Sharing-Life-in-the-Moment as Small Stories: Participation, Social Relations, and Subjectivity

My initial aim in my contribution to the Ego-Media project, originally called “Life-Writing of the Moment,” was to extend to social media communication small stories research, a social interactional paradigm for the analysis of everyday life and identities which I had developed.^1,2 The paradigm was grounded in the recognition that particular types of stories, namely those focused on the (re)telling of personal experience and past events in research interview situations, had become the privileged object of narrative analysis, leading to the neglect of conversational storytelling as a significant site of subjectivity and identity processes.³

Inspired by insights from conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, the analysis of stories as situated, contextualized practices called attention to the process of story-making as an interactionally achieved performance that, instead of a focus on the “lived and told,” can provide insights into “the messier business of living and telling.”⁴ A small stories perspective has been employed in narrative-based strands of disciplines outside of sociolinguistics (e.g., criminology, educational inquiry, psychology, sociology) as an epistemology and a toolkit well-suited to interrogating essentialist links between stories and identities and bringing to the fore silenced, untold, devalued, and discarded stories in numerous institutional or research-regulated (e.g., interviews) contexts. Small stories have, therefore, often emerged as counterstories that do not fit expectations of who the tellers should be and that are used by tellers to introduce moments of resistance to dominant discourses, as well as contradictions, tensions, and dilemmas vis-à-vis their sense of self.⁵

Below, I present the key epistemological, methodological, and theoretical reasons for extending small stories research to the analysis of social media communication. In particular, I introduce and discuss three key concepts: narrative stance-taking, rescripting, and story-linking. These concepts have emerged through the “Life-Writing of the Moment” Project as pivotal for examining processes of emplotment on social media, aiding the investigation of conditions of media-afforded story sharing, tellability, and audience engagement on the one hand, and of the inter-animation of the personal and the public on the other.

My analytical encounter with small stories happened in two ethnographically studied environments of social interaction amongst female adolescents, one in Greece (2007) and one in a London school (2008; 2009).^6,7,8 Subsequent to that, I began to document a close association of small stories, as the use of social media was growing.^9,10,11 I noted a set of features that conventional narrative analysts would see as atypical or noncanonical, being salient in different social media platforms and practices, from Facebook to YouTube and Twitter, from statuses to spoof videos and retweets. These features involved fragmentation and open-endedness of stories, exceeding the confines of a single posting and site and resisting a neat categorization of beginning-middle-end.

They also involved multi-semioticity and multiple authoring of posts, as these may be shared across platforms. In addition, there was 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 “small stories” much more widely available and visible in public arenas of communication through circulation/sharing.¹² The growing discourse and sociolinguistic work on stories on social media by other scholars began to confirm the validity of this view of small stories research and in turn the usefulness of the model for describing and analyzing narrative activities on digital media.^13,14,15

I was also in a position to document the migration and remediation of a specific genre of small stories, which I have called “breaking news” (see Sharing the Moment Now as Breaking News), from face-to-face conversational contexts to media-facilitated conversational contexts where new technologies are present, to various activities on digital media, including text messages, status updates on Facebook, (re)tweets, and titles of YouTube videos.^16,17 Breaking news stories are of very recent (e.g., a few hours ago) and in some cases evolving (just now) events that, once introduced into a conversation, can be further updated. The documented proliferation of breaking news on social media platforms is no accident: social media environments afford opportunities for sharing life in miniaturized form at the same time as constraining the ability of users to plunge into full autobiographical mode (e.g., 140 characters as the initial “constraint” of Twitter). In particular, they offer users the ability 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 platforms.

