System 102 (2021) 102620

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System
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/system

Small stories as curated formats on social media: The intersection

of affordances, values & practices
Alex Georgakopoulou
King’s College London, United Kingdom

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: In this article, I focus on the design of stories as a specific feature, integrated into the spatial
Formatting architecture of platform affordances (i.e. on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Weibo. I argue for
Small stories the need to interrogate such stories as curated, socio-technical formats, that is, as recogniseable
Directives
and normative co-patternings of media-afforded ways of telling & types of teller. I show a
Sharing-life-in-the-moment
Critical digital narrative literacies
methodological and analytical way of doing so, underpinned by a technographic perspective to
stories that tracks media affordances, discourses about stories as features and communicative
practices. I illustrate this approach with reference to three directives (cf. Preferential conditions,
prompts) to users that my analysis attested to (Georgakopoulou, 2019; Georgakopoulou et al.,
2020). These directives shape the types of stories told (i.e. sharing life-in-the-moment), the au­
dience’s mode of engagement in them (i.e. quantified viewing) and the tellers’ self-presentation
(i.e. authenticity). I specifically focus on the first directive of sharing-life-in-the-moment and
consider its implications for the kinds of (in)visibilities of specific types of tellings, tales and
tellers that has the potential to create. This line of inquiry, I suggest programmatically, can be
productively integrated into critical digital literacies work and, subsequently, feed into discus­
sions with (language) education and other non-academic stakeholders.

1. Introduction: Stories as designed features

Since their inception, social media companies have been keen to offer users facilities for telling stories, recognizing the power of
storytelling for presenting ourselves, making sense of our experience and connecting with others. Early features and prompts such as
‘what are you doing right now?’ on Facebook began to direct users to associating storytelling with sharing their experiences in the here-
and-now. As I have shown, this early coupling of storytelling with sharing the moment has been crucial for how storytelling facilities
have evolved on social media (Georgakopoulou, 2017a). In a longitudinal study of stories on social media (http://www.ego-media.
org/), I have identified a close link between specific media affordances, mainly portability, replicability and scalability of content,
and, what in previous work, I had described as small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2007).1 Seen through the lens of conventional narrative
studies, small stories are a-typical: they tend to be brief or signaled elliptically, they are about very recent, ongoing and/or future
events, open-ended and transportable. They also involve multiple authoring, negotiation and contestation, often across contexts, thus
destabilising the close link between one teller and their experience. Finally, there is a tendency for reporting mundane, ordinary and

E-mail address: alexandra.georgakopoulou@kcl.ac.uk.

1
In my early work on small stories, I made the case for their significance in everyday life, 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 & identity analysis, as equally worthy data as the life-stories that had hitherto monopolized the attention of narrative studies.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2021.102620
Received 21 July 2021; Accepted 19 August 2021
Available online 8 September 2021
0346-251X/Crown Copyright © 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
A. Georgakopoulou System 102 (2021) 102620

