Narratives Online Shared Stories in Social Media

Stories are shared by millions of people online every day. They post and re-post interactions as they re-tell and respond to large-scale mediated events. These stories are important as they can bring people together, or polarise them in opposing groups. Narratives Online explores this new genre - the shared story - and uses carefully chosen case-studies to illustrate the complex processes of sharing as they are shaped by four international social media contexts: Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Building on discourse analytic research, Ruth Page develops a new framework - 'Mediated Narrative Analysis' - to address the large scale, multimodal nature of online narratives, helping researchers interpret the micro- and macro-level politics that are played out in computer-mediated communication.

1. Introducing shared stories; 2. Mediated narrative analysis: The toolkit for analysing shared stories; 3. Stories in Wikipedia articles: is sharing ever neutral?; 4. Co-tellership in the context of Wikipedia talk pages; 5. Shared stories and bonding icons in Facebook community pages; 6. Collective identities and co-tellership in Facebook comments; 7. Shared stories and social television practices in Twitter; 8. Co-tellership in retweets; 9. Citizen journalism and shared stories in YouTube; 10. Creative sharing and laughter in YouTube comments; 11. Shared stories revisited.

Ruth Page is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests lie in sociolinguistic approaches to narrative, language and gender, and new media. She has published extensively in all three fields and is the author of Stories in Social Media (2012) and Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology (2006). She is editor of New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality (2010) and co-editor of New Narratives, Theory and Practice (2011).