Small Stories Research: A Narrative Paradigm For The Analysis of Social Media in 2nd Edition of The Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

Sage Reference
The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research

Methods
Author: Alexandra Georgakopoulou

Pub. Date: 2022
Product: Sage Reference
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529782943
Keywords: social media, narrative research, social analysis, narrative analysis, narrative stories, social
research, everyday life
Disciplines: Communication Research Methods (general), Research Methods for Media, Communication
& Cultural Studies, Social Research Methods, Research Methods for the Social Sciences, Media,
Communication & Cultural Studies
Access Date: April 29, 2023
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: 55 City Road
Online ISBN: 9781529782943
© 2022 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.

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© Anabel Quan-Haase & Luke Sloan, 2022
Small Stories Research: A Narrative Paradigm for the Analysis of Social Media
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to present the main rationale, methods and analytical tools for extending small sto-
ries research to social media. Small stories research is a paradigm for narrative and identities analysis that
has been developed by this author and, in the early stages, in collaboration with Michael Bamberg (e.g. Bam-
berg, 2006; Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008; Georgakopoulou, 2006, 2007). It was initially put forth as a
counter-move to dominant models of narrative studies that:
a. defined narrative restrictively and on the basis of language and text-based criteria, such as the use
of past tense for temporally sequenced events;
b. privileged a specific type of narrative, namely the long, relatively uninterrupted, teller-led accounts of
past events or of a person's life story, typically elicited in research interview situations;
c. placed emphasis on the biographical content and the what of stories as opposed to their commu-
nicative how and its links with tellers’ identities.
In previous work (Georgakopoulou, 2007), I made the case for the significance of such stories 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 and iden-
tity analysis, as equally worthy data as the life stories that had hitherto monopolized the attention of narrative
studies.
Below, I will first briefly provide the starting points of small stories research, its disciplinary context and out-
reach (for an extended version of this discussion, see Georgakopoulou, 2015a). I will then present three main
reasons for extending small stories research to the analysis of social media and show what methods can
be used and how we can extend the vocabulary of small stories to online contexts. Drawing on my work on
Facebook and YouTube, I will specifically introduce two key concepts that aid the analysis of stories online –
namely, narrative stancetaking and rescripting. Finally, I will introduce the extension of small stories research
to the interrogation of the increasing design and engineering of stories as a distinct feature on social media
platforms: this has led to a hugely popular format (e.g. Instagram Stories) and, at the time of writing this chap-
The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

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ter, sharing through stories has overtaken sharing through feeds.1
Small Stories Research In Face-To-Face Conversations
Small stories research was developed so as to account conceptually and analytically for a range of narrative
activities that had not been sufficiently studied; neither had their importance for the interlocutors’ identity work
been recognized. These mainly involve stories that present fragmentation and open-endedness of tellings,
exceeding the confines of a single speech event and resisting a neat categorization of beginning–middle–end.
They are invariably heavily co-constructed, rendering the sole teller's story-ownership problematic. Small sto-
ries research thus made a case for including in conventional narrative analysis ‘a gamut of under-represented
and “a-typical” narrative activities, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, shared
(known) events, but also allusions to tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell’ (Georgakopoulou, 2006:
124). To do so, small stories research has drawn on a synthesis of frameworks from diverse disciplinary tra-
ditions, including sociolinguistics and biographical studies. There has also been a recognition that empirical
work needed to be done to add nuance to the general descriptor of ‘small stories', shedding light on the spe-
cific genres of small stories that occur in specific contexts and that ought to be included in the narrative ana-
lytic lens.
Small stories research has been intended as a model for, not a model of (Duranti, 2005), narrative analysis.
Duranti (2005: 421ff) sees ‘models for’ as more open-ended frames of inquiry that are not controlled tightly by
their proponents and their original assumptions. In this spirit, many of the delights of small stories research
have come from an imaginative and largely unforeseen uptake of the model by different fields (e.g. sports
sociology, narrative psychology, organisational research, etc.) and stakeholders: from counselling on the go
for homeless people, narrative inquiry into Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients, to facilitating reflections of
pre-service school teachers, etc. (for details, see Georgakopoulou, 2015a).
Context for Small Stories Research
The broader context of small stories research is to be found in anti-essentialist views of self, society and cul-
ture which stress the multiplicity, fragmentation, context-specificity and performativity of our communication
practices (see De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2012: ch. 6). Within sociolinguistics, these views have informed