even trivial events from the teller’s everyday life, rather than big complications or disruptions. In this way, the emphasis is on the
experiencing narrator in the here-and-now, who is in a position to announce, share and invite audience engagement with what is
happening, rather than looking back and reflecting. Given these features, which have by now been well-documented as characteristic
of much of the storytelling online (e.g. see Dayter, 2015; Giaxoglou, 2020; Hutchinson & Jackson, 2014; Page, 2012; West, 2013), I
have argued that small stories research is well-placed to be extended to social media, so as to offer alternative tools and concepts for the
inquiry into stories (2016a). Methodologically, this has involved a (re)mixing of primarily qualitative methods, such as ethnographic
tracking, online conversation analysis, and insights from platform studies with quantitative, corpus-assisted discourse analysis (ditto;
also see below).
I have also identified certain key design-phases in the development of facilities for posting small stories. The first phase goes back to
the inception of social networking sites as spaces for sharing the moment now, with a premium on brevity and based on an algorithmic
pressure for immediacy. The second major design-phase of story-facilities has involved the move from sharing the moment now in a
primarily text-based way (i.e. telling the moment) to showing the moment (e.g. with selfies, Georgakopoulou, 2016b). Visual affordances
for storytelling that in face-to-face contexts was primarily verbal paved the way to the 3rd design-phase (covering mainly the period
post-2015). This has involved the turn of big platforms to designing stories as distinct features, integrated into their architecture, and
named as such. It began with the introduction of the feature of stories on Senft (2013), followed by Instagram Senft (2013), Facebook
(2017), Weibo (2018) and lately, Twitter Fleets (2020), which have an uncanny similarity with stories. Newer developments such as
Tik Tok short form videos that have experienced a surge in use are notably building on the design and pivoting of ‘stories’. This phase
can be characterized as sharing the moment(s) as stories, as it involves rolling out facilities that purport to allow users to post beyond
single feeds and beyond sharing ‘a single moment’. It is also part and parcel of platforms’ ongoing shift toward transient, live streaming
formats of sharing (cf. Abidin, 2018).
Stories are essentially collections of max. 10-second on Snapchat and 7-s snaps (photos) on Instagram, 15 s videos and currently live
streaming. Initially, they lasted for 24 h and then they disappeared, but currently users can archive them or use highlights to store their
favourite stories for longer. Stories as a feature acquire material, iconic and action-button dimensions. For instance, they come with a
designated, by now familiar, icon on both apps (e.g. see support.snapchat.com/en-US/a/about-stories)" title = "https://support.
snapchat.com/en-US/a/about-stories)">https://support.snapchat.com/en-US/a/about-stories). A colourful ring around a user’s
profile picture on Instagram, to indicate that they have posted a story, is also a familiar sign to users. Users perform habitual, embodied
actions to both post and engage with stories: they click on their story button to share to their story day; they tap on a user’s profile to
see their story. They use their smart phone for posting and viewing stories and their viewing experience of Instagram Stories is more
immersive than anything else on the app, as they can view them full-screen. Similarly, in photographic terms, stories present a vertical
format, departing from the earlier square format of pictures on Instagram, evoking less polaroid pictures and moving more to the
direction of video (their size and ratio are the same as those of full HD video). This is in tune with the gradual evolution of Instagram
from a photo-sharing app to a social network app with social interaction at its centre (Poulsen, 2018): Stories have been an important
step in this evolution.
The ‘template’ stories provided by the apps encourage snapshots of daily life with a simple aesthetic, minimal graphics, and brief
language used as a caption, overlaid to the images or video, often accompanied by emojis, providing stage directions and an assessment
of what is going on (see examples in https://buffer.com/library/instagram-stories). The constant introduction of new features and
functionality to stories, especially on Instagram, show that they function as a site for intensifying curation by pulling together (cf.
Bundling) complex resources, tools, metrics and analytics (for a discussion of stories as quantified activities, see Georgakopoulou et al.,
2020).
In the space of 5+ years, sharing through stories as a feature on social media platforms has surpassed sharing through newsfeeds.
The unprecedented popularity of a single feature, dubbed as a game changer for Snapchat, as the first platform to offer it, 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 Influ­
encers emerging as top-ranking on Instagram, based on the popularity of their stories. Stories, more than any other feature, are caught
up in a game of perpetual change and introduction of ever more sophisiticated features: there is wide recognition that the label itself is
powerful. The wide-spread view and, in some cases, criticism of an uncanny similarity of Instagram Stories with Snapchat Stories, was
addressed by the then Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, by arguing that a successful ‘format’ can be drawn on, taken “to a network”
where “your own spin on it” can be put (cited in Constine 2016). In the short history of the rival story-facilities, Instagram has out­
performed Snapchat, as the number of stories posted on it has surpassed that of Snapchat Stories since 2017. As an estimate, more than
500 million accounts use Instagram Stories every day (https://www.businessofapps.com/data/instagram-statistic), more than twice
the users of Snapchat Stories, and teenagers post on average 4 times more stories a day than any other age group.
In the light of the above, my starting point in this research has been that the ever-evolving story-design spree needed to be
scrutinized with regard to 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). Here, I focus on the following questions: Which types of stories, ways of telling them
and specific ways of self-presentation become recogniseable and even normative as part of the ‘feature of stories’? How is this rec­
ogniseability and development of norms achieved? What processes support this type of storytelling standardization? And given that a
key-target group of stories as a feature has been Generation Z (broadly defined as those born from mid-90s onwards), what does the
socialization into them implicate for the narrative communicative skills and competencies of the current young generation?
To address these questions, I draw on the concept of formatting, defined simply as users’ recogniseability of stories as a specific type
of communicative practice and social action, as pivotal in a technographic approach to stories. I argue that formatting hinges on three
processes:

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A. Georgakopoulou System 102 (2021) 102620

i) Design: This includes the tools and functionality that support the creation of stories as a distinct platform feature.
ii) Directives: These consist in preferences and prompts to users aimed at promoting a feature and creating conditions of accep­
tance by many users.
iii) Authorization: This involves the valorization, valuation and ultimately naturalization of specific stories as good, successful
stories.

