Sharing the Moment Now as Breaking News

Many social networking sites were, from the outset designed to incentivize users to share the here-and-now. The brevity of the initial feeds (e.g., 140 characters on Twitter, Facebook statuses) was an integral part of this directive toward sharing life in miniaturized form, at the same time as constraining the ability of users to plunge into full autobiographical mode. In this aspect of my Ego Media research,^1,2 I have investigated how this initial directive for sharing life in the here-and-now as breaking news and updating as often as necessary has evolved, with emphasis on Facebook statuses. I introduce narrative stancetaking as an attested systematic practice for sharing life as breaking news. I examine its genealogy in relation to evolving affordances on Facebook and its connections with the practice of story-linking as a vehicle of transposing and cross-platforming. Finally, I refer to two case studies of my empirical work on narrative stancetaking that show its close connections with a story’s tellability on the one hand, and with audience selection on the other. In the first case study, announcing disruptions or complications in the poster’s life by means of taking a narrative stance routinely leads to further storying as a result of audience interest. In the second, narrative stancetaking is a mechanism for projecting specific audiences and specific types of responses, thus selecting certain members of the audience as more ratified addressees than others.

Breaking news comprises stories 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. They encompass a wide range of communication practices that involve momentary, fleeting invokings of worlds other than the here and now: for example, allusions to tellings, intertextual tellings, promises to tell, deferrals of telling, withholding of offers to tell – instances in which understanding is premised on the “audience” knowing of certain events and/or prior tellings. The textual forms of such practices can range from one-liners, to skeletons of stories (e.g., mention of main events and the teller’s assessment of them) to conventionalized story-opening devices (e.g., metapragmatic, spatiotemporal, character references),^3,4 forming part of a shared story. As such, they bring in conventional associations among characters, events, and evaluations of them, and position teller and interlocutors as characters and tellers of previous tellings. As I have shown elsewhere,^5,6 the social actions that different textual forms of breaking news perform range from reaffirming solidarity with interlocutors, to actively resisting the researcher’s agenda in interviews, to securing floor-holding rights in a multiparty conversation.

In all such cases, breaking news stories seemed to be premised on the opportunity of continuation, unpacking, expansion, and updating, for example, on the anticipation of an imminent face-to-face interaction when more of the breaking news story, shared as a text message, would be told. Similarly, in earlier research on a corpus of email messages amongst friends that went back to the 1990s,⁷ I found that long stories were deemed unacceptable. Breaking news was routinely shared but marked as incomplete stories: a full telling was promised in face-to-face interaction. Breaking news thus hinged on the participants’ ability to meet frequently.

Social media have remediated these practices by removing the need for users to meet physically for stories to develop and evolve. This idea of frictionless sharing has been supported by affordances for sharing experience as it is happening, with various semiotic (multimodal) resources, updating it as often as necessary, and (re)-embedding it on various platforms. In addition, apps have offered facilities for sharing-life-in-the-moment to be extended beyond sharing about one’s everyday life to sharing others’ posts. In Mark Zuckerberg’s terms, Facebook was about giving everybody the power to share the things they care about. Furthermore, media apps have incentivized users to share in the moment by including recency and timeliness in the key factors of their algorithmic calculations, at least the ones that have been publicized. In this vein, both Facebook’s and Instagram’s algorithms still prioritize recency in various, albeit complicated, ways. As Bucher suggests, not showing posts on Facebook in chronological order any more has prioritized showing posts at “the right time for a specific user” rather than showing them in chronological order.⁸ That said, time decay is still embedded in the logic of the architectural structuring of Facebook. This ultimately means that older posts tend to drop from visibility, so the more recent and closer to real time a post is, the more likely it is to make it to the top of a feed. In turn, to remain visible, hence popular, users need to keep sharing.⁹

At the heart of this built-in logic of sharing the moment in the moment 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?” In my corpus analysis of online media about Stories on Instagram and Snapchat, “the moment” tellingly emerged as a top keyword, and its semantic and thematic associations mainly involved capturing and sharing instants from one’s daily life. The moment is, therefore, intertwined with the mundane rather than with the crucial and the extraordinary. Put differently, users are being socialized into a continuous sharing of what is happening now, regardless of its significance or of whether this departs from the routine. Of course, as we will see, different norms and interactional practices tease out sharing the routine as breaking news from sharing the extraordinary as breaking news. That said, the apps’ evolving affordances for frictionless sharing, and the cost for users of not sharing (enough), render sharing as breaking news a typical and valued genre of social media communication.

