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(SMALL) STORIES ONLINE

The intersection of affordances and practices

Alexandra Georgakopoulou

Situating online stories in discourse analysis

The concepts of ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ come with long and contested histories in diverse dis-
ciplinary traditions. A detailed discussion of the terminological and conceptual differences
between ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is worth noting that, in
my discussion, I will reserve the term ‘narrative’ for referring to the formal object of inquiry in
fields such as narratology and narrative analysis, while I will employ the term ‘story/stories’ to
refer to everyday life storytelling practices. My starting point in this chapter is that any current
discussion of storytelling needs to acknowledge the fact that the landscape of narrative studies
in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics has changed radically since the turn of the millennium.
To situate then current discourse analytic work on stories online, I will first highlight certain
key changes in the conceptualization of storytelling within narrative analysis. These changes
involve a re-thinking of the mainstay ways of defining, exploring and studying stories, in par-
ticular, vis-à-vis the role of: the teller, story-ownership and the personal experiences story; time
and space/place in stories; tellability (the point and worthiness of a story); and, finally, the place
of stories themselves in the contemporary world (for details, see De Fina and Georgakopoulou,
2020). In brief, viewing the teller as a sole entity, in control and possession of their story, has
given way to contextual approaches that view stories as co-constructed and negotiable accounts
between teller and audiences (e.g. Ochs and Capps, 2001). In a similar vein, the organization
of a story, including its tellability, are viewed as situated and emergent in acts of commu-
nication, rather than as inherent to a particular subject-matter or story topic and point. In
turn, tellers’ identities have been increasingly understood as being intricately connected with a
story’s local purposes, and with participation roles pertinent to them. This shift to interactional
approaches to identities – or, as often called, identities-in-interaction – stresses the multiplicity,
fragmentation, context-specificity and performativity of storytelling practices (see De Fina and
Georgakopoulou, 2012: Chapter 6). It is notable that, in parallel with these developments,
narratologists have also gradually moved away from the text- and structure-based heritage from
French structuralism, including its tendency to focus on fictional, literary narratives. Currently,
so-called postclassical narratologies have, instead, turned their attention to the contexts and
materialities of stories, focusing for instance on the role of rhetorical strategies and of ideologies
in shaping stories (e.g. Iversen and Nielsen, 2017; Phelan, 1996).

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This re-thinking of narrative has partly been the result of the increasing resonance of con-
textual, practice-based approaches to language and discourse and partly been necessitated and
precipitated by major socio-cultural changes, including mobility, globalization and social media
communication, which is the focus of this chapter. One paradigm that has been instrumental
in opening up the lens of narrative analysis so as to be able to scrutinize and account for such
changes has been that of small stories research. Small stories research is a paradigm for narrative
and identities analysis that has been developed by this author and, in the early stages, in collab-
oration with Michael Bamberg (e.g. Bamberg, 2006; Georgakopoulou, 2006, 2007; Bamberg
and Georgakopoulou, 2008). It was initially put forth as a counter-move to dominant models
of narrative studies that defined narrative restrictively, on the basis of language and text-based
criteria, such as the use of past tense for temporally sequenced events, and in this way privileged
a specific type of narrative, namely long, relatively uninterrupted, teller-led accounts of past
events or of one’s life story, typically elicited in research interview situations. In previous work
(Georgakopoulou, 2007), I made the case for the significance in everyday life of the hitherto
neglected small stories, as part of the fabric of social practices that ordinary people engage
in. I therefore highlighted the need for small stories, be they in conversational or interview
contexts, to be included in the remit of narrative and identity analysis, as equally worthy data as
the life stories that had monopolized the attention of narrative studies.
In recent work, I have argued (Georgakopoulou, 2016) that small stories research prefigured
the current situation of the proliferation of stories that fit the definition of ‘small stories’ on
social media. To be specific, stories on social media tend to be brief or signaled elliptically;
they are more often than not about very recent and ongoing events and they are open-ended
and transportable. They are also multiply authored and contested, often across contexts, thus
destabilizing the close link between one teller and their experience. Finally, there is a tendency
for reporting mundane, ordinary and even trivial events from the teller’s everyday life, rather
than big complications or disruptions. This dominance of types of small stories on social media
is closely linked with the affordances of social media, defined as perceived possibilities and
constraints for action (Barton and Lee, 2013: 27, citing Gibson, 1977), mainly the portability,
replicability and scalability (cf. amplification) of content. But above all, platforms’ and users’
predilection for small stories is shaped by what I have claimed to be a built in, algorithmically
preferred logic of platforms, since their inception, that of offering users facilities that encourage
them to share in the moment, here and now. The timeliness of posts is notably a key feature
of what has been disclosed by platforms about algorithms. In a longitudinal study of how
storytelling facilities have evolved on social media, I have shown how even early features and
prompts, such as ‘what are you doing right now?’ on Facebook began to direct users to a type
of storytelling that is associated with sharing their experiences in the here and now and in short
bursts, as opposed to producing lengthy accounts about the past. As we will see below, this early
coupling of storytelling with sharing the moment has been crucial for how storytelling facil-
ities have evolved on major social media platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and
Snapchat (Georgakopoulou, 2017b).
In light of the normative status that the posting of small stories has acquired on social media,
small stories research, I have argued, is well-placed to offer a conceptual apparatus for the study
of new/social media practices that facilitate the circulation not just of personal stories, but of
public and ‘news’ stories too (Georgakopoulou, 2013). Based on how participation affordances
shape stories online, we can claim that a starting point of a narrative analysis on social media
should be the recognition that stories produced on social media normally announce and per-
form the minute-by-minute everyday life experience; are transportable and circulatable in
different sites and media (cf. transmedia distribution); are embedded into a variety of online and