These processes are inter-related and mutually feeding. For instance, the stories’ design evolves on the basis of the authorization of
specific choices. Directives both underpin design choices and owe their force to the authorization of such choices by users, in particular
Influencers, as I show below. One particular nexus of the three processes that my analysis has brought forward is to be found in three
directives, produced by the values in the design of stories, the affordances offered for them, and the authorization work done by
Influencers’ stories. These directives are: sharing-life-in-the-moment, audience engagement as quantified viewing, and authenticity in
tellers’ self-presentation. A detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter (but see Georgakopoulou et al., 2020: chapter 4).
Below, I single out the role of the directive of sharing-life-in-the-moment in the formatting of specific types of small stories that are
suited to providing snapshots of daily life in the moment, in particular breaking news, countdowns, on the go, behind the scenes stories.
This immediacy and mining the mundane, combined with simple visual aesthetics and graphics, are key to creating authenticity for the
teller. In this way, a specific way of telling becomes conventionally associated with a specific mode of self-presentation. This asso­
ciation is authorized by Influencers at the same time as becoming co-opted to the purpose of self-promotion. This happens by blurring
the boundaries between familiar, ordinary daily life and the Influencers’ self-branding. Emphasis on sharing-here-and-now priviledges
specific narratorial positions and roles, in particular the narrator-experiencer and recorder of the goings on as opposed to the remi­
niscing narrator who reflects on past events. The backgrounding of the past, memories and reflections on past events has implications
for the definition of a ‘good storyteller’ as well as for conventional modes of autobiography and personal narration.
These insights, I suggest, can be productively integrated into digital literacies work and subsequently feed into discussions with
education and other non-academic stakeholders. The study of stories online as curated, socio-technical activities can feed into the latest
growing critical digital literacies perspective. This advocates incorporating a broader understanding of the internet (Buckingham,
2007) and its roles in surveillance, monetization, and advertising, so as to go beyond just evaluating users’ content and mediated
representations and include critical reflections on the media content (Rogow, 2015).

2. Methods for studying stories as designed features

2.1. Technography of stories

An interrogation of the design of stories on social media that has the potential to contribute to discussions about the role of social
media in promoting specific kinds of communication and identities to young people, necessitates what, adapting Bucher’s terms (2018:
60), can be called a technographic approach to stories: a type of ethnography that attempts to trace the workings of technology in
relation to the design of stories. This requires an element of historicity, that is, tracking and identification of choices. I have done this
through real-time tracking of the evolution of story-facilities in the last decade but this does not exclude a retrospective process of
tracing. Whatever the choices for tracking may be, a technography of stories accepts from the outset that platformed storytelling is an
irreducibly socio-technical, ‘curated’ process and so the platforms’ design affordances for stories need to become an integral part of any
analysis of storytelling. All designed features on platforms are work-in-progress and the (dis)continuity of any choices and updates
have to find their way into the methods of collection and analysis. A corpus-assisted analysis (see below) combined with real-time
tracking and observations as well as with a narrative-semiotic analysis of Influencers’ stories have been the backbone of my tech­
nographic approach.
It is important to note that a technography of stories should not be viewed as a deterministic perspective on technological affor­
dances but rather as a way of studying the nuances of an entangled relationship amongst technologies, values in design, platform
features and storytelling practices. It is by now well attested that the apps’ evolution is in a mutually feeding relationship with users’
practices and that users, rather than passive adopters, strategize, circumvent perceived constraints and even game and outpace what
they perceive as algorithmic manipulations. In turn, apps often co-opt any such user resistances by bringing their ‘vernacular stra­
tegies’ into the apps’ ‘officialdom’ (Abidin, 2018: 92; also see Bucher, 2018).

2.2. Corpus-assisted discourse analysis

The design and popularity of stories as a feature as well as their wide adoption by Influencers suggest that there is already rec­
ogniseability of what a typical story is. Proliferating online guides to ordinary users and brands on how to post, for instance, a great
Instagram story also suggest that there is a well-developed machinery for the creation of normativity. In addition, distribution and
cross-platforming facilities, conducive to the circulation of ready-made portables and the replication of specific stories (Georgako­
poulou, 2017b; Georgakopoulou, 2016a) increase the potential for amplification and recogniseability of ways of telling. (Blom­
maertwith Smits and Yacoubi, 2020), drawing on Garfinkel (2002), recommend the concept of formatting which refers to the
‘recogniseability of jointly achieved social actions in specific settings’, for research on digital communication, where large numbers of
users, geographically dispersed and unknown to one another, enter communication ‘stages’ without any prior shared history. Blom­
maert et al. suggest that a key-way in which communication takes place in such cases is through formats, social actions which, through
occurrence and repetition, become recogniseable to others as typical (cf. Generic, non-unique; idem: 55–57). This work is valuable but

