Quantified Storytelling: A Narrative Analysis of Metrics on Social Media

155 Pages·2020·1.978 MB·English

by  Alex Georgakopoulou, Stefan Iversen, Carsten Stage

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
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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