ (1984) discussion of “doing being ordinary”, to explore and expound the means and purposes celebrities do “being ordinary” on social media and the related notions of narrative in digital communication and narrative identity. These notions are conceptualized with reference to the Chinese business mogul Jack Ma’s means of doing ordinary things vs. doing things ordinarily on Sina Weibo through the social media’s affordance of multimodal resources. What emerges in the course of data analysis is our proposed sense of doing being ordinary, i.e., the observation of the order of things. Our analysis shows that storytelling serves as an important pragmatic strategy in Jack Ma’s doing “being ordinary” on Weibo and that most of Ma’s posts turn out to be “extraordinarily carefully regulated sorts of things” (Sacks 1984: 428), which aim to project, present and/or preserve Jack Ma’s various positive narrative identities.

Keywords: social media, doing being ordinary, impression management, genre, storytelling, narrative identity, identity construction, order of things
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The intricacies of doing “being ordinary”
  • 3.Analytical framework for doing “being ordinary” online
    • 3.1Internet pragmatics and genres
    • 3.2Narrative and narrative identity in digital communication
  • 4.Data
  • 5.Data analysis
    • 5.1Doing “being ordinary” in self-claimed identities
    • 5.2Doing “being ordinary” in projected identities
      • 5.2.1Jack Ma as a business mogul
      • 5.2.2Jack Ma as Alibaba CEO
      • 5.2.3Jack Ma as a football fan
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.307.08xie
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