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A. Georgakopoulou System 102 (2021) 102620

there is still much scope for developing specific modes of data collection and analysis for the study of recogniseability online, especially
with respect to stories. Small stories research, with its focus on stories as contextualized social practices and the aforementioned
technographic approach, is well-placed to offer tools and modes of analysis for the study of formatting processes in stories online.
The actual design facilities, tools and functionality of stories are a key-constituent of the creation of formatting. There is increasing
recognition within social media studies, in particular in the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and of platform studies, that
any critical analysis of social media needs to incorporate a ‘values in design’ perspective (Flanagan & Nissenbaum, 2014; also see
Bucher, 2018). How platforms design their space, what affordances they offer their users, what participation means for them, are not
ideologically free choices (e.g. Langlois, 2013). Instead, they encapsulate values, norms and beliefs of a whole network of actors,
ranging from programmers to designers, product managers and beta users (cf. Marwick, 2013). Methodological steps have begun to be
taken in uncovering such values in design, for example, by means of a ‘walk-through method’ (Decuypere, 2019), an approach that
examines apps and smartphone features in terms of their interfaces. As my own technographic study of stories has shown, the design of
stories involves the constant provision of tools and features that come with pre-selections, prior categorizations of experience and
menus with specific editing facilities. These offer users templates for stories, thus setting parameters for their creativity when posting
stories (Georgakopoulou, 2019).
Alongside designed features, platforms produce glimpses of the views and ideologies underlying their design, in promotional
material, interviews with CEOs and product managers and in occasional disclosures of how part of their algorithms work. Media app
companies’ briefs and blog posts, documents that outline technical specifications of new features and media reports are all, therefore,
part of a machinery of texts that afford a sense of values in design. In tune with a critical discourse analytic agenda, I view such material
as cumulatively producing a dominant discourse about a feature at the same time as including clues of hidden agendas regarding its
marketization and monetization. Such discourses have the potential to promote certain stories and semiotic choices in them, making
them more available than others and normalizing them. Corpus-assisted discourse analyses are instrumental in uncovering any hidden
meanings and interconnections in the discourse of apps and their offerings for stories. They allow us to retrieve meanings and asso­
ciations that are salient yet not obvious and that they can only be established 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 and connections, bringing to
the fore traces of social routines and habitual patterns of understanding and acting (Taylor & Marchi, 2018: 61).
In the light of the above, corpus-assisted discourse analytic methods were employed as one facet of my technographic approach to
stories so as to study the ideologies that underpinned the design and affordances offered for Snapchat and Instagram Stories. We
employed advanced google search facilities on the words ‘stories’, ‘Instagram’, ‘Snapchat’ and ‘Facebook’, and the search engines
Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo,2 so as to compile a corpus of material (c. 1213 articles, excl. Duplicates & 1.000.000 words) related to
the introduction and review of Snapchat Senft (2013) and Instagram Senft (2013).3 The main types of sources in the obtained corpus
(henceforth the EgoMedia Stories Corpus) include Instagram and Snapchat blogs (https://instagram-press.com/blog, https://www.
snap.com/). Combined with those are presentations and reviews of such features on a variety of online media such as tech, busi­
ness and marketing magazines and blogs (e.g. Buzzfeed, TechJunkie, The Verge, Macworld, The Next Web, TechCrunch, Wired, Sprout
Social, searchenginejournal.com, etc.). Using corpus compilation and analysis procedures (for details, see Georgakopoulou, 2019),4 we
identified keywords and key-semantic domains, collocates so as to explore the textual behaviour of keywords, and concordances so as
to explore patterns of lexical associations.
This analysis allowed us to uncover the directives encoded in the design of stories. Directives are defined here as prompts to users for
engaging in specific posting practices and relational actions. As several analysts have noted (e.g. Bucher, 2018; Gillespie, 2016;
VanDijck, 2013; VanDijck, Poell, & De Waal, 2018), platforms develop their architecture on the basis of ideas about who their intended
users are and what they would like them to do. Interaction and sociality on social media are, in turn, programmed (i.e. engineered) and
underpinned by the ‘logic’ of social media in general and of a platform in particular. This programming comes with a range of actions
for users that, as Davis and Chouinard (2016) point out, include ‘request’, ‘demand’, ‘encourage’, ‘discourage’, ‘refuse’ and ‘allow’
particular forms of action. Directives are primarily linked to the requesting and encouraging aspects of platform affordances: they are not
obligatory, but they are supported by tools and features that inherently facilitate and activate certain actions at the expense of others,
prioritizing certain types of content. In this sense, they render specific types of posting and behaviour by users as more appropriate for
achieving the highly valued status of popularity and visibility in their environments.

