Narrative Tellership in Social Media

Narrative Interaction in discussion forums and twitter
Dr Ruth Page
University of Leicester
rep22@le.ac.uk

Introduction
Interaction enabled by social media and narrative tellership (Ochs and Capps 2001)
Why social media is an important resource
Framework for familiar, reconfigured and innovative forms of tellership
Two case studies:
Discussion forums
Twitter

Interaction and Tellership
“the extent and kind of involvement of conversational partners in the actual recounting of a narrative.”
(Ochs and Capps 2001, 24)
Low - high involvement
Second Stories (Sacks 1995)
Interlaced Stories (Norrick 2005)
Shared Stories (Georgakopoulou 2007)
Different kinds of relational work
Face-enhancing solidarity
Face-threatening displays of contradiction/power

Social media
Social media as a category of CMC
Emerged from late 1990s-2000s
Forums, blogs, wikis, social network sites, microblogging, podcasts
Collaborative, enables dialogue, episodic, displays connection between narrator + networked audience
New formats + scale of adoption

Social media statistics
By 2007, over 70 million blogs were indexed in the blogosphere.
In 2010, Facebook’s membership exceeded 500 million active users.
In 2011, Twitter reported that over 140 million tweets were being posted each day.
More video content is uploaded to YouTube in a 60 day period than the 3 major American TV networks produced in 60 years.

Stories and Social Media
A larger project of how narrative dimensions are being transformed by a range of social media contexts
Linearity, Tellability, Tellership, Embeddedness and Moral Stance
Discussion forums, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, podcasts, video-logs
But for today: Tellership in early and more recent forms

Research Questions
How are stories co-constructed across turn-taking patterns in discussion forums and tweet streams?
What are the structural features of these co-constructed stories?
What interpersonal work is accomplished between narrator and audience in the process of narrative co-construction?

How new is social media?
Familiar
Ebooks (Project Gutenberg)
Podcasts (Storycorps)
Reconfigured
Blogs (diary writing)
Facebook updates (emotes)
Emergent/Innovative
Wikis
Voice threading in YouTube

Social Media tellership: an overview
Spectrum of possibilities available from single to multiple tellership
But single tellership is relatively rare, while co-construction is increasingly important
Reconfigure turn-taking patterns from conversational narrative
Report of events (teller)
Evaluative assessment / request for clarification (audience)

Narrative report + evaluative assessment
When I was at Botany with my friend um we were walking down the alley kind of way
And um all these um these people there were about eight of them
They were all guys
And they were um brown
And um and uh they started calling us mean names
And they were like teenagers
And um me and my friend we were kind of scared
They were trying to block our way
A: Oh crumbs I can imagine, was this uh recently?
Uh yeah that was about a month ago

Co-tellership reconfigured
Distribution of turns across textual units
Are the multiple turns in separate textual units (e.g. blog post + comment)?
Or compressed into a single textual unit (e.g. a wiki page)?
Control of the text
Held by one person (e.g. an administrator or blogger)
Or shared equally between participants (e.g. forum posters)

Options for tellership in social media

Example 1: Discussion forums
Introduction to Forums as a web genre
Dataset: Bodybuilding.com
Turn-taking in a forum thread is asynchronous but usually sequential
Report of events
Evaluative assessment
That's a really well balanced workout....not sure why you weren't pleased. You're back is crazy strong...hell, you're strong! How does all this strength translate to your big 3? Looks to me like it should transfer well. Ever thought about PL'ing comps for fun? I sure would if I had your strength.....

Second Stories (Sacks 1995)
1. Adjacency in a sequence of turns, where a Second Story follows a first.
2. Parallels in story content, specifically where the second speaker will adopt a similar role in the narrative to that taken by the first speaker.
3. Pragmatic inter-relationship between the stories, where the second is used as an analysis of the first.