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the turn to identities-in-interaction (see Bucholtz and Hall, 2005), while in literary studies of narrative, they
have precipitated a combined focus on the content, the author/narrator, the form and the readers as active
participants (cf. rhetorical narratology). They have also relativized the evaluative hierarchies of texts and cul-
tures, problematizing distinctions between high and low, official and unofficial. If we extend this to the study of
stories, we can talk about an opening up of the analysis beyond literary stories and certainly beyond stories in
research-regulated environments, such as interviews. Sociolinguistics has played a key role since the 1960s
in showing that it is worthwhile studying stories in diverse contexts – for example, from friends’ conversations,
family dinnertime and school runs to classroom settings, asylum seekers’ application and job interviews (for a
discussion on this, see Ochs and Capps, 2001). Small stories research has synthesized conversation analytic
views of stories as talk-in-interaction, co-constructed between teller and audiences, with practice-based ap-
proaches that view stories as an integral part of social practices. Narrative meaning-making is thus explored
as both contextualized in specific events and as circulatable and re-contextualized across time and space (for
a detailed discussion, see Georgakopoulou, 2007).
Three Reasons for Extending Small Stories Research to Social Media
Through a longitudinal, genealogical study of how affordances, defined as perceived possibilities and con-
straints for action (Gibson, 1977, cited in Barton and Lee, 2013: 27) for posting, sharing and interacting with
stories have evolved on major social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, I have
documented a close association of small stories with the pervasive presence of social media in everyday
life, facilitated by media convergence and smartphones. I initially noted a set of features that conventional
narrative analysts would see as a-typical or non-canonical, being salient in different platforms and practices,
from Facebook statuses to spoof videos and memes, to (re)tweets. These features involve fragmentation and
open-endedness of stories, exceeding the confines of a single posting and site and resisting a neat catego-
rization of beginning–middle–end. They also involve multiple authoring of a post, as it may become shared
across media platforms. In addition, there is a tendency for reporting mundane, ordinary and, in some cases,
trivial events from the poster's everyday life, rather than big complications or disruptions. These features led
me to recognize the role of small stories research as a paradigm that prefigured the current situation when
social media affordances have made what I called small stories much more widely available and visible in
public arenas of communication through circulation (see Georgakopoulou, 2013a, b). Initial work within so-

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ciolinguistics on stories online confirmed the validity and usefulness of small stories research for describing
and analyzing narrative activities online (e.g. Georgalou, 2015; Page, 2012; West, 2013).
The resonance of the semiotic and interactional features of small stories, including the feature of brevity of
tellings, is continuing to be demonstrable, through the identification and analysis of small stories genres that
are encouraged by how stories are being designed as a distinct feature on platforms. For instance, my study
of female influencers’ Instagram Stories has shown the prevalence of specific types of small stories for shar-
ing moments from the poster's everyday life, within the 10–15 second parameters of photo and video post-
ings (Georgakopoulou et al., 2020). These include on the go stories, behind the scenes, countdowns and
breaking news, a salient genre of small stories. I have in fact been in a position to document the migration of
breaking news, from face-to-face conversational contexts to media-facilitated conversational contexts, where
new technologies are present, to various activities on social media, including text messages, status updates
on Facebook, (re)tweets, titles of YouTube videos (Georgakopoulou, 2013a, b) and Snapchat and Instagram
Stories (Georgakopoulou, 2019). Breaking news are stories of very recent (yesterday) and, in many cases,
evolving (just now) events that, once introduced into a conversational or other context, can be further updat-
ed. In my study of a peer-group of female best friends in a small Greek town in the late 1990s, breaking news
proved to hold a salient place in the group's communication practices: they filled one another in on events
that had happened in the very few hours between school and home when the friends had not communicated
with one another. As many of these events literally unfolded in the town's streets, new scenarios arose while
the friends were piecing together what had just happened, providing them with more material and opportuni-
ties for story plots. In this way, breaking news tended to lead to further narrative making with updates on the
unfolding events and/or projections to the near future. Similarly, in an Economic & Social Research Council
(ESRC) funded project entitled Urban Classroom Culture and Interaction2 in which we studied Year 9 and
Year 10 students in a London comprehensive school, breaking news stories were also salient, but in this case
intimately linked with the pupils’ engagements with new media. For instance, a breaking news story would
be told about a conversation the teller had had the previous evening on MySpace. Then, this story would be
updated and co-constructed with friends, as more communication with the story's character(s) would happen
during the school day – for example, by text-messaging (Georgakopoulou, 2008).
The attested proliferation of breaking news on social media platforms is no accident: social media environ-
ments afford opportunities for sharing-life-in-the-moment (Georgakopoulou, 2017), in miniaturized form, at the
same time as constraining the ability of users to plunge into full autobiographical mode (e.g. the constraint of
initially 140 characters, currently 280 for a single tweet, on Twitter). In particular, they offer users the ability as