2.3. Storytelling practices

Due to affordances of amplification and scaleability as well as to algorithmic pressures for users to be and stay popular (Bucher,
2018), the potential for directives to lead to compliance on the part of users and, in turn, to specific communication practices becoming
normative, in the sense of widely available and highly sought after, should not be under-estimated. In the light of this, studying the
formatting of stories online requires a dual focus on directives and on processes of their authorization by specific users’ storytelling
practices. Influencers as power-, hyper-popular users were the first point of entry into such practices for two reasons: the style and

2
We used more than one search engine to try and minimize the biases of Google search histories in the collection of data.
3
The corpus was compiled in collaboration with Dr Anda Drasovean in February 2018 and it includes material published by January 2018.
4
In brief, although we ‘cleaned up’ the texts for the purposes of the corpus analysis, it was important for us to download and have access to any
visual material for any subsequent multimodal analysis. We used the software SketchEngine for the analysis and three reference corpora: the British
National Corpus, EnTenTen15 (or English Web 2015), and the TED_en Corpus (transcriptions of TED talks).

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A. Georgakopoulou System 102 (2021) 102620

content of their communication, including their stories, are highly emulated by ordinary users. The apps 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 priviledged access to story analytics shows. To consolidate this, Instagram
has, as of lately, been rolling out new creator profiles for influencers, offering exclusive features and analytics. https://later.com/blog/
instagram-creator-profile/
In this way, Influencers play a key-role in the authorization or ratification of specific ways of storytelling, serving as model-setters
and cultural mediators between the apps’ template stories and the users. As Jaffe (2011: 580) claims in relation to processes of
standardizing a language, authorization involves naturalization and legitimation of specific language choices, normally by institu­
tional authorities who are doing the work of framing and evaluation in discourse, interaction and writing, thus being implicated in the
production of knowledge.
An ongoing study of Influencers’ Instagram Stories was decided as a point of entry into the authorization of the directives for
posting stories. The first phase involved mining Stories (as multi-modal data with their metadata), from two, in many ways repre­
sentative, cases of female5 Influencers, in an automatic collection period of 20 days (January 2019). The data were collected using
Python command line tools and Instaloader. Here, I draw on findings from the 406 stories collected from LelePons, (https://www.
instagram.com/lelepons/?hl=en), American-Venezuelan Instagram and YouTube celebrity, former top female Viner, a top-ten sto­
ryteller (and with the most watched Stories in 2016 & 2017), according to Instagram’s released figures. The subsequent coding of
stories on NVivo12 included: metadata, types of captions, language of choice in captions, interactive elements (e.g. Swipe up features),
format of Stories (e.g. live, photos, videos), mentions in stories of others, etc. We also coded Stories in terms of the type of experience
they reported, for instance, good morning/good night stories, on the go stories, (tour and product) promotions, and so on. As we will
see below, such types of experience are well suited to the formatting of specific types of small stories for sharing-life-in-the-moment,
that is, to their recogniseability as typical and generic Instagram Stories.