Example: ‘Guys Staring at the Gym’
Here's the thing, it feels like NONE of the women at my gym do ANYTHING but CARDIO!!!! The cardio machines are constantly full and I am the ONLY chick even going NEAR the weights... Which is fine for them I guess, However the guys just stare at me, talk amongst themselves, it drives me NUTS.
I went to the gym tonight, walked in and saw there wasn't ONE girl in the whole gym... I LEFT.... that's right, didn't even complete a workout. I feel like crap about this, but honestly, its really awkward.

Response stories
Agree with above post^
It was a little awkward for me too when I first started. I'm only one of a few ladies who uses the free weights, usually it's just me.
I'm so focused on my workout I don't even notice the guys any more! Earphones and music and I'm in my own zone.
Eventually, when they see you're committed and working hard, they'll come to respect you! Hell, my form is better than most of them anyways!
Take a deep breathe and concentrate on what you're doing...not on whats happening around you. You've as much right to be there as them!Good luck....

Facework of Second Stories
Promotes solidarity between 1st and 2nd tellers
Supports the affective rights and sociality rights of the group (Spencer-Oatey 2002)
Constructs an idealised image of a cohesive social identity for the group
(Of course, not all Second Stories are face-enhancing, but that’s another conference paper...)

Tellership in Twitter
Introduction to Twitter
Posts = tweets (limited to 140 characters)
Updates, addressed messages, retweets

Retweets
When one member forwards a message from someone else to all their ‘followers’
Reconfigures email forwarding
Involves two participants
Original author
Person who forwards + adds new material

Format of a Retweet
Multiple turns are compressed into the same textual unit
Attribution enabled by use of “RT + @username”
Turn-taking represented in reverse order
[Retweeter’s comment] RT [original message]

An example

Dataset
52,000 tweets taken from 60 publically available Twitter accounts in June 2010
30 ‘celebrity’ figures
30 ‘ordinary’ accounts
What kind of material is added to a modified retweet?

Evaluation of events
Outraged. RT @Laurapalooza: Staff at the MEN aren't letting people into the arena with cans in their hair. So many sad Little Monsters :(
Lady gaga: Wed, 02 Jun 2010
Amazing! RT @rowdeezy227: in 1992 the NY State Appeals Court ruled that women have the right to go topless, just like men
MrsKutcher: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:26

Alignment between tellers
FANTASTIC!! RT @Graceahhh I'm a 16 yr old who watched yr show and got encouraged to eat better an all natural. Lost 10lbs so far. Thanks!
Jamie_Oliver: Thu, 06 May 2010 12:29
That is SO you! :-) RT @fifi_box: locked myself out, credit cards cancelled, flat tyre now my phone just died...someone please put the voodoo doll down!!
DanniiMinogue: Wed, 28 April 2010

Carry out face-enhancing work
Nice work T! RT @taylorphinney: Bunch sprint today... Got 7th!!! Pretty excited about that.
Lance Armstrong: Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:38

Agreed! RT @NickKristof: "I am for sale" for 20k; horrifying LAT story of educated Afghan girl peddled by her brothers. http://shar.es/aQr31
Aplusk: Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:21

Celebrity practice (Marwick and boyd 2011)
Celebrity updates: 12% were modified retweets
‘Ordinary’ updates: 5% were modified retweets
Celebrity practice amplifies general Twitter practice
Projected solidarity?

Synthetic Personalization (Fairclough 1989)
Modified retweets are broadcasts of conversational snippets disseminated to millions, not dyadic turns between peers
Simulates solidarity rather than creating it: A return to mass broadcasting, not participatory culture (Jenkins 2006)
A strategy of containment, which acknowledges the power of the Twitter audience but uses this to shore up the hierarchy of mainstream celebrity as elite persons

Summary
Social media enables new practices of narrative interaction and tellership.
Some are familiar (like forum threads)
Some are reconfigured (like modified retweets)
Both appear to promote face-enhancing relational work
But surface level solidarity can mask underlying structures of power

Narrative Tellership in Social Media

by RuthPage on Jul 06, 2011

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Narrative Tellership in Social Media — Presentation Transcript