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well as directing them to share experience as it is happening, with various semiotic (multimodal) resources,
to update it as often as necessary and to (re)-embed it in various social media platforms. This readily ob-
servable prevalence of small stories on social media platforms, often engendered by media affordances, is
the first empirical reason as to why small stories research holds relevance for the analysis of online data. At
the same time, activities which I characterize as small stories have often prompted dystopic views by numer-
ous commentators (e.g. see Baym, 2010) about what constantly announcing (trivial) slices of one's mundane,
everyday life, means for how we see and present ourselves and how this is endangering more convention-
al forms of autobiography (Jongy, 2008). In the light of this, the second reason for extending small stories
research to social media is methodological: narrative analysts need to engage with these phenomena with
questions that pertain to both what narrative analysis can offer for their scrutiny and how it can respond to the
new challenges they pose. Small stories research, having developed tools for examining fragmented, trans-
posable and a-typical stories, is well placed to provide a sound methodological basis for exploring stories on
social media, in particular for interrogating what is distinctive about them, but also how they draw on or depart
from other forms and practices of storytelling.
The third reason for extending small stories research to social media is epistemological. The numerous appli-
cations and outreach of small stories research beyond sociolinguistics recommend it as a critical micro-per-
spective on social media engagements, one that can help answer a question currently being investigated in
social media research: what is the socio-political potential of social media engagements for transformation?
And on an individual level, how does performative and agentive self-presentation intersect with algorithms
and the datafication of users? Similarly, small stories research can help illuminate the values, views and ide-
ologies that underpin the design of stories on platforms: what templates for storytelling are offered? What is
promoted as a story worth sharing and posting? how and why? And what implications does this have for the
types of lives and subjectivities that may become widely available and amplified on social media or equally be
silenced (see Georgakopoulou, 2019)?
Taking the above reasons into account, my work has aimed to show the need for a radical re-thinking of how
we define a ‘narrative’ on social media, how we can analyze it and in what ways small stories research can
enable this re-positioning of conventional narrative analysis. In particular, my claim has been that the starting
point of a narrative analysis on social media should be the recognition that stories produced on social media
normally:
• announce and perform the minute-by-minute everyday life experience

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• are transportable and circulatable in different sites and media (cf. transmedia distribution)
• are embedded into a variety of online and offline environments, are multi-semiotic and multi-authored
• address simultaneously different, potentially big and unforeseeable audiences.
In addition, any narrative analysis of stories on social media should factor in the metricization of users’ story-
telling activities, the fact that stories are supported by and generate many visible and invisible metrics – for
instance, number of views, shares, as well as a host of algorithmic calculations that shape individual users’
experience of storytelling online, including what stories they engage with (for a study of how metrics and al-
gorithms shape storytelling on social media, see Georgakopoulou et al., 2020).
Below, I will show how employing small stories research for the analysis of social media has involved method-
ological innovation – in particular, links with (digital) ethnography and tracking, corpus-assisted discourse
analysis, online conversation analysis and an infusion of insights from science and technology studies and
platform studies into narrative analysis.
Key Assumptions and Modes of Analysis
Working with small stories on social media involves exploring the intersection of narrative with social media
affordances and their role in what stories will be told and how. This should not be viewed as a determin-
istic perspective but as a productive engagement with previous contextual studies of storytelling. A volume
of research in everyday stories has shown their role in the imaginative and affective presentation of self as
grounded in specific spatiotemporal realities and the 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: pages 1–23 & 123). Establishing connections between people, place, time, events
and emotions lies at the heart of interweaving narrative plots. Sociolinguistic studies of storytelling have also
demonstrated how these connections are always done in context and in interaction with participants (De Fi-
na and Georgakopoulou, 2012: pages 86–108). These insights should be tested out vis-à-vis the multi-semi-
oticity, multi-authorship and transposability of communicative activities that social media platforms have been
found to enable. Media scholars have shown that the ever evolving architecture of platforms has increasingly
become directional to specific forms and practices of communication that encourage users to share their lives
with wider audiences (van Dijck, 2013). There is still much scope for empirical research into how these di-
rectives shape users’ self-presentation and interactions with other users but equally into how users’ practices

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follow, resist or counteract social media design.
To analyze small stories online, I adopt a broad perspective on interaction that takes into account, when ap-
plicable, 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, replica-
bility and remixing. I also employ the heuristic I developed for storytelling in face-to-face contexts, due to its
flexibility and open-endedness (Georgakopoulou, 2007). The heuristic explores the connections of three sep-
arable but interrelated layers of analysis: (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, without, however, pre-deter-
mining 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-related levels of stories-in-context, I draw on positioning analysis in its connections with small sto-
ries (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, legiti-
mates or contests which part of the story? Who coauthors, what and how? (Level 2)
What aspects of the key character(s), events and narrated experience are presented as generaliz-
able and holding above and beyond the specific story? (Level 3)
This analysis draws on the growing line of inquiry into the interactional aspects of social media communication
and their links with users’ participation roles and statuses (cf. online conversation analysis, such as Frobenius
and Harper, 2015; Gillies et al., 2015: 45–51). Such studies have begun to show how users gauge and nav-
igate the potentially diverse and multiple audiences of their communication (see the discussion on context
collapse in Quan-Haase, 2009; Wesch, 2008) by, for instance, implicitly selecting and addressing certain au-
diences at the expense of others (Tagg and Seargeant, 2016). In this respect, I have argued that any study of
participation frameworks and interaction on social media platforms cannot be disconnected from the height-
ened possibility for circulation of a discourse activity in different sites and for different audiences. Specifically,
I have shown that the posting of an activity as a story or its becoming a story through subsequent sharing and