2.4. Analysis of formatting: Sharing-life-in-the-moment

The real-time tracking of the evolution of stories as features, the corpus-assisted analysis of how stories were promoted by
Instagram and Snapchat and the analysis of Influencers’ stories, as described above, suggested the significance of sharing life-in-the
moment as a key-directive to users, built into the design of stories and authorized (primarily) by Influencers. Stories have been
designed on the basis of the algorithmic logic of instant, live sharing and they have become a recogniseable format for capturing the
moment.6 This is despite the rhetoric of the apps in launching stories as a means for allowing users to go beyond the moment (see
Georgakopoulou, 2019, on mismatches between the rhetoric about stories and the affordances offered for them). It is notable that in
the EgoMedia Stories corpus the lexeme ‘moment(s)’ is one of the top 50 keywords and it mostly collocates with ‘share/sharing’. This
suggests the close association of stories with sharing moments which is a far cry from the conventional definition of stories as reports of
past events, evaluated and reflected upon by the narrator. The most frequent modifiers for moment(s), especially the terms ‘everyday,
little, casual, daily’ suggest a strong association with spontaneity and the mundane, and, in turn, with authenticity, as we will see
below. These associations reinforce the prompt for posting stories for sharing the everyday as it happens and as ‘multiple’, ‘little’
moments. This contrasts with the two most frequent meanings of moment in the British National Corpus (BNC), our reference corpus,
namely moment as a very short time interval (e.g. a brief moment) and as an opportune and specific occasion (e.g. at the last/cru­
cial/right moment). For examples of concordance lines from the lemma ‘moment/s’ in our corpus and the reference corpora, see
Appendix.
In similar vein, the analysis of the collocates of the lemma story showed that the association between stories and memories, which is
salient in the BNC, was absent from our corpus, providing further evidence for the close association of stories with the present moment
and ephemerality. In addition, the design of stories as primarily visual and viewable activities was evidenced in our corpus in the fact
that the most salient verbs that take story as an object were ‘view’ and ‘watch’ with 11.45 and 10.87 score value, while in the BNC it
was the verbs ‘tell’ and ‘hear’.
In addition, the analysis of the key-semantic domains suggested that immediacy is a salient theme in the corpus. Timeliness is
notably one of the key-features of Instagram algorithms, supported by Instagram’s prioritization of use, through mobile and locative
media, able to catch and share life on the move. This practice was authorized by the types of reported experience that we found in
Lelepons’ stories which are well-suited to the directive of sharing life-in-the-moment. These included:
Daily life with friends & family: Pictures/videos7 that show or mention the poster’s friends or family, typically in fun outings (e.g.
clubbing, birthday celebrations) or domestic life scenes (e.g. hanging out, eating, watching TV).
Good morning/good night Stories: Pictures/videos that contain greetings such as “Good night” or “Good morning”. These
normally depict Lele Pons in intimate surroundings, in her bedroom, half-awake and face semi-covered by a duvet or blanket. Only 2
out of 17 such stories show a sunrise to indicate the time of the day (morning stories) as opposed to her bedtime routines.

5
Although the female bias in the gender ratio of Instagram users’ has recently narrowed, six of the top 10 most followed accounts on Instagram
are currently owned by women, so it is no accident that our study has begun with two female influencers. Kim Kardashian is routinely on the top 10
list.
6
Instagram, like Facebook, discloses specific key-features of its algorithms, inviting users to a guessing game about its largely opaque calculations.
Three such key-features involve timeliness, relationship and interest.
7
In the 1st phase of data collection, there are no live stories. 264 stories are in the form of pictures and 142 in the form of videos.