This readily observable prevalence of small stories on social media platforms, often engendered by media affordances, was the first empirical reason as to why, I have argued,¹⁸ small stories research holds relevance for the analysis of online data. At the same time, activities which I call “small stories” have often prompted dystopic responses from numerous commentators about what constantly announcing trivial slices of one’s everyday life means for how we see and present ourselves and how this is endangering more conventional forms of autobiography. In the light of this, the second reason for extending small stories research to social media was methodological: narrative analysts needed, in my view, 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 that they pose. Small stories research, having developed tools for examining fragmented, transposable, and atypical 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 for exploring how they draw on – or depart from – other forms and practices of storytelling.

The third reason for extending small stories research to social media has been epistemological. The numerous applications and outreach of small stories research recommend it as a critical microperspective on social media engagements, one that can help answer in a balanced way questions about the aesthetics and politics of social media, in particular about their implications for the ways in which we think about ourselves and our lives.

The main impetus behind my project “Life-Writing of the Moment: The Sharing and Updating Self on Social Media” was to test out small stories research, extend, fine-tune, systematize it, and where applicable rethink its scope and concepts so as to investigate the dialectic between media affordances, algorithms, and stories in a range of social media (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat) and genres. My starting point was the built-in logic and economy of breaking news in many social networking sites.¹⁹ This is intimately linked with the algorithmically shaped preference for recency of posts: recency and timeliness was, notably, one of the weighing factors in Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm,²⁰ as well as in Instagram’s algorithm. My contention has been that this essentially encourages the sharing of everyday life as stories, as a branded directive of living and telling, of sharing-life-in-the moment. Small stories methods and modes of analysis are thus well placed to play a key role in their exploration. In particular, they can help with shedding light on how users respond to the drive of sharing-life-in-the-moment. This consists of a continuum from revelatory sharing about one’s everyday life to sharing others’ posts. At the heart of this logic of breaking news, which typifies many social media apps,²¹ seems to be a drive toward creating plots out of the moment. It is an ingenious bringing together of immersing ourselves in the immediacy of the here-and-now daily experience, at the same time as being able to share it. The moment, a metaphor for the present, is not easily quantifiable, but there is evidence for how instantaneous to the user’s experience it is viewed as: Facebook’s initial prompt to users for updating their status was, tellingly, “What are you doing right now?”

To share the experience of the moment, whilst being in the moment, inevitably requires some sort of stepping out, however momentary, from the flow of experience. The experiencer can then begin to take a perspective on it and create a, however incipient, plot. I define plot flexibly, as locating experience in time and place and beginning to make tentative, meaningful connections between people, actions/interactions, and emotions. I also accept that this emergence of a story-plot is shaped by well-attested social media affordances,²² which provide conditions for certain kinds of narration while constraining others. These affordances include portability, replicability, and the fact that different, and often unforeseen, audiences may tune into any circulated story. It has been shown that such affordances encourage the production of small stories as opposed to more conventional, single-teller, “big” stories with a beginning-middle-end.²³ To view sharing the moment in these terms, that is, as a drive toward emplotting the ongoing present,²⁴ is also justified by the fact that platform-designing has explicitly been evolving with the aim of providing us with more enhanced facilities for sharing our “stories” (see The Social Media Curation of Stories: Stories as a Feature on Snapchat and Instagram). When Facebook, for instance, allowed users to add a location for their posts, it claimed that this was so that they could pin their stories to a physical place.

In the light of the above, researching how users take up (or not) the social media prompts for sharing-life-in-the-moment demanded a focus on both the incipiency of a story and on the becoming of a story, through distribution and co-authoring. These sets of processes in turn required a focus on interactions, for instance, between posts and comments, between original posts and subsequent distributions (e.g., shares, reposts), between commenters, and so on. Such interactional approaches to everyday, face-to-face conversations have amply documented the systematicity of sequential phenomena to be found within turn-taking as well as their close links with participant roles and relations. Furthermore, they have shown how any preallocated telling rights and rules (e.g., in institutional contexts involving asymmetrical relations between participants) may be visibly oriented to, managed, or departed from by the participants with their exploitation of conversational structures.²⁵ In a similar vein, participation frameworks – i.e., the roles and statuses assumed by interlocutors in the course of a conversation – have been found to be shaped by the type of discourse activity underway, for instance, the telling of a story, as we will see below.²⁶ Finally, participants’ differential degrees of knowledge and expertise in the topic at hand are also linked with who contributes what and how they contribute. When I embarked on the project, a comparable interactional approach to social media communication was lagging behind, despite the fact that much of the social media predesigning was specifically aimed at getting users into some kind of a “dialogue,” for example, between posters and respondents, and that it projected specific responses to posts with facilities such as Like, Comment, Share, etc.

Since then, there has been a growing critical mass of online conversation analysis, with studies showing how we create coherence online, for example, by manipulating the time and space organization of media apps.²⁷ At the same time, there is recognition that not all of the interactional modes of analysis and techniques originally developed for face-to-face conversations can be automatically transferred to the analysis of online data and that digitally native methods will have to complement them.²⁸ A prime challenge has been to explore how interaction is achieved when multiple participants may tune in from different time zones and with different degrees of familiarity with the original poster: from friends with whom there are multiple interactions across media to complete strangers and “de-individuated” users whose offline, demographic identities cannot possibly be established. This challenge is partly linked with the fact that multiple audiences can be collapsed into a single context in many social media. “Context collapse” refers to the infinite audience possible online as opposed to more limited numbers of people a person normally interacts with face to face.²⁹ In situations of a well-defined, limited group, speakers can “size up” the situation and adjust their presentation of self. In a situation of context collapse, however, which Wesch compares to a “building collapse,”³⁰ it becomes much more difficult to gauge what is appropriate and for whom. This makes the intended or imagined audience of a posting potentially very different to the actual audience.

That said, sociolinguistic and online conversation analytic studies have begun to show that users strategically circumvent the constraints of context collapse by targeting different audiences differently, for example by implicitly selecting and addressing or equally deselecting and excluding some,³¹ or by giving close friends the opportunity to serve as knowing participants.³² Language-focused analyses of YouTube comments have also begun to document the complexity and multiplicity of participation frameworks of contributors in their interaction with the video and with one another, compared to the viewing roles that films and television programs traditionally allowed.^33,34

Drawing on this growing line of inquiry into online interactions, I have sought with small stories to bring together a focus on how narrative arrangements, in particular the roles of storyteller(s) and story recipient(s), affect participation and are interactionally achieved with a focus on how they shape users’ subjectivity and self-presentation.

Small stories research into face-to-face interactions has been closely aligned with ethnographic methods which allow the analyst to document iterativity of choices on the one hand, and participants’ emic sense-making devices and theories about storytelling on the other. This approach to sharing-lives-in-the-moment online, however, presented challenges. A prime challenge has been, as suggested, to establish how stories and intersubjective understandings of them are produced and achieved within a framework of multiple participation roles and distributions. To this end, I adopted a broad perspective on narrative interaction online that took into account, when applicable, the sharing of a story across multiple events and spaces with multiple and unforeseen recipients and the multiple related stories that this might generate, through media-enabled processes of linking, replication, and remixing.

In addition, the ethnography I have employed can be best described as open-ended and adaptive. This involves applying flexible routes to fieldwork over time to suit the mobile, ever-shifting landscape of social media. It also involves being open-minded about the use of “remix” methods, in Markham’s terms,³⁵ in the spirit of social media practices of bringing together unlikely modes in imaginative and reflexive ways. 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. I have for instance adapted digitally native methods for fieldwork. These include observing activities and postings systematically – as a “lurking” participant in a specific site – so as to identify key posters of small stories and respondents. Some of these methods involve auto-phenomenology, that is, the researcher’s reflexivity about her own position, stakes, and interests in the field of social media engagements. For instance, I have often examined my own position as a late adopter of practices and certainly not as a primary, target user of apps in the first instance (e.g., of selfies), even using this positionality strategically in off-the-record chats with teenage participants about their use of selfies. In Showing the Moment, I have also drawn upon observations and developed analytical lines on the basis of my identity as mother to a media-saturated teenage daughter.

In addition to adaptive ethnographic methods, I found that I needed to employ the sort of back and forth process that Gubrium and Holstein refer to as bracketing in narrative analysis.³⁶ Bracketing involves keeping a balanced focus through mode shifting on the whats and the how of research (I would include the who and why of research), gliding between processes, conditions, and resources. This kind of approach does justice to the ever-changing nature of social media data which resist a neat separation between data collection and analysis, as new contexts and data are aggregated.³⁷ In addition, it allows a shift in modes – qualitative and quantitative – to suit different purposes.

In addition to specific platform explorations, small stories research is well-suited to incident-based work. This may be necessary in cases where it is important to track the phases and stages of a story’s sharing as part of building a “thick description.” To this end, I have used popularity indexes and Google trends that show when the circulation of an incident has peaked and on which platform. YouTube videos have emerged as a prime circulation phase of political story-sharing in my data. I have employed the concepts of telling case³⁸ and critical moment³⁹ to identify postings worthy of further investigation. Both concepts suggest that a microscale event or incident 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.”⁴⁰ Using the principles of a critical moment, I tracked the social media circulation of key political events in post-2010 crisis-stricken Greece. The first incident I focused on prior to embarking on this project 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 European Union.

On a live breakfast TV news show (June 7, 2012), a male member of parliament, 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 analysis the fifty most viewed videos.^41,42 I also tracked the subsequent transposition of the incident: this 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 posted until the end of April 2015 amounting to 1,500 comments.

I drew on the same tracking mode to identify and analyze key spoof videos that were 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,⁴³ with a description of “Varoufakis says NO to the Troika,” was based on what I call an emblematic event (see below): Varoufakis’s tense press conference with the head of Eurogroup, days after he had been appointed as minister. The other video I analyzed, V for Varoufakis,⁴⁴ was produced by controversial German comedian and TV personality Jan Böhmermann for Neo Magazin Royale, a late-night talk show he presented. The video was uploaded on February 25, 2015, and became very popular very quickly with millions of views and thousands of comments.⁴⁵

Tracking in all these cases involves real-time capturing of “diachronic” types of contributions, as Bou-Franch and Blitvitch have put it.⁴⁶ Such contributions include comments on videos that people add when the original incident featured in the video may become topical again due to 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), both of which resulted in a flurry of new comments and a social media reengagement with the original incident. 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.⁴⁷

Observing social media posts as part of everyday life practices and engagements rather than as purely online activities disconnected and separable from offline worlds also at times necessitated the adoption of a blended ethnography. A case in point was my study of selfies, by collecting data from female teenagers (primary users). For this, I mobilized my then-teenage daughter’s wide circle of friends. This helped me with initial orientations and subsequent intensive observations over a period of eighteen months: these were akin to what teenage Facebook users often describe as “stalking” somebody. On the basis of these observations, in March 2015, I selected the top five selfie-posters and further scrutinized their selfie postings.

It is interesting to note that none of the selected users had any privacy settings: their walls were publicly accessible. I nonetheless sought consent to study their selfie postings from March 2014 to March 2015, on the understanding that I would follow principles of heavy disguise in any uses of comments for illustration and that there would be no reproduction of any visual material.⁴⁸ I also asked the selected users to contact any friends who had commented on the selfies and seek their consent on my behalf, this time, on the understanding that no comments would be used for illustration from any commenters who had not consented or not been informed and that, unless absolutely key to my analysis, (parts) of the content and any identifying information would be altered by me to ensure heavy disguise.