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offline environments, rendering their boundaries ever so porous; are multi-semiotic and multi-
authored, addressing simultaneously different, potentially big and unforeseeable audiences.
As I will discuss below, the scarce, albeit growing, line of inquiry into stories online within
discourse analysis has confirmed the resonance of features and practices associated with small
stories (e.g. see Dayter, 2015; Giaxoglou, 2021; Page, 2012; West, 2013). Below, I will first
tease out key findings from this line of inquiry. Then, I will move to the methods I have
drawn upon, as part of extending small stories research to the investigation of stories on social
media. I will show how employing small stories research for the analysis of social media has
involved methodological choices that allow us to study stories as socio-technical, technologic-
ally designed and engineered activities, whereby users’ practices cannot be disassociated from
media affordances. To illustrate such a technographic methodology to stories, I will use as a
case study the recent turn of all major platforms to designing stories as a feature. I will specif-
ically show how the platforms’ stepping up on the design of stories leads to a speedy formatting
of stories online, that is, to the development of norms and expectations about what a typical
and valorized story is on a particular platform. Given how scarce the focus on stories online
is, including on the novel feature of stories on platforms, the aim of this chapter is more to set
beacons for further analysis, rather than to provide an overview of a critical mass, as one would
do for a phenomenon well-researched. As a result, in addition to the final section, which will
look ahead, pointing to avenues for further research, some of the discussion throughout will
have a programmatic nature.