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On the go: Pictures/videos from the poster’s trips abroad, day trips, road trips with friends, again with a fun element incoproprated
in them, for example, pulling funny faces.
Promotions: This category can be broken down into:
Self-promotion (pictures/videos that show the Influencer in her professional capacity (e.g. dancer, singer, model), mention her
accomplishments, or announce the publication of new content on Instagram and/or other platforms (e.g. videos on YouTube).
Endorsements: Promotions that mention (with hashtag) collaborators (singers, dancers, make-up artists). This peer-to-peer
recommendation, as we will see below, is routinely done in Lele Pons’ stories through mentions and hashtags of her best friends.
The above types of experience single out snapshots from the here-and-now of daily life which are routinely ‘told’ through small
stories of breaking news, a salient storytelling genre on platforms (Georgakopoulou, 2017a). In tune with Instagram’s template Stories,
Lelepons’ breaking news stories are mainly used to depict the mundane rather than complications: only 5 of 406 stories report a
complication (e.g. ‘broke my whole nail!!!!!‘, ‘I’m still a little sick:/‘). The tellability of the mundane therefore seems to reside in
affectivity rather than newsworthiness, as this is attested in the (over)-use of exclamation marks and heart emojis in almost every story
for the depiction of routine moments. Brief captions are recruited to provide the evaluative assessment of what is going on as a
narrator’s voice-over, leaving the visual or video modality routinely in the role of the unmediated, raw depiction of the here- and-now.
(Out of 406 stories, 366 notably contain captions).
The format of breaking news of ordinary moments from daily life is well-suited to the culture of live streaming: this combines
keeping users’ attention economy, fuelled by (audio)visual moments of affective intensity and satisfying distraction (Paasonen 2016),
with observing the preference for timeliness. It also licenses the frequency of postings, despite the fact that stories were explicitly
introduced as a means of remedying over-posting (cf. Abidin, 2018). Market research on Instagram Stories posted by businesses has
found that one to seven Stories is the optimal posting length (https://buffer.com/resources/instagram-stories-research). Lelepons falls
on the top end of this posting frequency adding content (mostly pictures & videos and fewer live stories) several times a day (every 2–3
h). Her Instagram Stories for one day are thus a veritable newsfeed designed to keep her followers engaged 24/7. One of the strategies
that she employs as a resource for multiple postings is to combine breaking news with updates or countdowns.
As I have shown in previous work, breaking news stories afford intertextual, temporalized links that create conditions for a tra­
jectory of tellings in the near-future, based on the ongoingness of events and/or audience engagement that seeks further elaboration
(2017a,b). Announcing that something has just happened or is just happening thus sets expectations for updates. For instance,
announcing the event of her visit to her middle school with durative present (‘visiting my middle school!!!!!‘) and a picture with
current students serves as the 1st of several postings by Lele Pons for the day, that update on the visit. Similarly, an upcoming event or
happening with a temporal indication is followed by countdown updates. 23 of her stories are framed as updates and 15 as count­
downs. Anchoring stories in the present time, in the here and now, is therefore done both with specific formats (e.g. good morning,
good night stories) and with the use of temporal markers of immediacy: e.g. ‘just’, ‘now’, ‘today’, time stickers. 59 of her stories are
linguistically marked as being of the moment and there is no use of past tense in any of the captions, except for cases when a temporal
marker of immediacy precedes the verb: e.g. ‘just posted a video’.
Breaking news, updates and countdowns remediate the parasocial relationships that were argued to typify the connections of fans
with celebrities in the pre-digital era (Horton & Wohl 1956) as ‘ambient intimacy’ (Reichelt 2007) between Influencers and followers:
this involves the sort of emotional closeness that results from being able to ‘keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and
intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible’ (idem). In this way, the
relationship of fandom is re-programmed as one of ‘friendship’. It is notable that the friends & family category is recogniseable and
programmable to algorithms as those people who interact most with you. Within this relational frame, it is of note that breaking news
formats are put in the service of promotions, repurposed from mining the mundane to doing self-branding. One third of Lele Pons’
stories are promotions (140 out of 406). Breaking news is often deployed to direct users to postings of pictures or musical videos of
Lelepons. “Just posted a pic. Comment if you can relate”. Or, ‘My next YouTube is my favourite ever!! This Friday!!!!“. Countdowns are
also deployed as alerts to upcoming music videos or tours. Lelepons for example posted a sequence of three stories within 1 h in the lead
up of the release of her video Amigos (a short video parody of the TV show Friends’ opening credits, featuring her and 5 friends and
replacing the well-known Friends theme with a Latino song. The first story was announcing that the video would be ‘coming out in 1 h’,
the second that it would be out in 30 min and the third that it was ‘out now’. Similarly, behind the scenes offer glimpses of shooting
music videos.
The strategic blend of commercial and social, relational elements in branding (cf. Kelly-Holmes 2016) is characteristic of social
media Influencers’ genre of peer-to-peer recommendations, in an attempt to combine catering to their followers and the brands who
want their products endorsed. This integration of self-promotion into the prevalent mode of sharing-life-in-the-moment goes hand in
hand with the systematic conflation that stories attempt between the monetization of users’ activities and the affective, relational
elements of storytelling (for a detailed discussion see Georgakopoulou, 2019).
This conflation becomes part of the stories’ formatting which is not just about the recogniseability of specific types of stories but
also about ways of engaging with them. The followers’ engagement with stories appearing full-screen on their smart phones is a big
part of an immersive, intimate experience. Their viewing engagements place friends and influencers on the same level, as stories
appear next to one another and can be viewed one after another. A story of your close friend going out clubbing can be next to a story
from an influencer, also clubbing, next to a story promoting a product. This visual and experienced contiguity and co-existence is
conducive to blurring the lines of the ordinary with the promotional, of relationality and affectivity with marketization. In addition,
stories are engaged with as viewable features. This disassociation of stories from textuality and their close association instead with
visuality is attestable in the collocations of the lemmas story and stories in our corpus with visual language (e.g. watch, view, see, hide,
appear, disappear; for details see Georgakopoulou, 2019). The positioning of story recipients as viewers, with language remediated

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from TV and film audiences is one way in which to consolidate the hybrid status of stories as content-creation activities and as
consumables, as marketed features that lend themselves to advertising.