A blended ethnographic approach involved navigating between observations, collection and analysis of selfie posts and observations, and interrogation of practices of posting selfies as well as attitudes to such practices. This allowed me to tap into activities, norms, and representations of norms. I spent time hanging out and having off-the-record chats with my key informants about their media engagements. I had access to screenshots from their favorite posts, and I tracked the migration practices of their selfies to Instagram and Snapchat, as well as observing their posts on both these apps (see Showing the Moment). This material led me to delve into the selected selfie-posters’ other posts on Facebook, so as to gauge the relative importance of selfies as part of statuses. It also led me back to the wall of a friend, then in her thirties, for systematic observations of her Facebook use during 2014–2015, so I could get a sense of her transition toward selfies and other visual or video posts.⁴⁹ The processes involved in combining observations of online posts with practices and engagements around posting were, in other words, iterative and fed into each other. Similarly, there were no clear-cut demarcations between data selection, collection, and analysis. For example, in parallel with the analysis of the selfies, I embarked on off-the-record chats with a few of the teenagers from my daughter’s list of friends. In these chats, following Markham’s remix methods,⁵⁰ I positioned myself as a “digital nonnative,” seeking clarification on patterns that I had observed and asking questions along the lines of “[W]hy do you guys do X? What does it mean? Which selfie should I look at?” and so on. I was also interested in things going wrong, moments of gaps between what is expected and what gets done, and bad experiences from posting selfies, for instance.

Finally, I involved my key informants in discussions about a possible approach to selfies, asking them to assist me in formulating some kind of a typology of selfies that captured their main visual arrangements in combination with what they commonly aimed to achieve (see Showing the Moment).

Bringing in corpus methods to complement microanalytical and digital ethnographic methods works well with the methodological principle of bracketing.⁵¹ This allows analysts to prioritize different questions, for example, the what, why, and how, at different stages in their research and to shift in methods depending on what suits their, or their project’s, current priorities.

Corpus methods were synergized in my project with other tracking methods (see above) as a way of uncovering hidden meanings and interconnections in the discourse of apps and their offerings for stories. They were thus instrumental in identifying the “values in design,” the discourses of how stories are being viewed and defined by the apps as part of designing them. Such values are normally not spelled out: they are, instead, opaque, and have the potential to promote certain stories and semiotic choices, making these more available than others and even normalizing them.

The results of corpus analysis regarding the discourses and ideologies that underpinned the design of stories by apps led me (back) to a focus on users’ actual communicative practices with Stories as a designed feature. This involved collecting stories from two influencers (see Showing the Moment) as multimodal material with access to the metadata too. The subsequent coding of this material on NVivo followed principles of a qualitative analysis of plot-based elements (e.g., type of experience reported) combined with a social semiotic analysis of the stories, especially in terms of their visual choices and the modes of narration that these involved.

Overall then, to extend small stories research to social media, I have creatively synergized microanalytical, social semiotic, and online conversation analysis (interactional) methods,⁵² with adaptive ethnography and corpus-assisted critical discourse analyses.

My analysis 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.

Rescripting: This involves the deployment of media affordances (e.g., video-editing, remixing) for visually and/or verbally manipulating and reworking specific incidents (mainly relating to news events). Rescripting routinely entails the creation of humoros, satirical takes on current affairs, and so it is commonly associated with YouTube satirical videos.⁵³ It also involves manipulations of plot ingredients so as to create (cryptic) analogies between an “original” incident and other already circulated stories.⁵⁴ I have reported elsewhere how the creative and largely satirical engagements with the original incident of the assault of the two female politicians by Kasidiaris involved rescripting the place of the incident from the TV studio variously to a boxing ring, scenes from a Greek rom com of the 60s, a reenactment of the incident by ordinary people on a Greek beach, etc. This, in turn, effected changes in the plot, the protagonists’ characterizations based on gendered and personality roles other than their identities as politicians, and the evaluative stances on the original incident.⁵⁵

