(Un)complicating context online: The case of formatted storytelling

Alexandra Georgakopoulou
King’s College London
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The starting point for my talk is that online environments, in particular social media, have altered the constitution of context in communication, and, in effect, should lead analysts to an overhaul of our conceptualisation of this foundational concept for linguistics, moving away from assumptions and biases that originate in research on face-to-face environments, with co-present participants, in rather well-delineated participation roles (for a similar call see Blommaert et al 2020). At the heart of challenges for contextual analysis online lies the difficulty in establishing sharedness -and by extension indexicality & other pivotal work for meaning-making – amongst users, in the face of the extra-speedy development and consolidation of communication types & norms. In this talk, in recognition of the need to factor in any contextual analysis, the role of technologies, in a non-deterministic and historicized way, I will re-work technography, a social media-tailored ethnographic approach (Bucher 2018), for the purposes of the study of stories online. I will first present the technographic premises & steps for integrating the triptych of platformed affordances, discourses, and users’ practices into a contextual analysis. Drawing on the late Blommaert’s reworking of the ethnomethodological concept of formatting, that is, the process of typification and recognizability of social actions for the communicators involved, I will then argue that, what I have described in previous work as small stories, have formed the basis for the creation of formatted stories on social media: recognizable as typical of specific stances and life-styles, valued, widely distributed across languages and cultures, with a homogeneity of form and content. I will tease out such key story-formats across platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, currently TikTok) and the multi-semiotic features (linguistic, textual, visual, auditory) within them, showing how they have gradually become emblematic of an ‘authentic’ and ‘relatable’ teller. I will conclude with the need for a critical mass of contextual studies of the current formatting of communication online, as part of us grappling with the realities of the new mutations of ‘globalization’ in the (post)digital era of GenAI.

References

Blommaert, J. with Smits, L. & Yacoubi, Ν. (2020) Context and Its Complications. In De Fina, A. & Georgakopoulou, A. (eds.) The CUP Handbook of Discourse Studies. CUP. 52-69.

Bucher, T. (2018) If … then. Algorithmic power and politics. New York: OUP.