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engagement with it, has important implications for interaction (Georgakopoulou, 2013a, b). Similarly, the roles
of users as storytellers and story-recipients lend themselves to specific types of participation – for example,
knowing participation (see Georgakopoulou 2016c).
Methods
Tracking
I examined the ways in which we can extend small stories research to social media as part of a larger project
entitled ‘Life writing of the moment: The sharing and updating self on social media'.3 My aims were to chart
the multi-semiotic forms (linguistic/textual, visual, auditory, etc.) that life-writing of the moment takes on a
range of social media (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter), with emergent and remediated genres (e.g. selfies,
retweets, spoof videos and remixes) and, where applicable, on the basis of specific (personal, political, so-
cial, etc.) incidents and issues (e.g. the Eurozone crisis). Incident-based work was combined with tracking the
phases and stages of a story's sharing as part of building a ‘thick description’ (see Latzko-Toth et al., Chap-
ter 12, this Handbook). To this effect, I have used popularity indexes and Google trends that show when the
circulation of an incident has peaked and on which platform. I have also employed the rationale of identifying
a critical moment (Vaajala et al., 2013) so as to decide on postings worthy of further investigation. A criti-
cal moment refers to a micro-scale event or incident that may serve as a disruptive moment that sets larger
processes in motion. It may, for instance, provide a glimpse of meanings, ideas and values that are normally
taken for granted or remain tacit, hidden and backgrounded under ‘normal’ circumstances. Such moments
may allow ‘condensing a complex subject … to a few symbolic issues’ (Oberhuber et al., 2005: 230).
The first incident that I focused on happened in the run up to the 2012 election in Greece, which was viewed
at the time as crucial for the future of the Greek bailout and of the EU. On a live breakfast TV news show
(June 7, 2012), a male member of parliament (MP) candidate (Ilias Kasidiaris) from the then rising far-right
party Golden Dawn assaulted two female left-wing MPs (Rena Dourou and Liana Kanelli): he threw a glass
of water at Dourou and slapped and punched Kanelli. The incident quickly went viral with numerous uploads
of the clip of the assault on YouTube by ordinary people. I singled out for close qualitative and quantitative

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analysis the 50 most viewed videos (for the results of this analysis, see Georgakopoulou, 2013b, 2014). I also
tracked the subsequent transposition of the incident that involved the production of spoof/fake videos, mash-
ups and remixes and their uploading on YouTube. I closely analyzed nine such videos produced in the first
month after the incident and all comments for each video until April 2015, amounting to 1,500 comments.
In addition, I tracked key spoof videos and memes created as part of the prolific and intense mediatization
of the former Greek minister of Finance (January–June 2015), Yanis Varoufakis, who has since achieved
celebrity status. The first such memetic video, Varoufakis Thug Life, with a description of ‘Varoufakis says NO
to the Troika', was based on what I call an emblematic event: Varoufakis’ tense press conference with the
Head of Eurogroup, days after he had been appointed as minister (for the results of this analysis, see Geor-
gakopoulou and Giaxoglou, 2018).
For both these case studies, I employed principles of an open-ended, adaptive ethnography (Hine et al.,
2009), which involves applying flexible routes to fieldwork over time to suit the mobile, ever shifting land-
scape of social media. It also involved using, in Markham's terms (2013), ‘remix’ methods, that is bringing
together unlikely methodological choices in imaginative and reflexive ways, in the spirit of social media prac-
tices of remixing. For instance, the researcher's own immersion and participation in social media culture, with
processes of catching up, sharing and real-time tracking, are recognized as a major part of the development
of ethnographic understanding. In addition, I adapted digitally native methods for fieldwork – for instance, ob-
serving systematically, as a ‘lurking’ participant in a specific site, activities and postings, so as to identify key
posters of small stories and respondents. Some of these methods involve auto-phenomenology, which is the
researcher's reflexivity about her own position, stakes and interests in the field of social media engagement.
For instance, I often examined my position as a ‘digital tourist', even using it strategically in off the record
chats with teenage participants and their use of Facebook and Instagram. I also drew upon observations and
developed analytical lines as a result, on the basis of my identity-at the time-as mother to a media-saturated
teenage daughter. I specifically employed the above methods as part of a small stories research project on
Facebook status updates, which involved tracking a female friend in her 30s, and on selfies, which involved
postings of a group of teenage friends who I selected from my daughter's friends, as part of a study of selfies
(for details, see Georgakopoulou, 2016a).
Tracking in my work has involved real-time capturing of ‘diachronic’ types of contributions, as Bou-Franch et
al. (2012) put it. Such contributions include, for instance, comments on videos that are added by contributors