2.5. Concluding discussion: Story-directives and/in digital narrative literacy

In the above discussion, I showed a way in which to study stories as a designed feature on platforms, a growing and resonant
phenomenon in the social media landscape. With a focus on Snapchat and Instagram, and drawing on real-time tracking, corpus-
assisted methods and a narrative analysis of Influencers’ Instagram stories, I put forward a technographic approach that traces the
workings of technology in relation to the values underlying the design of stories, the affordances offered and the types of stories that
they prompt. I showed that, what I have described in previous work as small stories, become formatted, that is, recogniseable as a
specific type of communicative practice and social action. This formatting hinges on three interrelated processes: the design values,
tools and functionality of stories, the directives or prompts to users for what stories to tell, and the authorization of specific stories,
mainly by Influencers.
I singled out the role of the directive of sharing-life-in-the-moment in the formatting of small stories well-suited to providing
snapshots of daily life in the moment. Breaking news in particular lends itself to creating sequences of stories intertextually linked on
the basis of countdowns, updates and on the go stories. Immediacy and mining the mundane are key to this type of telling and to
creating authenticity for the teller. Authenticity in this case is closely linked with presenting ‘real’ (non-polished, non-filtered)
everyday lives (for a detailed discussion see Georgakopoulou, 2021).
In the light of this article’s findings, studies of stories as curated features on social media require combined attention to the
communicative how, what and who, as well as the socio-technicity of stories. Technographic methods allow us to track the evolution of
such socio-technicity. These include a critical interrogation 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.
This type of analysis can serve as a first step toward contributing to digital literacies and connecting social media (ab/mis)uses with
educational contexts. Studies of digital literacies have to date been navigating a tension between protectionist perspectives on pupils’
(children’s and young adults’) privacy and safety on the one hand, and, on the other hand, empowerment perspectives that stress the
democratizing potential of social media, their potential for creativity, and the power of users as masterful communicators (cf. Hobbs’
2010). The latter perspective questions the expert-based role of school and teachers, often advocating active connections of the
curriculum with students’ social media engagements aimed at harnessing their digital skills by positioning them as ‘experts’. That said,
there is increasing recognition of a bias in new literacy studies in what Pangrazio (2016) describes as an overt focus on users’ creative
practices with digital media, often overlooking their critical understandings. Critical evaluation and production of online content are
thus increasingly viewed as “core competencies of citizenship in the digital age” for both the young and old (idem; also see Erstad &
Amdam, 2013).
A focus on storytelling digital literacies is lagging behind in these discussions, as studies in the area are still dominated by the
empowerment potential of the 1st generation of digital storytelling in website forums and pre-social media. The undoubtedly influ­
ential ‘digital storytelling movement’ was based on the assumption that learning to listen to the stories of others and learning to tell and
share one’s own story on new media is beneficial to personal and collective identity formation (Couldry & et al, 2014: 923; Lundby,
2008). Similarly, Lambart’s Centre for Digital Storytelling (since 2015 known as StoryCenter) at Berkeley formulated a series of the
ideas underpinning what is essentially a more or less formalized practice for, “using storytelling and participatory media for reflection,
education, and social change” (https://www.storycenter.org/).
The –often uncritically celebratory-focus on the positive impact of personal narration in digital media has overlooked the
increasing power of social media platforms in actively engineering stories and delimiting the potential for individual creativity by
means of the formatting processes that this article has put forward. This study’s findings provide evidence for a process of (re)-
branding, a re-configuration of values attached to storytelling as a prime communication mode and so they call for the use of narrative
analysis tools to interrogate further the implications of this, as part of a critical digital literacies inquiry.
In particular, the formatting of sharing-life-in-the-moment raises important questions for (language) educators regarding:
The semantic re-designation of the lexis ‘moment’ and the deictic field of ‘here-and-now’ as organising units of storytelling at the
expense of past events.
The role of storytelling in announcing ongoing happenings and evolving on the basis of immediate feedback at the expense of
reflecting on and reconstructing (completed) events.
The role of language and text, increasingly confined in captions, and their placement in multi-modal semiosis. These are obvious
sites of reflection on the formatting of everyday-life stories as pictures or videos and as a viewable mode of communication.
Beyond the above, the reign of the everyday and the immediate as a key to authenticity, a currently highly valued mode of self-
presentation, is a fruitful site for a critical digital literacies programme that tackles questions of truth, credibility, and evidence, in
connection with the latest storytelling boom on social media.

Funding

The corpus compilation and the initial phase of data collection from Influencers of this study were carried out within the European
Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant "Ego-media: The impact of new media on forms and practices of self-presentation". https://

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A. Georgakopoulou System 102 (2021) 102620

www.ego-media.orgi.

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