Tales and tellings in the online economy of sharing: key insights

Drawing on latest trends within the study of narrative, as briefly outlined above, the studies that
have explored stories on social media have brought to the fore salient genres of stories and ways
of storytelling. Their findings converge on the importance of communicating recency of experi-
ence that leads to the frequency of breaking news stories (Dayter, 2015; Georgakopoulou, 2013;
Page, 2012; West, 2013). This is linked, as already suggested, with (live-)sharing affordances. As
part of the prevalence of breaking news, conventionalized story-framing devices (e.g. references
to time, place, characters and events) have been found to be used so as to tell a condensed
story or to suggest that there is a story in the making (Georgakopoulou, 2017b), in lieu of full-
fledged stories. This narrative stance-taking applies to a variety of environments from Facebook
statuses to selfies and to titles in YouTube videos. Narrativity in such cases is understood as an
emergent property, a process of becoming a story through engagement.
In addition, studies have explored the fragmentation, multi-authorship and co-construction
of stories in close connection with participation roles, practices of storytelling on the go
(Georgakopoulou, 2013) and processes of distribution that different platforms afford (e.g.
Perrino, 2017; Giaxoglou, 2017; Marques and Koven, 2017; Vásquez, 2017). At the same time,
a contextually sensitive approach followed by such studies has shed light on issues of variation of
storytelling styles and genres, according to the exigencies of different environments, regarding
for instance, the use of Facebook for doing remembering and nostalgia (Georgalou, 2015); the
development of more continuous stories on Twitter through a series of small stories (Dayter,
2015); the tendency to have stories with co-tellership in some environments more than in
others (Page, 2012).
This strand of inquiry has also been concerned with issues of methodology and analysis posed
by social media communication, in particular, with the role of multi-modality and the ways in
which it can be taken into account in the study of stories, given that traditional modes of ana-
lysis have focused on the language of storytelling (see Page, 2018). Similarly, the difficulties of

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transferring onto the online sequential, interactional models of analysis as well as ethnographic
ways of data collection have been discussed. In similar vein, emergent approaches such as online
conversation analysis and discourse-centered online ethnography have been fruitfully drawn
upon for the study of stories online (e.g. see Georgakopoulou, 2017a; papers in De Fina and
Perrino, 2017).
In terms of the participation and identities construction that stories online afford, most
early studies highlighted their positive, empowering potential for giving a voice and opportun-
ities to ordinary people, so as to share (disruptive) experiences, such as illness (e.g. Lambert,
2006). More recent studies with a similar focus on the participatory potential of stories online
have documented how distribution and multi-participation affordances of social media shape
what types of stories are told and how. Storytelling has been shown to serve as a primarily
affective mode of participation for diverse users that come together as tellers-commentators
of current affairs, for instance on Twitter, by using affordances such as hashtags that scale up
specific assessments of events and social actors (e.g. Georgakopoulou and Giaxoglou, 2018;
Papacharissi, 2015).
Emphasis on how participation and distribution affordances affect the semiotic properties of
stories has also attested to a tendency for creative, often satirical, verbal and visual re-workings
(cf. rescriptings) of a story’s plot by different audiences, as it gets distributed across sites (e.g.
Georgakopoulou, 2014, 2015). Such recontextualizations bring about different meaning-
making potentials and construct different evaluative stances on events and characters (e.g.
Perrino, 2017; Blommaert and Varis, 2015; De Fina and Gore, 2017).
Overall, studies such as the above, show that a contextual analysis of stories online needs to
take into account, when applicable, the sharing of a posting across multiple events and spaces
with multiple and unforeseen recipients and the multiple related stories that this may generate,
through media-enabled processes of linking, replicability and remixing.

Online stories as designed, ‘curated’ features: methods

Since their inception, social media platforms have recognized the power of storytelling as a
mode of self-presentation and connecting with others, and so they have been keen to offer
users facilities for telling stories. In my aforementioned study of the evolution of such facilities,
I have identified key phases in particular in so-called ego-centered platforms, such as Facebook
and Instagram (Georgakopoulou, 2017b). The first phase coincides with the launching of
social networking sites that emphasized immediacy of communication. The sites, which were
conceived as spaces for sharing the moment now, placed a premium on brevity and instantaneity
(cf. breaking news, as mentioned above). The second major design phase involved the move
from sharing the moment now in a primarily text-based way (i.e. telling the moment) to showing
the moment visually, starting with selfies (Georgakopoulou, 2016) and moving on to short video
forms integrated into previously ‘textual’ environments such as Twitter and Facebook.
Such visual affordances for storytelling paved the way to the third design phase (covering
mainly the period post-2015) during which big platforms have been turning to designing
stories as distinct features, integrated into their architecture, and named as such. The introduc-
tion of the feature of stories began on Snapchat (2014), followed by Instagram Stories (2016),
Facebook (2017), Weibo (2018) and lately, the highly similar Twitter Fleets (2020). In this phase,
platforms use and, in many ways, appropriate the term ‘story/stories’ as an attractive label that
evokes positive associations to do with the power of stories. As I have shown (Georgakopoulou,
2019), the design of stories as a feature presents certain mismatches between such associations,
that are explicitly evoked by the rhetoric of platforms about stories, and the actual affordances