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when the original incident of a video may become topical again due to any subsequent (political) changes and
developments. This was the case with the imprisonment of Ilias Kasidiaris in 2014, as part of a crackdown
on Golden Dawn's criminal activities as well as his acquittal for the incident under study (March 2015), which
resulted in a flurry of new comments and a social media re-engagement with the original aforementioned in-
cident. Tracking this new engagement allowed me to chart the creation of a social mediatized biography for
the main protagonists of the incident, and the sedimentation of any specific evaluative viewpoints about the
incident (see Georgakopoulou, 2016b).
The above back and forth processes of tracking, data collection and analysis are akin to what Gubrium and
Holstein (2009) refer to as bracketing in narrative analysis. Bracketing involves keeping a balanced focus
through mode shifting on the what and the how of research, and I would include the who and why of research,
gliding between processes, conditions and resources. Although bracketing has been proposed and developed
for the study of offline narrative data, it is in my view transferrable to the analysis of social media data too,
as it does justice to their ever changing nature, which resists a neat separation between data collection and
analysis, as new contexts and data are aggregated.4 As I have claimed elsewhere (Georgakopoulou, 2016b),
in the light of this enlarged time frame of the research, my research ethics questions and requirements have
at times needed to change considerably and in unforeseeable ways.
In addition, bracketing has involved different phases of coding in my dataset, as questions changed and
evolved. For instance, I sampled YouTube comments on the videos described earlier and Facebook posts and
selfies, so as to check for the frequency of certain knowing participation patterns that had emerged as salient
from previous analysis. Knowing participation involves the commenters bringing in and displaying knowledge
specific to the post and/or poster: in comments on selfies, this is often traceable to offline, pre-posting activi-
ties and a relational history with the poster. To capture knowing participation, I specifically coded any explicit
and implied references to knowledge of specific events, activities and/or characters and any information about
the provenance of this knowledge (e.g. shared participation in an activity offline). I also coded references and
reaction to the state of non-knowing. In all these cases, I took into account the form that such references took
and if and how they were linked with Facebook and YouTube affordances (e.g. tagging, uploading videos and
photographs; for details, see Georgakopoulou, 2016c).

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The Place of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis
To complement the micro-analysis of my datasets, I have drawn on corpus-assisted discourse studies (Part-
ington, 2004) for the analysis of published surveys, platform blogs, including any publicity about new features
for stories, and reviews of such new features in online tech magazines. A corpus-assisted analysis 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. Specifically, the corpus methodology
is instrumental in identifying discourses of how stories are being viewed and defined by the apps’ companies
and how they connect with the breaking news logic. In tune with a critical discourse analytic agenda, my aim is
to uncover the meanings in the discourse of apps and their offerings for stories, which are often hidden within
a rhetoric of user empowerment. 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 apps’ 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).
Using previous findings on how users adapt media facilities for sharing the moment to produce small stories
(Georgakopoulou, 2017), I have sought to identify the extent to which Stories as a distinct feature on Insta-
gram 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 of-
fered 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).5
In this type of corpus-assisted discourse analysis, I bring in insights from platform studies and science and
technology studies which study platforms as ideologically laden spaces and socio-material actors with influ-
ence on communication (e.g. Beer, 2009; Bucher, 2018; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011).

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Narrative Stancetaking and Rescripting as Sharing
My analysis of the above described datasets (Georgakopoulou, 2015b, 2016a, b, 2017; Georgakopoulou and
Giaxoglou, 2018) has attested to the following plot features that need to be identified as part of examining the
making and sharing of stories on social media:
Emblematic events: key shared moments that emerge as central in the mediatization of specific in-
dividuals and current affairs on account of their distribution and iterative invocation in (re) tellings.
Key actors: who, through distribution of specific emblematic events, become ‘characters’ in circulat-
ing stories, often with different roles and identities than those in ‘real life'.
Portable and iterative assessments: evaluations of key actors’ speech, action, values and style.
These are picked out for circulation and, helped by replicability and distribution, often lead to recy-
clable quotes.
Multi-authorship: participation roles, rights and affordances in the sharing of a story, including co-
narration possibilities.
I have also shown (Georgakopoulou, 2014, 2015b) that the authoring and sharing of the above plot features
rely on two systematic social media-afforded practices: (1) narrative stancetaking and (2) rescripting. To begin
with, narrative stancetaking involves posts in which conventionalized story-framing devices are used to sug-
gest that there is a story in the making, a story that can be told, developed and updated later if requested.
More specifically, narrative stancetaking indicates that an activity is:
being offered or taken up as a story, thereby positioning participants as tellers-recipients-(co)-tellers

etc. thus anticipating and even proposing subsequent sites of circulation and audiences and/or
consisting of events and characters in specific spatiotemporal scenarios whose actions and speech
are assessable.
As I have shown elsewhere (Georgakopoulou, 2013b, 2017), small stories online often begin with or are con-
fined to narrative stancetaking. Narrativity is therefore emergent, a process of becoming a story through en-
gagement, as we will see later in the chapter. Narrative stancetaking is a common practice that cuts across
personal and other people's or news stories – for example, posting updates on Facebook, tweets about cur-
rent affairs, or YouTube video postings. I have shown that in all these different cases, there is systematicity in
how narrative stancetaking is responded to and taken up by users and this has implications for what stories
are told on which platforms, by whom and how. I have also found that narrative stancetaking often combines

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with story-linking processes, where posters ‘borrow’ and appropriate other stories, so as to suit their moment
and to create analogies with their experience (Georgakopoulou, 2017).
A specific, salient case of story-linking is that of rescripting, which involves practices of visually and/or verbally
manipulating previously circulated stories, so as to create alternative stories. These are in turn offered and
taken up as humorous, satirical takes on the original story. I have shown (Georgakopoulou, 2015b) that this
creative manipulation mainly involves changing the place of the original tale on its own or, along with other
aspects of the plot including the characters, so that a ‘new’ tale emerges with ‘new’ characters, ‘new’ narrator,
‘new’ audiences, etc. YouTube videos such as spoofs, memes, remixes and mashups form a main site of re-
scripting. For instance, the incident of the aforementioned assault was satirically re-enacted by ordinary users
on a Greek beach, with the ‘politicians’ wearing swimsuits. The spoof video was entitled: Kasidiaris Kaneli
sfaliara paralia (Kasidiaris Kaneli slap beach).6 Another form of rescripting involved ‘inserting’ the politicians
into places other than the TV studio. This capitalized on video-editing and remixing techniques that allowed
image manipulation. Unlikely settings in which the protagonists of the original incident were visually placed
included a boxing ring where Kasidiaris and Kanelli had a contest, a video game and a Star Wars scene with
Kasidiaris and Kanelli battling it out. Similarly, in the study of Yanis Varoufakis, we showed (Georgakopoulou
and Giaxoglou, 2018) how incidents involving him in his negotiations with members of the Eurogroup were
rescripted as one-to-one clashes with the then powerful politicians in Europe, modelled on Hollywood block-
buster films. In these clashes, Varoufakis was emplotted as a character of ‘thug life', ‘gangsta', ‘action su-
perhero', ‘kicking ass’ and ‘the Killah'. Such iterative characterizations became part of contests that set Varo-
ufakis in clashing semiologies as the ‘hero’ vs the ‘villains', ‘good’ vs ‘bad guys', ‘David vs Goliath’ type fights,
which echoed popular culture plots. Their transmedia distribution, enhanced by iterative, portable quotes (‘you
just killed the troika') sedimented the iconography and biographing of a maverick, embattled Minister of Fi-
nance.
Next, I will single out the main ways in which narrative stancetaking processes intersect with social media
affordances with examples from Facebook and what participation roles this allows for ‘who’ and ‘how'.
Narrative Stancetaking: Media Affordances
In face-to-face conversations, story-openers are conventionalized routines that preface an extended telling
(Jefferson, 1978). In the case of Facebook, what follows narrative stancetaking is more open-ended and con-

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tingent upon audience engagement. Narrative stancetaking elements include:
Temporal framing and notifications of activities that have just happened, e.g. Mary changed her pro-
file picture; Mary added a picture; Mary was with Abby & another 2 people
Localizations, e.g. with X at café dolce
Assessments, e.g. feeling amused with X …
Events/activities, e.g. ice-skating with X …
References to characters (and relationships), e.g. Me & my gorgeous girl; my top girl; lovers; getting
ready with the bae
Tagging
These affordances encourage the inclusion of time, place, events, characters and/or condensed or indexical
associations among them. Furthermore, posters can ‘select’ certain friends as ratified and knowing recipients
on the basis of their ‘named’ inclusion in the post. This may happen verbally – for instance, you can include
a friend by clicking on their name, which subsequently allows viewers of the post also to click on their name.
It can also happen visually – for example, by including a photograph from an outing, and with tagging, which
allows the posters to decide on who is more relevant for and connected with the post. Posting a shared status
also allows from the outset a posting to include specific participants as ‘addressees’ (specifically addressed
‘friends'; Tagg and Seargeant, 2016).
In all these cases, I have found that the overwhelming preference for tagged or otherwise ‘named’ and
‘signalled’ individuals is not just to produce a Like or a reaction but also to contribute a comment (Geor-
gakopoulou, 2016c). References to shared events, even in the absence of any visual or tagging material, also
introduce the requirement for certain individuals to display their knowing status. All these affordances end up
creating a ‘private chat’ on a public forum with certain friends appearing as being in the know and in the loop
and others not.

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Small Stories for ‘Friends’ in the Know
As I have shown elsewhere (Georgakopoulou, 2013a, b, 2017), narrative stancetaking on Facebook and
YouTube postings presents systematic interactional implications. This means that it may project certain kinds
of audience engagement, but it is the actual audience engagement that shapes further telling and terms of
telling. In particular, on Facebook, posts that report disruptive events in the poster's life are more likely to re-
ceive comments from their friends than a simple Like. (Most of my data in this respect pre-dates the introduc-
tion of reactions.) The report of disruptions is also more likely to lead to a further post from the poster where
they thank others for any wishes and interest and updates on the situation. A similar interactional pattern of a
task of reciprocation to comments from the original poster is to be found in the case of posting selfies. There,
a comment on a selfie from a respondent raises the task of replying and thanking for the initial poster. Most
of such reciprocal exchanges are dyadic, that is between commenter and original poster, and so the com-
menters routinely post atomized contributions in relation to other commenters (Georgakopoulou, 2016a, c).
In addition, narrative stancetaking in the original post or some other selection of knowing participants (e.g.
tagging in a selfie) is ‘read’ by recipients as an invitation and even a requirement for participation that displays
knowing status. This participation separates friends in the know from other friends, however aligned the latter
may be with the post or poster. Validation and alignment with the action of an initial post can be done with a
simple Like or some kind of appreciative comment. Knowing status, however, allows commenters to extend
beyond broadly affiliative actions to some form of elaboration and co-authoring of the initial post. Specifically,
the task of showing knowledge can take the following forms: commenters can expand on the narrative stanc-
etaking of the initial post by constituting it as a story or providing more of the story; they can also refer more
or less allusively to pre-posting shared activities, which I call the backstory (Georgakopoulou, 2016c).
Knowing participation in comments on selfies is mainly found in what I have called ‘significant other’ selfies
(selfies of the poster and a best friend or other special person in their life) and in ‘group selfies’ (selfies of the
poster and other people, normally friends; Georgakopoulou, 2016a). These raise the requirement for partici-
pation from the friend(s) in the selfie with a comment. In this way, the same post serves different purposes for
different ‘friends': it may be an opportunity for display of offline selfie-taking and other knowledge for knowing
friends, as we can see in example 1, in the comments that ensue by the two friends who are photographed
on the selfie that one of them has posted, or an announcement for non-knowing recipients, as we will see in