In his short term in office (January–July 2015), Varoufakis became the face of the then newly elected left-wing government’s battle against austerity measures that were connected with the EU’s bail-out terms of a bankrupt Greek state. In his case, Korina Giaxoglou and I showed how incidents involving Varoufakis in his negotiations of these terms with members of the Eurogroup were singled out as emblematic events, shared as breaking news, and rescripted for satirical purposes, mostly on YouTube and Twitter, thus adding empirical valence to practices of sharing through rescripting.⁵⁶ These rescriptings placed Varoufakis and, by proxy, the Greek economy in popular culture scenarios of one-to-one clashes and fights, creatively reworking him as a character of “thug life,” a “gangsta,” an “action superhero,” “kicking ass,” and “the Killah.” These iterative characterizations became part of contests that set Varoufakis in clashing semiologies as the “hero” vs. “the villains,” “good” vs. “bad guys,” “David” vs. “Goliath,” echoing popular culture fight plots. Their transmedia distribution, enhanced by iterative, portable quotes (“you just killed the Troika”) and incongruous couplings (e.g., “the Minister of Awesome”) sedimented the iconography and biographing of a maverick, embattled Minister of Finance. This was facilitated by what we called poly-storying, that is, media-afforded possibilities for bringing together multiple different plots and for users’ multiparticipation in them.

Our analysis showed how emplotment on social media is ultimately shaped by the affordances of portability, replicability, and remixing. It is characterized by cumulativeness, multiple authoring, and transmediality, which, taken together, produce complex and evolving transmedia narratives. Through distribution, certain positionings are amped up and sedimented, not least in the sense of becoming readily available and visible. However, this should not be seen as a linear or deterministic process. As we attempted to describe the fundamental differences of this kind of cumulative, multiauthored, and rescripted process of creating plots on social media that decidedly depart from a coherent (auto)biography, I came up with the term poly-storying, to capture the processes we empirically documented. Poly-storying refers to the availability of different plots of “original” and rescripted shared incidents as well as of the different possibilities for networked audiences to contribute to any of them in different (co)-authoring modes. Multiplicity and spatial coexistence of different plots and stories, different types of participation in a shared story being visually and spatially contiguous – for example as different comments on a video post – are key facets of poly-storying. The multiplicity of shared plots in Varoufakis’s rescripting was multi-semiotic, distributed across sites and media and often combined modes of sharing, and so might encompass

• the linguistic, e.g., quotes
• the visual, e.g., images
• remixes, e.g., with memes
• breaking news on Twitter and retweets
• captions on T-shirts, etc.
• modes of participation in comments
• lexically expressed identity claims and self-categorizations as well as positionings of him by others in interviews with mainstream media, his books, blogs, etc.

At the same time, in the same space – for instance, in comments on a YouTube video – the context collapse of participation resulted in the coexistence of different contributions from different users.⁵⁷ If we also take into account the possibility for diachronic contributions to video postings, poly-storying has to be viewed in principle as an open-ended communication process, with the potential for more and new layers of associations. Additionally, the amplification processes of social media distribution ultimately lead to specific evaluative stances and positions, as well as to specific rescriptings of a story becoming more sedimented, valorized, and visibly available. This gradual stratification, also evidenced by the ways in which different languages and quotes are used on different sites, needs to be recognized as a parallel and coexisting process with the poly-storying affordances of an open line of storying-in-progress, allowing different audiences updates and new engagements.