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offered for them. Stories as features are notably brief, visual – i.e. photographic (e.g. seven
seconds on Instagram) and/or (live) video (15 seconds) – posts, despite the fact that they are
launched as facilities for telling stories in a more sustained and continuous way than feeds allow.
They are also heavily designed, templatized features with bundles of menus and pre-selections,
despite the fact that they are hailed by platforms as opportunities for unbridled storyteller cre-
ativity (Georgakopoulou, 2019). Sharing through stories as a feature on social media platforms
has by now surpassed sharing through newsfeeds. This unprecedented popularity of a single
feature, dubbed as a game changer for Snapchat, spans demographic groups and types of users,
from ordinary users to businesses and influencers, in the Global North and South. How-to
guides for posting ‘great’ stories proliferate and even the hierarchy of power-users has been
disrupted, for example, with new influencers emerging as top-ranking on Instagram, based on
the popularity of their stories. Stories are caught up in an unprecedented game of perpetual
change and the introduction of ever more sophisticated features. As an estimate, more than
500 million accounts use Instagram Stories every day, more than twice the users of Snapchat
Stories, and teenagers post on average four times more stories a day than any other age group.1
This popularity, resonance and wide replication of stories as a feature, I argue, both merit
and warrant scholarly attention, not least regarding the types of stories, lives and selves that
are promoted as worth sharing, and the values, views and ideologies that underpin them (see
Georgakopoulou, 2019, 2021).
Specifically, I have claimed that an interrogation of the design of stories on social media
necessitates what can be called, adapting Bucher’s terms (2018: 60), a technographic approach
to stories: a type of ethnography that attempts to trace the workings of technology and the
affordances offered for the design of stories, establishing the (dis)continuity of any choices and
updates. This requires an element of historicity, that is, tracking and identifying choices and
values in the design of stories in the context of antecedents.2 A technographic approach allows
the analyst to document the processes of the stories’ formatting: this refers to the recognizability
of jointly achieved social actions in specific settings, in this case, digital communication, where
large numbers of users, geographically dispersed and unknown to one another, enter communi-
cation stages without any prior shared history (see Blommaert et al., 2020: 55–57). The key to
formatting is, according to Blommaert et al., users’ repeated exposure to specific social actions.
As will be shown below, such actions include the platforms’ repeated directives (prompts, prefer-
ential conditions) to users, in their promotional material and in the actual design of stories, for
what types of stories to post and how.
Technography allows us to identify the design facilities, tools and functionality of stories.
There is increasing recognition within social media studies, in particular in the fields of science
and technology studies and of platform studies, that the design of features is imbued with values
(cf. ‘values in design’ perspective; Flanagan and Nissenbaum, 2014; also see Bucher, 2018).
Social media develop their architecture on the basis of ideas about who their intended users are
and what they would like those media to accomplish (e.g. Langlois, 2013; van Dijck, 2013).
The technographic approach thus entails uncovering the views and ideologies underlying a
given design. These are encoded in promotional material, companies’ briefs and blog posts,
documents that outline technical specifications of new features, media reports and interviews
with CEOs, and in occasional disclosures of how part of their algorithms work. Such material
cumulatively produces a widely circulated discourse about a feature, while also including clues
of hidden agendas, regarding its marketing and monetization.
To uncover platforms’ discourses about stories and the values in their design, I have employed
corpus-assisted discourse analytic methods, as one facet of the technographic approach to stories.
Corpus methods allow us to retrieve meanings and associations that are salient yet not obvious

