By Alex Georgakopoulou, co-author of Quantified Storytelling

Since their inception, social media companies have been keen to offer users facilities for telling stories. The widely-recognized power of storytelling for making sense of our experience and connecting with others has been tapped into, as part of the project of finding something that people have always done and ‘removing friction’. In the process, certain conventional associations of storytelling, for instance, with memories and the past, have been shunned. 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. This early and, in some ways, technologically necessary, coupling of storytelling with sharing-the-moment has been crucial for how storytelling facilities have evolved online (Georgakopoulou 2017a). I have identified a close link between specific media affordances, mainly portability, replicability and scalability of content, and what I describe as ‘small stories’ (2007). Seen through the lens of conventional narrative studies, small stories are a-typical: brief or signaled elliptically; about recent, ongoing and/or future events (announcing & updating rather than remembering); grounded in the mundane and the everyday; open-ended & transportable; multiply authored, negotiated and contested.

My work (2017b) has identified certain key-phases in the development of facilities for posting such small stories, especially in the so called ego-centred platforms, Facebook being a prime example in its early days. These phases include the introduction of selfies that allowed pivotal ingredients of storytelling, such as characters located in time & space, jointly (with commenters) evaluating their experience, to become intertwined with a predominantly visual self-presentation. Visual affordances for storytelling that in face-to-face contexts was primarily verbal have paved the way for big platforms designing stories as viewable features, integrated into their architecture, and named as such. This began with the introduction of the feature of stories on Snapchat (2014), described as ‘a game changer’ (Cooper 2016) for the platform, followed by Instagram Stories (2016), Facebook (2017), Weibo (2018) and lately, Twitter Fleets (2020), which have an uncanny similarity with stories. It appears therefore that the format has been both hugely popular and replicated. By now, sharing with stories has surpassed sharing through newsfeeds.

The idea behind ‘stories’ is simple: users share a collection of moments from their daily life with photos and/or video as main modalities, and with brevity (e.g. 7-second snaps and 15- second videos on Instagram). My study of female Influencers’ Instagram Stories has shown that these features, alongside a built-in ephemerality (although archiving possibilities now exist, stories disappear after 24 hours), simplicity of graphics, and abudance of tools are directive to posting specific types of small stories: e.g. on the go stories, breaking news, behind the scenes, countdowns (Georgakopoulou, Iversen & Stage 2020). Similarly, a corpus-assisted analysis of how stories are promoted by Snapchat and Instagram has shown an association of stories with tellers’ authenticity, i.e. spontaneity & presentation of the ‘real’ self, often described as ‘imperfect sharing’ (Georgakopoulou 2019). 

An(other) important way in which stories as a curated feature go beyond earlier storytelling facilities is to be found in the abundance of sophisticated, more or less visible to users, metrics and analytics. Platform metrics, from numbers of Like and Share to hidden algorithmic measurements, harness users’ data for retention, advertising and other purposes. The integration of metrics into both the interface of stories with users’ activity (e.g. number of views on Instagram Stories) and the actual content of a story (e.g. numbers of taps on stickers, i.e., geotags, hashtags and mentions, in an Instagram Story; stories about bucket lists, etc.) has signalled a stepping up of metricization to cover all user-engagement with storytelling. As narrative analysts, we found this engineered, intimate link of stories with metrics extraordinary, in its implications for the kinds of storytelling we are being socialized into online and the types of selves & lives that it prompts us to share. We scrutinized the nuances of this entangled relationship amongst technologies, values in the design of stories, platform features & storytelling, in our book Quantified Storytelling: A narrative analysis of metrics on social media. Using different case-studies, from how cancer patients tell their illness experiences on Instagram to how specific stories rise in prominence on a subreddit group, we focused on the role that three distinct types of metrics play in the stories’ plot, structure and telllability, but also in the tellers’ self-presentation: content metrics, interface metrics and algorithmic metrics.

Alex Georgakopoulou is Professor of Discourse Analysis & Sociolinguistics, King’s College London, UK.

References

Cooper, S. (2016). Snapchat Versus Instagram: The War of the Stories. Accessed 10/11/2019. www.thedrum.com/opinion/2016/08/25.

Georgakopoulou, A. (2007) Small stories, interaction and identities. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Georgakopoulou, A. (2017a) Small stories research:  a narrative paradigm for the analysis of social media. In Sloan, L. & Quan-Haage, A., The SAGE Handbook of social media research methods. London: Sage. 266-282. 

Georgakopoulou, A. (2017b) “Sharing the moment as small stories: The interplay between practices & affordances in the social media-curation of lives”. Special Issue. Storytelling in the digital age. Narrative Inquiry 27: 311–333.

Georgakopoulou, A. (2019) “Designing stories on social media: A corpus-assisted critical perspective on the mismatches of story-curation”. Linguistics and Education. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2019.05.003.