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Description
Attested as an effective resource for the construction of identity (e.g., Schiffrin, 1996), storytelling also represents an important avenue for research into digital discourse and, more specifically, self-presentation on social media. To zoom in on this area of research, in this paper I adopt a narrative-discourse perspective and explore the role of stories in the self-presentation of a specific group of social media influencers (SMIs) and the construction of their identity. For these purposes, a dataset of Instagram microposts shared by five UK-based fashion and lifestyle SMIs was compiled (n=3,845), and the narrative potential of these posts was examined. Besides open-ended concomitant small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2007) that these SMIs individually narrate, the analysis also identified several types of multi-author stories that are developed collectively, across the feeds of the selected SMIs. These stories centre around a shared narrative element – a specific time, place, or hashtag – which provides opportunities for emplotment; time, space and hashtags hence function as narrative resources in these stories and assume a constitutive role in the narrative (Baynham, 2015). The paper argues that specific time-/place-/hashtag-centred stories which recur in posts by the selected SMIs can be understood as highly tellable for this group of users. As a result, they are considered instrumental in the construction of their identity and are thus likely to be embraced by other (aspiring) UK-based fashion and lifestyle SMIs. The analysis, however, also shows that this practice leads to the replication of specific narrative frames in the self-presentation of this group of SMIs as well as to the standardization of social media content in general (cf. van Driel & Dumitrica, 2021).
Baynham, M. (2015). Narrative and space/time. In A. De Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), The handbook of narrative analysis (pp. 119–139). Wiley Blackwell.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small stories, interaction and identities. John Benjamins.
Schiffrin, D. (1996). Narrative as self-portrait: Sociolinguistic construction of identity. Language in Society, 25(2), 167–203.
van Driel, L., & Dumitrica, D. (2021). Selling brands while staying ‘authentic’: The professionalization of Instagram influencers. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 27(1), 66–84.
