Story-formatting on social media: Ways of telling, teller identities, and audience engagement
Chapter
Author(s) / editor(s):
Alex Georgakopoulou
Year: 2025
In: Oliveira, M. / Conti, L. (eds.): Explorations in Digital Interculturality: Language, Culture, and Postdigital Practices. Bielefeld: transcript, p. 111-133.
Keywords: story-formatting, ways of telling-sites-tellers, sharing-life-in-the-moment, reconfiguring – repurposing, TikTok short form videosLanguage(s): English
Abstract:
Stories on social media platforms, more than any other communication mode, have increasingly become designed, curated features, so that users are faced with menus of choices, pre-selections, and templates, when posting a story. Connected with this is an attested, unprecedented speedy development of normative, typified, sought after and replicable stories on different platforms, despite the fact that the users involved in such processes, more often than not, do not know of one another but instead partake in transient acts of communication. In this chapter, I draw on the ethnomethodological concept of formatting, as reworked by the late Jan Blommaert for the contextual study of communication online, and synergise it with small stories and positioning analysis. My focus is on stories as a sociotechnical engineered feature on all major social media platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Weibo, and TikTok). Based on the technographic method, I will first show how I have extended the notion of formatting in my work so as to examine the historicity of semiotic choices in stories. I will then tease out specific
ways of telling formatted stories in their links with specific modes of tellers’ self-presen-
tation, in particular that of ‘authenticity’. The formatted practice of sharing-life-in-the-
moment shows power and continuity across platforms, partly by being reconfigured and
repurposed. I will illustrate this with a focus on TikTok short form videos and their for-
matted modes of audience engagement. Finally, I will discuss the implications of story-
formatting for the role of culture in stories.
Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein