Sharing the moment as small stories

What is it about?

Sharing the moment live, a built-in logic of many social networking sites, is, I claim, an invitation for creating plots, which has led to systematic practices. I single out taking a narrative stance on Facebook as such a practice and show the interplay between key-norms and evolving media affordances for pre-selection of story ingredients, localization, visualization of the experience, and audience selection. These contribute to showing the moment as opposed to telling it, with selected friends serving as knowing co-narrators and with story-linking allowing for allusive, transmedia links. I review these practices in the context of increased story facilities that notably bring together several social media apps. I argue that although this curation promises a move beyond the moment, it ultimately serves to consolidate sharing-lives-in-the-moment. I reflect on the implications of this for the direction of travel in relation to stories on many social media platforms.

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Why is it important?

With this article, I am moving in my own work toward a critical interrogation of algorithmically shaped stories on social media. What does this claiming and appropriation of stories reveal about how specific communication features are co-opted to pay lip service to monetary and specifically micro-targeting projects? How can small stories operate in this context as a critical (narrative) discourse analytic approach to identities on social media?