I have tracked the evolution of sharing life as breaking news in two data sets on Facebook and YouTube which, incidentally, remain the two most popular social networking sites. My analysis showed that a common and systematic practice of sharing the moment as breaking news was that of taking a narrative stance. To postulate taking a narrative stance (or narrative stancetaking), I drew on the concept of stance which is well developed within sociolinguistics.¹⁰ This refers to moments when speakers, more or less agentively and reflexively, position themselves in relation to the ongoing interaction.¹¹ I have defined narrative stancetaking as follows:

Exactly like breaking news, taking a narrative stance remediates and partly reconfigures story-openers or prefacing devices that have been found to be salient in conversational stories. These include a reference to a time and place other than the current one that the interlocutors share, to an event, and to how that event needs to be understood (e.g., funny, sad). The main purpose of such story-openers has been found to involve seeking permission, from the audience, for the teller to be granted the floor to tell a story.¹² Taking a narrative stance on social media, however, presents a few differences to conversational story-openers. Co-presence affordances normally do not apply. For instance, a recipient cannot change their body position, look at the potential teller of a story, after they have signaled a story telling, and indicate that they are ready for the story. There is also a time lag, even by seconds, between taking a narrative stance on, say a Facebook status, and audience interest being expressed in it. Different friends may also tune into a post at different times. So, sometimes interest needs to be expressed from quite a few users before a story is told.

Story-openers in narrative stancetaking instances of breaking news refer to very recent happenings, often to the here-and-now of the poster, making experiencing and posting almost concurrent to the experience. This – often hasty – configuration of the moment in some sort of an incipient plot may be all that a poster has, for the moment, which may lead to a story, dependent on whether there is enough interest or not. Finally, the actual story, when it emerges, is invariably a small story, in terms of length (too). Taking a narrative stance, then, is about the impulse to single out from the flow of experience moments, however ordinary, that are hastily put into some kind of configuration: a sort of incipient emplotment.

The narrative impulse that the frequent use of narrative stancetaking attests to is indicative of a need (to begin) to tell a story, even in situations that do not particularly encourage full tellings. Particular ways of talking and interacting become associated with certain stances or clusters of stances, which in turn become associated with specific social identities. This process primarily involves the connotational rather than the referential significance of activities – in other words, what a way of talking indexes:¹³ points to indirectly, conventionally implies, or alludes to. By recognizing instances of narrative stancetaking as having the potential to mobilize specific social indexicality, we can begin to look into the kinds of conventional associations that are present, not just with what a story is, but also what a story does, what the expectations are about what stories to tell, who tells them, and where and how.

Narrative stancetaking is a common practice that I found cuts across personal, news (current affairs), and other people’s stories: e.g., statuses on Facebook, tweets and retweets, and YouTube video titles. 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, in what terms, by whom and how. Subsequent audience engagements – with comments, for instance – can help turn a narrative stance taken in a status into a (fuller) story.

My study since 2010 has allowed me to see the connections of taking a narrative stance with the changing, in some ways enhanced, facilities that Facebook, often described as a “work in progress,” has been rolling out for sharing the moment. These affordances include check-ins, feelings, individual replies to comments, tagging (i.e., creating a link to a friend’s profile), and last, but not least, the platform’s push for visual and video elements. Such facilities readily contain elements of narrative stancetaking, as they encourage the inclusion of time, place, events, and assessments of the experience. Put differently, they are biased toward prompting users to tell stories rather than, say, share their views or exposés.

My analysis has shown that the addition of such affordances has resulted in certain changes in terms of the design of taking a narrative stance and the engagement with it. The first is that explicit time references (e.g., temporal adverbials such as “just now”) that stress recency or immediacy and that were prevalent in statuses in the data that I collected in 2010–2012 and also also in Page’s 2012 corpus analysis of Facebook statuses, seem to have been reduced in favor of adding locations and feelings.^14,15,16

The second change can be described as a standardization of stancetaking choices: the affordances of adding place, feelings, and shared check-ins serve as templates, a ready-made preselection, a menu of story ingredients which users are encouraged to select. It is almost unexceptional in the second phase of my data to see statuses that contain these preselections in some combination, even in creative or playful statuses. We can see in the example below that creativity combines with the poster embracing the affordances of sharing the moment: she produces a shared check-in with named friends, a type of activity (drinking whisky), and a location (remember, the name of the club), enhanced by the map of the place that automatically comes on when a place is added (not reproduced below). In lieu perhaps of adding feelings, she uses a paraphrase of a song by inserting the name of the club from where she is posting the shared status: me gusta remember, me gustas tu.¹⁷