From this point of view, poly-storying points to the importance of social mediatization affordances in creating and rendering available (new) multi-associations and parallel, alternative understandings or reworkings of issues of public interest. Similarly, rescripting as a story-(re)making and story-sharing practice can be a productive point of entry into investigating the interminglings of personal and public current affairs stories online. On this basis, we have called for an exploration of the role of poly-storying in creating celebrities out of experts as part of studies of mediatized “pop” politics or politainment.⁵⁸ Rescripting as satirical reworkings of stories and poly-storying as opportunities for multiparticipation of networked audiences can provide analytical routes into the (re)appraisal of satire, humor, and emotion in doing, communicating, and engaging with politics as well as with traditionally expert-based domains, such as the economy.⁵⁹

The brevity and live-sharing afforded by social media environments are conducive to announcements of stories as breaking news as opposed to full tellings. Conventionalized story-framing devices are used to tell a condensed story or to suggest that there is a story in the making.⁶⁰ These devices include: reference to time, place, events, characters, and/or associations amongst them. As I have shown elsewhere,^61,62 small stories often begin with or are confined to narrative stancetaking. This signaling positions participants as story (co-)tellers and recipients, and interactional partners, thus anticipating and even proposing subsequent sites of circulation and audiences. Narrativity is therefore an emergent property, a process of becoming a story through engagement. Put differently, what is signaled as a story has organized implications for the ensuing participation modes and for how relational stances on the post and/or poster will be displayed. See Sharing the Moment Now as Breaking News for more details.

The above practices lend themselves to specific social relations that can be broadly defined as alignment-based amongst posters and commenters. Conversation analysis and discursive psychology often use the term alignment to describe interactional processes of relationship building. With alignment, speakers signal, linguistically, paralinguistically, and in embodied ways their understanding of their interlocutors’ positions. A typical feature of alignment, as documented within conversation analysis, consists in creating contributions that are lexically, syntactically, grammatically, and sequentially similar to previous contributions.^63,64 Such similar sequences are viewed as the linguistic manifestation of convergent relations and behaviors, a sign within psychological research of affiliation with another. Although the exact relations between aligning with the communicative action of a speaker’s prior contribution and expressing affiliation with the speaker and his or her stances are a matter of some dispute,⁶⁵ a prevalent position in conversation analysis is that alignment is a prerequisite for affiliation.⁶⁶ Aligning with what and how a speaker communicates signals display of support and endorsement of their conveyed stance. A comparable interactional approach to processes of alignment in social media communication is lagging behind, despite the fact that social media designing routinely encourages users to form aligned relations (e.g., “Friends” and “Followers”), using features such as Like, Follow, or Share.

Several concepts have been proposed to describe the modes of such affiliative relationships within cultural and media studies. “Ambient intimacy” describes positively the media enabling of relating 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.”⁶⁷ To sustain such intimate and affiliative relationships, the users’ emotional labor and self-conscious monitoring of how well they are performing on the likability front have been well recognized. Marwick suggests that media affordances of relationships that are based on accruing status and being validated by others underlie the common presentation of self as a “brand,” with marketing strategies of positive product placement applied to the individual.⁶⁸ Such concepts often work at a level of abstraction that does not easily allow us to see how relations are worked out at the more local level of posting and commenting.

Drawing on small stories analysis, I have explored processes of alignment at the intersection of users’ interactional practices and social media affordances of participation. As outlined above, based on the analysis of selfies posted on Facebook (see Showing the Moment) and of spoof videos and remixes on YouTube, I have specifically documented two systematic interactional patterns of doing alignment: ritual appreciation and knowing participation. Ritual appreciation involves positive assessments of the post and/or poster, expressed in highly conventionalized language coupled with emojis. These semiotic choices result in congruent sequences of atomized contributions, which despite not directly engaging with one another, are strikingly similar, visually and linguistically.

Doing alignment through knowing participation, on the other hand, creates specific alignment responses by bringing in and displaying knowledge from offline, pre-posting activities or any other knowledge specific to the post or poster.^69,70 My claim has been that these two alignment practices cut across social media platforms, but certain types of posting activities can be expected to provide heightened opportunities for alignment. I have specifically singled out two such activities, namely, posting selfies and spoof videos. Despite their many differences, not least on the basis of their occurrence in two different platforms, Facebook and YouTube, the two activities proved, in my analysis, to be similar in how users show alignment. In both cases, alignment is designed as a response to a post that is viewed and understood as an act of performance that invites scrutiny and appreciation of the self as a character in time and place, and/or of the post as an artful activity. This creates norms of affiliative engagement with the post. In addition, alignment in both selfies and spoof videos capitalizes on the story-making possibilities that a shared interactional history with the poster, or any other prior knowledge affords. A contributor can thus produce specific alignment by elaborating on, amplifying, and co-authoring the post.