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example 2.
Example 1
Elena7: next to selfie of her and her best friend Anna [which is not reproduced here].
Waaaay up I feel blessed. With Hannah Bates.
Hannah: Awh luv u. xx May 7 at 9 pm
Elena: Luv u too heart emoji. We're gonna have so many more great times esp. now that we've
got Mike
May 7 at 10.47 pm Hannah: Ha ha very tru two heart emojis let's hope we don't run into bryan
again tho …
May 7 at 10.58pm
The ‘private’ chat which develops between the two friends in Example 1 elaborates on the caption of their
selfie, a line from a song in fact (‘Way up I feel blessed'), in ways which allude to their closeness. In particular,
with the reference to ‘Mike’ and ‘Brian', a backstory of shared interactional history is referred to allusively.
We can see the juxtaposition of contributions from knowing vs non-knowing friends in the comments to anoth-
er ‘significant selfie’ (of the female selfie-poster with a young man), which suggests a developing romance,
as it is accompanied by hearts (see Example 2).

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Example 2.
SNL: *cute couple
March 29 at 2.21pm Like 1
Kate L: yes this is piff ngl
Helena H. Kate: see I take ur advice on board
Megan R.: Hmmm … what have I missed?????!!!!!!
Helena H. Megaaan
Megan R.: Is there anything you want to tell me Miss Harris?! Like NIOW!!!!
Helena H.: Lols… But what have I done Miss Ryan? Went out for bubble tea with a mate [wink]
Megan R.: Bubble tea. Huh? Miss Ryan would like to have a chat with you Miss Harris now…
Knowing friends such as Kate L propose a positive assessment of the selfie, which is based on offline or any
other insider's knowledge in relation to the selfie posted. This is seen in Helena's response to Kate's com-

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ment that makes a cryptic reference to a backstory of Kate and Helena having discussed this relationship and
Helena ‘having taken her advice on board'. The backstory normally is part of the events surrounding a selfie
and any allusions to it seem to elaborate on the selfie as part of a story and thus propose how it should be un-
derstood. Put differently, knowing participation narrows down the interpretative options around a selfie. This
narrative engagement with selfies is seen in cases of non-knowing recipients too who routinely ask for the
backstory as a means of getting into the ‘loop'. Such responses from non-knowing recipients tend to lead to
(more) storying in relation to the selfie from the poster. In this way, the initial selfie post retrospectively serves
as a story preface (Jefferson, 1978). We can see this in Example 2 with Megan's comment which seeks to
find out ‘what she has missed'. Helena begins to provide an explanation in small story form in the publicly
available comments (‘went out for bubble tea with a mate'), but the fuller story, we can speculate, is provided
in the private chat area to which the friends claim they will switch. (I did not have access to private messages.)
‘Curating’ Small Stories: Between Affordances and Practices
As the discussion so far shows, I explore small stories on social media on the intersection of the platforms’
designed affordances with users’ practices. Studying the nuances of this entangled relationship among tech-
nologies, values in design, platform features and storytelling practices allows me to interrogate the increasing
‘curation’ of storytelling online. This consists of the intensification of offering facilities to users for posting and
engaging with stories that fit the definition of ‘small stories', mainly but not exclusively, through the feature
of Stories. My study of the values underpinning the design of Stories on Instagram and Snapchat, the af-
fordances offered and key communicative practices in influencers’ stories on Instagram have revealed three
directives (cf. preferential conditions, prompts) to users for what kinds of stories will be told, how audiences
will engage with them and how tellers will present themselves and their lives in them. These are sharing-
life-in-the-moment, audience engagement as quantified viewing and authenticity in tellers’ self-presentation
(for details, see Georgakopoulou et al., 2020; Georgakopoulou, 2021). These directives suit the algorithmic
logic of instant live-sharing, promoting visual representations and snapshots of sharing the moment as well
as the quantification of viewing audience-engagement practices. The promise of user control and creativi-
ty in the rhetoric of apps about Stories was found to be at odds with the abundance of pre-selections, pri-
or categorizations of experience, filters and menus with specific editing features (Georgakopoulou, 2019).