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to the naked eye and which can be established only by seeking out patterns of occurrence in
a body of texts. Keywords, collocations and lexical associations are an important part of such
patterned meaning-making, bringing to the fore traces of social routines and habitual patterns
of understanding and acting (Taylor and Marchi, 2018: 61). A corpus-assisted analysis thus
allows me to undertake a critical approach to social media affordances, in connection with the
micro-analysis of users’ stories and the ethnographic tracking of changes in media affordances.
In tune with a critical discourse analytic agenda, my aim is to uncover the, often hidden within
a rhetoric of user empowerment, meanings in the discourse of apps and their offerings for
stories. I view such opaque meanings as having the potential to promote certain stories and
semiotic choices in them, making them more available than others and even normalizing them.
To this effect, I draw on the emerging critical discourse analytic work on the significance of
the platforms’ discourses, especially via their CEOs and product managers, for how users are
discursively constructed and what roles are projected for them (e.g. Hoffman et al., 2016). In
this type of corpus-assisted (critical) discourse analysis, I also bring in insights from platform
studies and science and technology studies, which study platforms as ideologically laden spaces
and socio-material actors with influence on communication (e.g. Bucher, 2018; Beer, 2009;
Kitchin and Dodge, 2011).
Using previous findings on how users adapt media facilities for sharing the moment to
produce small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2017b), I have sought to identify the extent to which
Stories3 as a distinct feature on Instagram and Snapchat and Memories on Facebook build on
or, indeed, depart from established practices. In particular, I have focused on how aspects of
plot in the Stories were talked about and what facilities were offered to users for posting stories
and sharing memories. This included what connections were made between stories and time,
what was proposed as a tellable story and how, and what modes of audience engagement were
promoted. To this effect, I compiled a corpus of online media related to the introduction and
review of Snapchat Stories (2014) and Instagram Stories (2016; for details about the corpus
compilation and analysis, see Georgakopoulou, 2019).4 The insights from the corpus-assisted
analysis in turn led me to the next phase of data collection and analysis, namely influencers’
stories (see below).
Overall, the use of technography has enabled me to uncover the directives employed by
platforms in the stories’ design and in their promotion and marketing. Directives are under-
stood as prompts to users for engaging in specific posting practices and relational actions. They
are supported by an app’s tools, features and functionality: these elements facilitate and activate
certain actions at the expense of others, weigh more and prioritize certain types of content, and
so they render specific types of posting, interaction and behavior by users as more valued and
better-suited to ensuring popularity for said users. We have shown elsewhere how a big part of
the force of directives is to be found in the metricization of users’ storytelling activities. This
refers to the numerous visible and invisible metrics and analytics that support and are generated
by stories, for instance, number of views, shares, as well as a host of algorithmic calculations that
shape individual users’ experiences of storytelling online, including what stories they engage
with (for details, see Georgakopoulou et al., 2020).

Small stories as formatted genres online

Directives, as described above, should not be seen as positing a deterministic use of stories
as a feature. Users as agentive communicators tweak algorithms, strategize and differ in their
actions and preferences; as a result, they have the potential to push a platform and its features
in un-anticipated directions. That said, they also feel pressure to comply with directives, as that

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often gives them the best algorithmically computed chance to become and stay popular. This
compliance, in turn, has the potential to render specific communication practices normative, in
the sense of widely available and sought after. In the light of this, studying the development of
recognizable norms for stories online, their formatting, requires a dual focus on directives, as part
pat
of media affordances, and on specific users’ storytelling practices. Influencers5 as hyper-popular
power-users were in my study the first point of entry into such practices for two reasons: the
style and content of their communication, including their stories, are highly emulated by
ordinary users; the platforms themselves tend to evolve their features based on their practices,
indeed on their resistances too (cf. Abidin, 2018; Bucher, 2018). On Instagram, influencers are
clearly positioned as MVPs (Most Valuable Players), as their privileged access to story-analytics
and other exclusive features shows (see Georgakopoulou et al., 2020: Chapter 4). Influencers
therefore play a key role in the authorization (cf. naturalization, legitimation, see Jaffe (2011))
of story-directives, serving as model-setters and cultural mediators between the platforms’
promoted template stories and the users.
My ongoing study of influencers’ Instagram Stories has involved distinct phases of auto-
matic collection during which Stories, as multi-modal data, have been mined (with Python
automated
command lines and Instaloader) from two, largely representative, cases of female6 influencers.
This collection has generated a corpus of around 5000 stories (for details on the study, see
Georgakopoulou, 2021; 2022, in press). It is worth noting here that the coding of stories on
NVivo12 has included metadata (e.g. time of posting), types of captions, language of choice
in captions, interactive elements (e.g. swipe up features, stickers), format of Stories (e.g. live,
photos, videos), mentions of others and in stories of others, and so on.
For the stories’ analysis, I have drawn on a heuristic that explores the connections of three
separable but interrelated layers of analysis, useful for the study of stories as communicative
practices (Georgakopoulou, 2007): (1) ways of telling, (2) sites (of the stories’ tellings and tales)
and (3) tellers (in the broad sense of communicators). This dictates a combined focus on online
postings and various types of engagement with them, including transposition across media and
sites, where applicable, without, however, pre-determining what from each of the multi-layered
ways of telling, sites and tellers will be of analytical importance and how their relations will be
configured in different stories and media environments. To forge links between these inter-
connected levels of stories in context, I also draw on positioning analysis in its connections with
small stories (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008). In doing so, I seek to identify and establish
any iterativity (i.e. systematic recurrence) in the following:

How characters are presented in the taleworld, their relations, evaluative attributions,
activities and overall placement in time and place. (Level 1)
How a story is locally occasioned and distributed. Who participates and how. Who
ratifies, legitimates or contests which part of the story. Who co-authors, what and
how. (Level 2)
What aspects of the key character(s), events and narrated experience are presented
as generalizable and holding above and beyond a specific storytelling event (Level 3).

My study of the values underpinning the design of Stories on Instagram and Snapchat, the
affordances offered and the key-communicative practices in influencers’ Instagram Stories have
revealed three directives (cf. preferential conditions, prompts) to users: sharing life in the moment,
audience engagement as quantified viewing and authenticity in tellers’ self-presentation (for
details, see Georgakopoulou et al., 2020). As can be seen, these directives provide prompts for

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what kinds of stories will be told, how audiences will engage with them, and how tellers will
present themselves and their lives in them. Overall, they suit the algorithmic logic of instant,
live-sharing, promoting visual representations and snapshots of sharing the moment as well as
the quantification of audience-engagement practices. Stories are grounded in the ephemerality
of the here and now, presenting everyday life as off-the-cuff, raw experience. This imme-
diacy and mining the mundane are key to creating authenticity for the teller, as I have shown
(Georgakopoulou, 2022, in press).
Sharing in the moment in influencers’ stories, I have found, is closely associated with spe-
cific types of small stories well-suited to reporting on the here and now (Georgakopoulou,
2022, in press): these include breaking news, countdowns, behind the scenes, good morning/
good night stories and updates. All these formats of stories have lay names, recognizable to and
often employed by the posters themselves. There is a strong element of storytelling on the go
in all these formats: the teller moves about with their phone and captures snapshots of travels
and everyday outings with friends, but also of their domestic environment, thus diarizing the
everyday. Brief captions with language and/or emojis are often overlaid on the images or videos
to provide an assessment of what is going on as a narrator’s voice-over, leaving the visual or
video modality in the role of the depiction of the here and now. Another common thread in
small stories of the everyday is the prevalence of temporal marking of immediacy, linguistic-
ally expressed (e.g. with time-stamps, temporal adverbs such as ‘just’, ‘now’, durative aspects
of present tense verbs, etc.). This immediacy serves as a strategy for posting a story as breaking
news that announces an event or a happening and subsequently, through a modular, episodic
approach, for posting more stories that update on the initial story. In this way, breaking news
stories set expectations for updates and create conditions for a trajectory of tellings in the near
future, thus licensing frequent postings and retaining the audience’s (in this case ‘followers’’)
attention.
Elsewhere, I discuss the genealogical evolution of the intimate link between the formatting
of stories for sharing life in the moment and the teller’s self-presentation as ‘authentic’, within
a discourse of ‘imperfect sharing’ promoted by the platforms. I specifically show the emergence
of the discourse of imperfect sharing as a backlash to previous facilities for self-presentation,
especially selfies (Georgakopoulou, 2021, 2022, in press). Here, it suffices to say that stories as
designed platformed features have become a performable practice for valorizing the authentic
teller as a truth-teller, whereby truth is conceived of primarily in terms of experientiality rather
than referentiality. The authentic teller is therefore one who depicts the minutiae of everyday
life, the banal, using equally banal ways of telling and inviting their followers to be witnesses of
a ‘non-edited’ daily reality. I have shown how this mode of storytelling capitalizes on a specific
set of semiotic (both verbal and visual) resources, supported by the design of stories as vehicles
for imperfect sharing and for an amateur aesthetic.
Overall, the three directives that I have documented in the case of stories as a platformed
feature systematically collapse the stories’ social and relational aspects with the quantification
(cf. metricization) of users’ activities. Stories are thus being ‘curated’ in ways that allow them
to serve as hybrids, both as content-creation features and as consumables, that is, as vehicles
for advertising and monetization (for details, see Georgakopoulou et al., 2020: Chapter 4). As
Replace
I will outline below, this instrumentalization of stories is worthy of further scrutiny, not is worthy
least of with wa
because of the current consolidation of Instagram Stories and related short video forms (e.g.
Tik Tok videos) as a widely available (auto)biographical mode of sharing daily life on social
media, particularly for the main targeted (by platforms) user-groups of teenagers and young
adults (Georgakopoulou, 2019).

