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Quantified Storytelling: A Narrative Analysis of Metrics on Social Media PDF

155 Pages·2020·1.978 MB·English
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Quantified Storytelling A Narrative Analysis of Metrics on Social Media Alex Georgakopoulou Stefan Iversen Carsten Stage Quantified Storytelling Alex Georgakopoulou • Stefan Iversen Carsten Stage Quantified Storytelling A Narrative Analysis of Metrics on Social Media Alex Georgakopoulou Stefan Iversen School of Education, Communication School of Communication and Culture & Society Aarhus University King’s College London Aarhus, Denmark London, UK Carsten Stage School of Communication and Culture Aarhus University Aarhus, Denmark ISBN 978-3-030-48073-8 ISBN 978-3-030-48074-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48074-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland A cknowledgements A panel on ‘Narrative and Metrics on Social Media’, which we co- organized as part of the Narrative Matters conference, 2018, The Netherlands, served as the first step towards putting on the map of narra- tive studies this under-represented area and towards beginning to engage in productive conversations with colleagues and students. We are grateful to all those—too many to mention by name—who indulged us in the Narrative Matters conference and numerous workshops since then. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful com- ments on the book’s proposal with the usual proviso that all remaining errors are ours, and to our Commissioning Editor Cathy Scott for believ- ing in this project. Finally, our thanks go to Dr Anda Drasovean for help with the final editing stages of the book. v c ontents 1 Analysing Quantified Stories on Social Media 1 1.1 Narrating Numbers 1 1.2 Social Media, Metrics and Numbers 4 A History of Metrics and Numbers 6 Quantified Self-Tracking 7 Metrics and Affect 9 Visibility and Social Buttons 10 1.3 Stories on Social Media 12 ‘New’ Types of Stories, ‘New’ Types of Telling? 16 Storytelling Participation Between Agency and Media Affordances 17 1.4 Quantified Storytelling: Our Approach 19 Questions and Methodology 19 A Heuristic Typology of (In)Visible Metrics 21 Key-Insights: Metricized Formats, Engagement and Power 22 References 25 2 Measuring and Narrating the Disrupted Self on Instagram 31 2.1 Introduction 31 2.2 The Quantification of Illness Narratives on Instagram 34 2.3 Methods and Material 38 vii viii CoNTENTS 2.4 Analysis 40 Stories of Teleological Counting and Hope 40 Stories of Frustrated (Re)Counting 44 Performative Measures of Positivity and the Tellability Crisis of Having Nothing to Count 47 2.5 Conclusion 53 References 55 3 Making Memes Count: Platformed Rallying on Reddit 61 3.1 Introduction 61 3.2 The Metricized Affordances of Reddit 62 3.3 M ethods and Material 68 3.4 A nalysis 75 Meta-memetics 75 Political Education 80 Outreach and Influx 81 3.5 C onclusion 84 References 88 4 Curating Stories: Curating Metrics—Directives in the Design of Stories 95 4.1 Introducing Stories as Designed Features 95 4.2 Directives in the Design of Metricized Stories 98 4.3 Material and Methods 100 A Critical, ‘Values in Design’, Perspective 100 Tracking the Design of Stories 102 Corpus-Assisted Methods 103 Communicative Practices: A Case Study of Influencers’ Stories 105 4.4 Analysis 106 Directive I: Sharing-Life-in-the-Moment 106 Directive II: Audience Engagement as Quantified Viewing 112 Directive III: Authenticity in Tellers’ Self-Presentation 119 4.5 Conclusion 124 References 128 CoNTENTS ix 5 C onclusion 133 5.1 Stories Through the Lens of Content, Interface and Algorithmic Metrics 133 Tellability as Narrative Value 137 Multivalent Platforms and the Problem of Public Value 140 Reactive Agency? 141 References 142 Index 145 l f ist of igures Fig. 4.1 Distribution of online articles about the Story feature over time (May 9, 2012–January 30, 2018) 104 Fig. 4.2 NVivo coding of Lele Pons’ stories 111 Fig. 4.3 Example concordance lines for view and watch + quantifying expressions (e.g. ‘how many’) 116 Fig. 4.4 Semantic field of ‘rate’ 117 Fig. 4.5 Semantic field of ‘engagement’ 118 Fig. 4.6 Semantic field of ‘creative’ (as word cloud) 119 Fig. 4.7 Example concordance lines for ‘authentic’ 121 xi l t ist of Ables Table 2.1 Number of posts, comments, hearts and views on the three Instagram profiles, which are analysed in the chapter 38 Table 2.2 The ten most Liked posts on the profile Jannelivsnyder66 49 Table 3.1 Number of upvotes and comments on the ten most commented-upon posts on r/The_Donald from February 20, 2016, to February 29, 2016 75 Table 4.1 Partial word sketch for moment 107 Table 4.2 Most salient verbs that take story as an object in the Ego-Media Stories, British National Corpus, English Web 2015 and TED_en corpora 108 Table 4.3 20 most salient semantic domains in the Ego-Media corpus and most frequent words assigned to them 109 Table 4.4 Verb collocates of ‘story’ 115 Table 4.5 Top 10 collocates for ‘authentic’ (ranked by logDice score) 121 xiii

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