This creative variation is still done within the preallocated facilities of how Facebook directs users to share the moment. This has implications for how stories emerge and develop, as I will suggest below.¹⁸

Evolving affordances have also led to a more visual and localized narrative stancetaking in my data. Of course, posts on social media are multimodal, and they have always been part of multimodal environments. However, the wide use of smart phones and the push of photo postings from 2013 onwards and, increasingly, videos and live streaming, are leading to what I see as a conventional division of labor amongst different modes on Facebook posts, with the photos (and the videos) showing the moment and the “text” (i.e., language) being confined to brief affective captions or assessments. Sometimes, these captions are only done by emojis. As I have shown, the designing spree of stories on apps is further consolidating this shift to showing the moment.

Taking a narrative stance is well-suited to the distribution of a story across sites and across audiences. Its brevity lends itself well to circulatability due to the ease with which it can be quoted in new contexts and be recognized as quotable in them. The choice of narrative stancetaking then facilitates the process of “decontextualizability and accessibility for future action,” which essentially leads to the recontextualization of a story in new settings.¹⁹ The brevity of narrative stancetaking may also generate the need for more full-fledged and elaborate storying in either the original environment of occurrence or, indeed, in environments where it may be transposed.

Taking a narrative stance increasingly benefits from and connects with media-afforded processes which can be described as story-linking. Creating analogies between stories, fusing stories, verbally or visually manipulating one story, that is, rescripting a story, so as to be inserted into another, are creative practices of story-making and story-sharing that my work has documented, especially with reference to the circulation of spoofs, remixes, and fake videos on YouTube.^20,21 Story-linking is one facet of the creation of dense intertextual links amongst stories on social media, facilitated by media convergence and cross-platforming affordances which allow users to links their feeds on different platforms. Story-linking involves importing shareables, ready-made, circulated, popular scenarios from other sites: for example, popular memes into one’s Instagram or Facebook posts, heavily retweeted tweets, and so on. My observations of posts in the data set of adolescent Facebook users show an increasing tendency to story-link in their statuses. The wide distribution of portable quotes is another affordance for creating readily available shareables. With story-linking, users “borrow” and appropriate other stories, so as to suit their moment, and they often create analogies with their experience (see, for example, studies on story-linking²² and relational identities²³). By reproducing a quote, a meme, an image, and adding their own narrative stance-take on it, users become inadvertently part of a chain of recontextualizations and multiply authored stories. The result is not just a cumulative co-production but also, due to the scaleability of distribution processes on social media, an amplified co-production, which ultimately renders one particular take on a story more visible and validated than others, in the sense of more heavily distributed and widely shared.

Story-linking, in its association with taking a narrative stance to share “my” moment on Facebook, seems to have been remediated from video-sharing sites, primarily YouTube. The developing links of taking a narrative stance with story-linking on Facebook statuses is suggestive of how, across platforms, norms for sharing the moment may be converging. It is especially notable that media-afforded story ingredients and scenarios can be readily retrieved and adapted, so that users can share their moment on different apps. This is revealing of a level of ready-made story templates and story curation that, potentially, cannot be resisted even by the most creative and individual users. This is due to the tension that storying-the-moment creates, between managing audience selection and reach, live (instant) sharing, and likability and popularity. Story-linking suits the need for quick and brief sharing that also has the potential to address different audiences, as my study of YouTube has shown.²⁴

Taking a narrative stance has emerged in my study as a resource for proposing the tellability, that is the point of the event(s) or experience that the poster is communicating and in turn of the story about them that is yet to be told. A key term in sociolinguistic approaches to conversational storytelling,^25,26 and in narratology,²⁷ tellability refers to what makes a story worth telling and worth listening to. In this way, it is interwoven with the meaning, significance, and function of storytelling.

Given the association of narrative stancetaking on social media with affordances of sharing-life-in-the-moment, ideally in a brief, timely, and portable manner, as discussed, tellability in these cases partly resides in the position of the teller as somebody who has the ability to tell a story, if sufficient interest is shown. At the same time, my data show a very clear pattern of interactional implications of narrative stancetaking, depending on the type of event or experience that is signaled in it. For instance, statuses that report disruptive or sad events in the poster’s life were more likely to receive comments from their friends than a simple Like.²⁸ In turn, they lead to a small story that elaborates on the status. As Figure 1 shows, whereas statuses of routine events tend to receive Like (and reactions), statuses of disruption lead to comments as responses that serve as requests for elaboration on what had happened. Then, the poster routinely provides a small story of events and their evaluation, as a collective response to friends that have shown interest. The responses to such a story tend to be story-relevant: e.g., “very sorry to hear this.”²⁹ A typical next move by the poster is to thank friends for their interest and good wishes and to provide update(s).

