From Narrating the Self to Posting Self(ies): A Small Stories Approach to Selfies

Abstract

Abstract:Selfies have by now earned a prominent place in the diverse forms of self-representation on social media. In sociolinguistic terms, they have been undergoing a process of enregisterment (Agha 2005), as attested to in moral panics in public discussions and in a developing selfie-related lexicon. A phenomenon worthy of study then, yet largely unexplored, particularly within discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives on identities (possibly due to the selfie's visual nature). My aim in this article is to venture (and justify) a 'claiming' of selfies by small stories. Selfies present the semiotic hallmarks of small stories, as I will show, and so they constitute valuable 'data', the study of which can benefit from small stories inquiry into genres as communicative and social practices on social media. Small stories apparatus is well-suited to selfie analysis: it has been specifically developed to account for genres that challenge the assumptions and modes of analysis of conventional narrative and life writing studies. Using data of selfie postings by adolescent women on FB, I will show how within a small stories framework, far from being narcissistic expressions of 'ideal selves', selfies emerge as contextualized and co-constructed presentations of self, shaped by media affordances.

Mental health advocacy on Twitter: Positioning in Depression Awareness Week tweets

“…The study set out to examine how Twitter users position themselves and their audiences when they represent their private experiences of illness in the context of mental health advocacy. The approach to narrative advocated in interactional sociolinguistics (Bamberg, 2011) invites us to consider stories of personal illness experience not only as therapeutic and meaning-making resources (Bury, 2001;Charmaz, 2002) but also as performances that construct specific relationships with the audience (Wortham, 2000) and call for attention to the different semiotic resources used in the act of expression (Georgakopoulou, 2016). While this approach has so far been used to highlight the interactional dynamics and underlying institutional structures in illness narratives elicited via one-to-one interviews (e.g.…”

“…Hyperlinks to extended narratives allow recipients a greater opportunity to understand the author's preferences and symbolic connections, and in this way complement the intimacy of the written and visual self-disclosures. Self-disclosive posts in this category also use selfies as small stories that capture the moment in the life of the teller (Georgakopoulou, 2016) and help create narratives that reveal something 'deeply personal and not always obvious about the confessant' (Hall, 2016: 229). The agentic stance in the selfie can be directly contrasted with the position of 'self as an undergoer' (Bamberg, 2011: 106) and provides further cues that the telling is not a complaint story.…”

Narratives 2.0

“…Page 2015) or selfie postings (cf. Georgakopoulou 2016) in which the textual basis is either restricted by the platform (e. g. 280 characters on Twitter) or secondary to the picture posting (as is the case with selfies). To betjfml Vol 2 (2019), No 2: 30-59 ter grasp the various features which have been identified as characteristic for digital narrations, the next paragraph will introduce an adaptation of Ochs and Capps' model of narrative dimensions to the study of social media storytelling (cf.…”

Group selfies and Snapchat: From sociality to synthetic collectivisation

“…For example, Zappavigna's (2016) and Zappavigna and Zhao's (2017) work on 'mommy blogging' and Eagar and Dann's analysis of self-branding (2016) concentrate on images of individuals. On the rare occasions that group selfies have been included in discourse analytic research, they have only been treated as a subordinate element within a larger project, as in Georgakopoulou's (2016) reframing of selfies as a type of 'small story'. Second, even in media studies, where selfies have been discussed in relation to collective action such as such as activist campaigns (Deller and Tilton, 2015) or political protests (Kuntsman, 2017), these studies have not examined the construction of the group selfie per se (for example, in relation to the image composition), but concentrated on the macro-social outcomes of the selfiesharing.…”

“…Selfies are not just produced as images, but are a form of multimodal discourse which can include visual, aural and verbal elements when shared through video clips that can be created on smart phones. This presents a major challenge for discourse analysts, whose earlier work on selfies has been monomodal, concentrating only on photography (as in the work of Zhao and Zappavigna, 2018) or only on the verbal content which accompanies the images (Georgakopoulou, 2016). There has, as yet, been no attempt to analyse systematically the ways in which visual, aural and verbal elements might together contribute to the positioning of people vis-à-vis selfies, and in particular, no attempt to differentiate how this might be constructed for groups as compared with individuals.…”