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Looking ahead: toward a narrative analysis of platformed storytelling

In this chapter, I presented certain key findings of the incipient yet growing line of inquiry into
online storytelling within discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. I specifically focused on small
stories research, a model for narrative and identities analysis, well-suited to the study of, previ-
ously thought of as, atypical stories, which are now proliferating on social media. Brief, ellip-
tical, transportable, multiply authored, multi-semiotic stories about the ongoing present, rather
than the past, are linked with the social media logic of timeliness of posts and sharing in the
here and now. I discussed how within small stories research, I have developed a technographic
methodology for studying stories in connection with this algorithmic logic and as curated,
designed activities on the intersection of media affordances and users’ practices. This method-
ology integrates qualitative methods, such as ethnographic tracking, (narrative) discourse ana-
lysis and insights from platform studies with quantitative, corpus-assisted methods of discourse
analysis. It seems that the nature of the data online necessitates an eclectic synthesis of qualita-
tive and quantitative modes of inquiry (cf. Page’s mediated narrative analysis (2018)), even for
contextual studies of storytelling which in face-to-face storytelling would have only relied on
micro-analysis. Going forward and building on existing methods for the study of stories online,
there is much potential for cultivating synergies and mixed methods that would include data
visualization and big data mining.
As research on social media is uncovering practices for posting stories on the intersec-
tion between specific modes of tellers’ self-presentation, audiences’ participation and media
affordances, we are increasingly in a position to find out more about the processes through
which certain stories and, in turn, lives and subjectivities are becoming more visible and more
valued. Further interrogation of this intensified story-curation and its implications should be
high on the agenda of narrative research. In this respect, there is still much scope for fully
addressing, methodologically and analytically, the role of the technological materiality, algo-
rithmic and socio-technical design of social media platforms in the telling of stories. This
should not be viewed as a deterministic exercise but as a productive engagement with previous
contextual studies of storytelling. A volume of discourse analytic and sociolinguistic research
in everyday, conversational stories has shown their role in the imaginative and affective pres-
entation of self, as grounded in specific spatiotemporal realities, and their ability to invoke
other worlds, real or possible, to bear on the here and now of the narrating act, but also to
position self over time and across places (see De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2012: Chapters 1
and 5). Establishing connections between people, place, time, events and emotions lies at the
heart of interweaving narrative plots. Studies have also demonstrated how these connections
are routinely done in context and in interaction with participants (for details, see De Fina and
Georgakopoulou, 2012: Chapters 3 and 4). There is scope for further testing these insights
vis-à-vis the multi-semioticity, multi-authorship and transposability of narrative activities that
social media platforms have been found to enable. In this respect, future studies should be in a
position to document further what genres and practices of storytelling are ‘familiar, emergent
or re-configured’ (Herring, 2013) and how these connect with (or not) previously established
face-to-face storytelling. At the same time, such an inquiry should be careful not to over-
attribute any changes to the medium alone but instead to contextualize and historicize them,
including in the evolution of platforms themselves. A technographic approach, such as the one
advocated in this chapter is, in my view, a vital step in this direction.
This chapter has shown that the latest design of stories on platforms as features attests
to an increasing tendency to commoditize and instrumentalize stories, amongst others, for
advertising and commercial purposes. It is no accident that businesses and brands nowadays,

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routinely use Stories as vehicles for advertising. Further studies of stories online should tap
into this connection between stories and advertising, further interrogating the finding that
the affective and relational aspects of stories are being conflated with the quantification of
users’ activities (Georgakopoulou et al., 2020). I envisage in this respect a critical mass on
‘platformed storytelling’ that will emerge from the synergy with parallel initiatives that recog-
nize the need to critically interrogate the current instrumentalization of stories, especially of
personal experience, across various spheres of everyday life. This instrumentalization is vari-
ously referred to as a storytelling boom, a period of story-curation or a story-positive culture (e.g.
Fernandes, 2017; Mäkelä, 2018). Based on this chapter’s discussion, studies of story-curation
on social media could benefit from combined attention to the communicative ‘how’, the
‘what’ and the ‘who’ with the socio-technicity of stories, and from ethnographic methods that
allow us to track the evolution of such socio-technicity. This includes a scrutiny of, what I see
as the three under-represented, Vs within narrative analysis: the Values that underlie the design
of stories, the tools that accompany stories and become instruments for their Valuation and
the (in)Visibilities of tellers-tales-audiences that these in turn create. It is within this nexus that
agency and any empowering potentials of stories for storytellers and audiences online need to
be placed and examined.

Notes
1 www.businessofapps.com/data/instagram-statistic.
2 For details on the methods I have employed for ‘tracking’, including the technique of identifying ‘crit-
ical moments’, see Georgakopoulou (2013, 2014).
3 Henceforth, when referring to Instagram Stories, I will use a capital S, as the platform itself does.
4 The corpus was compiled in collaboration with Dr. Anda Drasovean in February 2018 and it includes
material published by January 2018.
5 According to Freberg et al. (2010), social media influencers constitute independent third-party endorsers
or opinion leaders with access and reach to a large audience and the ability to shape their attitudes by
using blogs, tweets and other social media.
6 Although the female bias in the gender ratio of Instagram users has recently narrowed, six of the top ten
most followed accounts on Instagram are – at the time of writing – owned by women, hence our focus
on two female influencers. Kim Kardashian is routinely on the top 10 list.

Further reading
De Fina, Anna and Perrino, Sabina (2019) Storytelling in the Digital World. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. as a special
Originally published as special issue of Narrative Inquiry 27 (2) (2017), this innovative collection, the first issue
of its kind, explores new, emerging narrative practices on a variety of digital platforms such as Amazon,
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Georgakopoulou, Alexandra, Iversen, Stefan and Stage, Carsten (2020) Quantified Storytelling: A Narrative
Analysis of Metrics on Social Media. London: Palgrave.
This book is also the first of its kind, in that it sets out to explore how numbers, metrics and analytics that
abound on social media shape what stories are told, how and why. The book includes data from Reddit,
too, which does not frequently figure in discourse analyses.

Giaxoglou, Korina (2021) A Narrative Approach to Social Media Mourning: Small Stories and Affective
Positioning. New York and Abingdon: Routledge.
This book presents an empirical framework for analyzing small stories of dying, death and mourning
as practices of sharing online. It provides useful methodological tools for the study of affect through
storytelling.

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Page, Ruth (2015) ‘The narrative dimensions of social media storytelling: options for linearity and
tellership’, in Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.) The Handbook of Narrative Analysis.
Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 329–348.
This early chapter on stories on social media examines specific, well-researched conversational storytelling,
dimensions of stories (e.g. tellership, linearity of events), showing both similarities and differences between
‘offline’ and ‘online’ modes of narration.

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