Professor Alexandra Georgakopoulou (King’s College London) 

Small stories research has recently been extended in my work as a paradigm for critically interrogating the current storytelling boom on social media, which includes the designing-spree of stories as specific features on a range of platforms. This algorithmic engineering of stories which integrates them into the spatial architecture of platform affordances has led to the hugely popular feature of Stories on Snapchat and Instagram (also Facebook and Weibo):  sharing through Stories has now overtaken sharing through feeds. Drawing on a digital ethnographic tracking of such story-facilities, a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the platforms’ views and ideologies about stories, and a narrative-semiotic analysis of female Influencers’ Instagram Stories, I have uncovered specific directives (cf. preferential conditions, prompts) to users for what stories they will share and how. These directives are attestable in the dialectic of the values underlying the design of stories, the story affordances and the practices that they commonly lead to. In this talk, I focus on the directive for authenticity. ‘Being authentic’ online is currently synonymous with ‘telling authentic stories’, within a widely circulating users- and brands-oriented agenda of making the most of the ‘power of stories’. What are the key-elements then of this digital authenticity as a discourse for posting stories and how are they shaped by the stories’ technological and algorithmic design? How do Influencers’ stories work with and around this imperative for presenting authentic selves and lives? And how does this all fit (or not) with longstanding narrative analyses of the links of stories with authenticity that have stressed either the referential (i.e. credibility and accuracy of events) or the performative (i.e. the teller’s construction of a taleworld ‘reality’)

All welcome but email us for Zoom link: ioe.ccmseminars@ucl.ac.uk