Overall, alignment-based relations of ritual appreciation and knowing participation have emerged in my study as part of situated activity systems in the interplay between media-directed drives and users’ agentive ways of signaling and displaying some form of knowledge. Bringing potentially disparate people with weak ties together is part of social media engineering, but users move away from this undifferentiated participation status in favor of either consolidating preexisting, offline shared knowledge, or of seeking out and indexing modes of common ground. Story-making and sharing practices, for instance narrative stancetaking and rescripting, have proved to be major vehicles for bringing about alignments. In particular, they afford ways of counteracting context collapse and creating relations of inclusion in the sense of exclusivity, so as to produce postings and comments that address different subsets of the audience differently.

In the light of the above, we can claim that social media exigencies alter the nature and possibilities of social relations of consociate status, which Lerner saw as fundamental in knowing recipiency.⁷¹ Drawing on Schutz’s phenomenological study of social relations, in particular his concept of consociates, Lerner suggests that knowing participation in conversational stories affords opportunities for participants to display their consociate status.⁷² Schutz’s concept of consociates emphasized the power of face-to-face interactions in creating strong ties and embodied and direct social relations that have to do with simultaneous experience of the world. Schutz suggested that consociates live in each other’s contexts of meaning and experience so that they can correct and adjust respective understandings. In Lerner's study, consociates were found to present a distinct alignment to an emerging story, by monitoring its correctness and repairing aspects of both the story and its delivery, but also by acting as co-tellers who can assist at a story’s possible completion. In the case of my study, the same ability for participation that involves a systematic contribution and elaboration of storytelling organization was noted. The ways in which this was done, however, were intimately linked with the digital environment, facilities, and constraints in terms of the loss of embodied and paralinguistic elements.

In Schutz's study, contemporaries, unlike consociates, have indirect social relations and so do not grasp each other’s unique experience in a vivid present. We could loosely map alignment and knowing participation on Facebook and YouTube onto consociate and contemporary relational statuses respectively. On Facebook, alignment is premised heavily on shared interactional, direct experience, characteristic of consociate relations, while on YouTube it exploits shared cultural repertoires that tend to arise from social group–based, collective experiences and belonging, typical of contemporaries. Recognizing different degrees and types of relationality between posters or posts and commenters is important in examining processes of establishing common ground on social media platforms with respect to their varying degrees of publicness or publicity. This in turn allows the differentiation between procedures for confirming, adjusting, and correcting common groundings on different platforms. Other principles of relationality such as common bond vs. common identity communities, which have been proposed so as to differentiate amongst different social networks and platforms are not incompatible with this perspective.⁷³

Of course, it is also important to recognize that the potential for alignment-based relations on social media can cut both ways, creating ingroups and outgroups, us vs. them types of social relations, based on aligning with one view or group, and disaligning from another, and so on. Indeed, YouTube interactions amongst commenters have been routinely viewed and analyzed as normative sites for contention, conflict, and impoliteness,⁷⁴ Alongside descriptions of YouTube as fostering rants and polylogic conflicts, other Ego Media studies (see, for example, Mommy vlogging and the narrative construction of a mommy vlogger influencer identity) have also been instrumental in showing how relationships of alignment, solidarity, and intimacy can develop over time between posters and commenters, even though they have no offline shared history. Following principles of small stories and a social interactional analysis, participation on social media can be described and analyzed in a nuanced way that allows insights into highly differentiated degrees and types of participation and relationship, above and beyond generalized facilities and roles such as “Friend” or “Follower.”