Check-ins to hospitals afforded by adding location follow the same pattern. A negative affective stance, however minimal (e.g., a sad emoji), also seems to be read as a signal that there may be a backstory to the current state of the poster, which can be shared, if prompted by commenters.

Narrative stancetaking in the data then presents sequential systematicity and interactional implications.³⁰ It projects the relevance of engagement from the audience that may allow the poster to “tell more.” In addition, conventional associations seem to have emerged, regarding the sort of moment that carries the potential for (further) storying. We can pose the sequential systematicity of taking a narrative stance in statuses that announce a complication in the poster’s life as follows:

The relative evaluation of moments – some being more tellable than others – clearly shows the development of norms and expectations about how to initiate and tell stories on Facebook and, in turn, about how to serve as a story recipient. At the time at which I conducted this analysis, narrative stancetaking practices contradicted widely circulating discourses in the media by dystopic commentators about Facebook being all about sharing trivia. Taking a narrative stance can be seen as a vernacular strategy developed by users both for proposing different types of tellability, and for circumventing context collapse issues, by projecting specific types of audience response and from specific types of audience,^31,32 as we will see in the following case study.

As I argued above, with narrative stancetaking, posters propose a specific understanding of the events and/or characters announced or signaled. This, in turn, makes certain audience responses more relevant than others as well as, more or less implicitly, selecting a specific audience as the designated one for a particular posting. From this point of view, the signaling of a specific narrative stancetaking in the data seems to counteract context collapse by projecting certain members of the audience as ratified addressees or, as we will see, by affording them the opportunity to serve as co-tellers of a story.

In my data, there is an overwhelming preference for tagged or otherwise named and signaled individuals in selfie posts not just to produce a Like, but also to contribute a comment which displays their knowing status. References to shared events or experiences (e.g., outings), even in the absence of any visual or tagging material, also introduce a preference for certain individuals to display their knowing status. This provides opportunities for the addressees to serve as co-narrators, that is, to produce and expand on a story or bring in what I call the backstory. This often results in a private chat on a semi-public forum (i.e., somebody’s Wall) with certain friends appearing as being in the know and in the loop and others not.³³

Knowing participation has thus become an increasingly conventional response to taking a narrative stance on statuses, as a result of visual posts, shared statuses, and of tagging, which have offered facilities for audience selection. The fact that close friends can serve as knowing co-narrators has, in turn, made the sharing of the moment highly allusive with plenty of online-offline, and more generally, transmedia, connections. This works well to strengthen bonds with friends with whom one interacts a lot outside of Facebook. It is also in line with the relational algorithmic recipe of Facebook for a participatory subject that goes beyond the defaults of Like (and, the other, more recently added reactions). The ideal user is one who spends considerable time on Facebook and gets “hooked” on it:³⁴ popularity and scoring highly on affinity with friends are major motivations for doing so. Popularity and affinity are themselves premised on participating, not just by posting, but also by engaging consistently with certain friends’ posts.³⁵ Narrative stancetaking is a recourse for projecting knowing participation that in turn proves to be a key participation mode for generating such tied-engagement (i.e. post-comment-reply to comment, etc.) and frequency of Facebook interactions.

My analysis of the social mediatization of key political incidents and figures in the Greek financial crisis suggested that a prime location for the signaling of narrative stancetaking was the title of YouTube video postings of the incident under study.³⁶

Such narrative stancetaking was found to project specific audiences as more relevant and ratified than others by signaling implicitly specific, ideologically driven positionings for the teller, couched in which events and characters were selected to be included in the title that accompanied a video uploading and/or how they were assessed.^37,87 A case in point is an incident that happened in the run up to the decisive 2012 election, much discussed across Europe, in Greece at the height of the crisis. The incident involved the assault of two female left-wing party MP candidates, in particular the “slapping” and “punching” of one of them, by Ilias Kasidiaris, spokesman for the far-right, anti-immigration party Golden Dawn – then gaining in popularity – during a political debate on a breakfast news show of live TV (Antenna TV, June 7, 2012). Kasidiaris threw water at SYRIZA’s Rena Dourou and then repeatedly hit Communist Party MP candidate Liana Kanelli.