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These ever evolving templates for storytelling seem to direct users to a specific presentation of themselves
and their everyday life-in-the-moment, off-the-cuff, as raw experience, which is in turn defined as ‘authentic'.
Elsewhere, I discuss the genealogical evolution of this intimate link between stories and authenticity within
a discourse of ‘imperfect sharing’ and I tease out its relationship with previous facilities for self-presentation,
especially selfies (Georgakopoulou, 2019; Georgakopoulou et al., 2020). Here, it suffices to say that the three
directives that I have documented in the curation of small stories systematically collapse the stories’ social
and relational aspects with the quantification (see metricization) of users’ activities. Stories are thus being cu-
rated in ways that allow them to serve as hybrids, both content-creation features and consumables, vehicles
for advertising and monetization. At the same time, as the corpus analysis of the main lexical and thematic
associations of Stories showed, the design of stories serves to disassociate them from memories and the
past in favour of a showing mode of narration, grounded in the ephemerality of the here-and-now. Taking into
account the affordances of distribution and amplification as well as the huge popularity of Stories among In-
fluencers, businesses and ordinary users alike, I have argued that this curation of small stories has the poten-
tial to create normative ways of storying oneself. Similarly, the convergence and replication of story facilities
across apps suggest that drawing on existing templates to post stories is rapidly becoming consolidated as
a widely available mode of ‘autobiography', particularly for the main targeted user groups of teenagers and
young adults (Georgakopoulou, 2019).
Conclusion
In this chapter, I presented the key assumptions, disciplinary context and outreach (beyond sociolinguistics)
of small stories research, a model for narrative and identities analysis originally put forward for the analysis of
conversational data. Narrative analysis has a pivotal role to play in social media research for the documenta-
tion of genres of stories and (new) forms of subjectivities, but to do so a radical departure from certain tropes
and modes of conventional narrative research has been necessary. I argued that small stories research has
been well placed to offer alternative tools and concepts for such an inquiry. I charted the main directions
that the extension of small stories research has taken so far, teasing out key methodological choices that
have involved a (re)mixing of primarily qualitative methods, such as ethnographic tracking, online conversa-
tion analysis, (critical) discourse analysis and insights from platform studies. The integration of quantitative,
corpus methods into micro-analyses shows that, going forward, there is potential in engaging small stories
with various mixed methods, including data visualization and big data mining.

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The chapter also presented certain analytical ways of working with small stories by focusing on narrative
stancetaking and rescripting, two concepts coined to describe the main attested practices of story-sharing.
These practices show the flexible, emergent ways of story-making and emplotment online. I specifically
showed the implications of narrative stancetaking for participation roles – narrative stancetaking counteracts
context collapse by creating conditions of knowing participation for some members of a post's ‘audience', al-
lowing them to align with the stance in the original posting and to elaborate on, amplify and co-author it on the
basis of (shared) knowledge.
As small stories research on social media is uncovering practices for posting stories on the intersection be-
tween specific modes of self-presentation, participation and affordances, we are increasingly in a position to
find out more about the processes through which certain stories and, in turn, 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 small stories research.
Notes
1 www.prweek.com/article/1666235/stories-overtake-news-feeds-live-dead-top-100-brands-use-instagram
2 2005–2008 (www.identities.org.uk).
3 This was part of a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (www.ego-media.org, 2014–2019).
4 Similarly, Burrows and Savage (2014) have also claimed from experience that while standard methods,
even longitudinal ones, allow a demarcation of the fieldwork and acquisition of data from the analysis, with
online data, this proves much more difficult to do.
5 The corpus was compiled in collaboration with Dr Anda Drasovean in February 2018 and it includes material
published by January 2018.
6 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx-RXZLP9wI
7 All names used are pseudonyms.

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• social media
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https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529782943

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Sage Reference

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research

Author: Alexandra Georgakopoulou

© 2022 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

ter, sharing through stories has overtaken sharing through feeds.1

Small Stories Research In Face-To-Face Conversations

Context for Small Stories Research

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

Three Reasons for Extending Small Stories Research to Social Media

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

• announce and perform the minute-by-minute everyday life experience

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

Key Assumptions and Modes of Analysis

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

follow, resist or counteract social media design.

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

The Place of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis

see Georgakopoulou (2019).5

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

Narrative Stancetaking and Rescripting as Sharing

being offered or taken up as a story, thereby positioning participants as tellers-recipients-(co)-tellers

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

Narrative Stancetaking: Media Affordances

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

tingent upon audience engagement. Narrative stancetaking elements include:

Localizations, e.g. with X at café dolce

Assessments, e.g. feeling amused with X …

Events/activities, e.g. ice-skating with X …

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

Small Stories for ‘Friends’ in the Know

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

Waaaay up I feel blessed. With Hannah Bates.

Hannah: Awh luv u. xx May 7 at 9 pm

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

SNL: *cute couple

March 29 at 2.21pm Like 1

Kate L: yes this is piff ngl

March 29 at 2.27pm Like 2

Helena H. Kate: see I take ur advice on board

March 29 at 2.28pm Like 2

Megan R.: Hmmm … what have I missed?????!!!!!!

March 28 at 10.05pm Like 3

March 28 at 10.50pm Like 1

March 28 at 10.51pm Like 2

March 28 at 10.53pm Like 1

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

‘Curating’ Small Stories: Between Affordances and Practices

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

7 All names used are pseudonyms.

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

Barton, D. & Lee, C. (2013) Language online. London: Routledge.

Duranti, A. (2005) On theories and models. Discourse Studies 7: 409–429.