The program went off air immediately after the incident, but reports suggested that the brawl continued when the cameras were off. An arrest warrant was issued for Kasidiaris who went into hiding after the incident. Hundreds of videos and hundreds of related videos can be found on YouTube about the incident under study which quickly became viral. I chose to single out for close qualitative analysis the fifty most viewed (and commented upon) YouTube videos a few months after the incident. I have analyzed the social mediatization of this incident elsewhere.^39,40,41

My analysis showed that the choice by video uploaders of describing the event of the assault of Kanelli by Kasidiaris as “punching” as opposed to “slapping” was an implicit ideological positioning. “Slapping” signaled affiliation with Kasidiaris and his politics while “punching,” routinely cast in the wake of the incident as much more serious and violent than slapping, suggested an ideological distancing from Kasidiaris and his politics. More than that, a negative evaluation of the act projected a left-wing ideological affiliation. This was evident in the intersubjective dynamics with commenters that each choice generated. The contestation of the assault as “punching” by commenters invariably aimed at lessening the bad deed and vice versa: the characterization of the main deed as “punching” upgraded its seriousness and was routinely associated with negative characterizations of Kasidiaris as a “bully.”

Which character was included and seen as key in the events also signaled the teller’s position and constituted a form of implicit evaluation. For instance, despite the fact that the actual incident involved two female MP candidates, two thirds of the titles chose to focus solely on Kasidiaris and Kanelli rendering the incident as a duel. This choice of a male and a female protagonist led to playful rescriptings of the incident with a variety of popular culture genres, including romantic comedies.^42,43

Like the uploaders of the videos, the respondents had a choice to either taking a narrative stance or not. In the case of taking a narrative stance, the comments more or less explicitly recognized the incident as a story with specific characters and events. Furthermore, they provided an assessment of the characters and the events. A nonnarrative stancetaking involved the respondents detaching themselves from the events of the story and providing general social and political commentary. The positioning of the respondents in each case was very different. In the first case, the commenters positioned themselves as story recipients and furthermore as co- or counter-tellers. The signaling of any ideological or political positionings was rooted in the positive or negative assessments of what the respondent saw as the main events and characters of the uploaded video and their meaning. For instance, by assessing Kasidiaris’s actions positively or by justifying them, respondents were positioning themselves – even if implicitly – as affiliated with his politics.

In the case of abstracting from the specific incident and providing general commentary on the Greek crisis and politics of the time, commenters positioned themselves as having an explicit political and ideological agenda: for example, as European citizens, as pro- or anti- EU bailouts of countries like Greece, as politically affiliated with one party or another, etc.

Narrative stancetaking thus both projected specific audiences as more included and as more primary recipients than others, along indexicalized and implied ideological lines, and in turn created positions of story recipiency that allowed commenters to either serve as co-tellers of a specific version of events, or as counter-tellers.

Taking a narrative stance on Facebook statuses was found to be a systematic practice for sharing the moment in ways that initially allowed for a brief and timely sharing-life-in-the-moment. As facilities evolved that allowed the user’s preselection of story signals and ingredients (e.g., location, tagging, or mention of friends), as well as showing rather than textually telling the moment, narrative stancetaking has increasingly become a resource for audience selection and projection of specific types of participation. Shared selfies with friends and check-ins on Facebook have, for instance, afforded opportunities for selected friends to serve as knowing (co)-narrators of the moment. In all these cases, narrative stancetaking creates conditions for stories to emerge and develop relationally. Audience engagement, vital for any story to develop, can take a range of forms, from interest and requests for elaboration to knowing co-authoring. Although co-construction is commonly found in stories in face-to-face contexts too, the brand of relational becoming of stories found on sharing the moment presents two distinctive features: it licenses a tentative signaling of stories, of testing the waters, as the events are still ongoing, and it relies on an – often concurrent – development of storying and happenings. The result is storytelling that is spatiotemporally anchored in the here-and-now. Immediacy and timeliness become an integral part of sharing the moment as stories, and stories, in turn, become deeply integrated into the audience’s attention economy. Which moments will become emplotted is contingent on engagement with posts, as posters often do not (yet) have a story to report, when they initially share. Affordances that facilitate the process of a quick and constant sharing-life-in-the-moment as stories, involve story-linking with (audio)-visual portables and quotables. As I show in The Social Media Curation of Stories: Stories as a Feature on Snapchat and Instagram, this has been further consolidated with story curation on social media apps and the intensification of provision of preselection and ready-made templates for storytelling.