Narratives Online: Shared Stories in Social Media

Description

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.

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).

'A box of delights: structured around case-studies from Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, this ambitious book succeeds in interweaving insights from a broad range of approaches to narrative analysis in a multi-faceted approach, whilst retaining coherence and lucidity of method and argument throughout. A much-needed, systematic and rigorous account of how stories are shared on social media as multimodal and multi-authored discourse activities, which deserves to be shared widely!' Alexandra Georgakopoulou-Nunes, King's College London 'An original piece of cutting-edge research in narrative and social media. It presents an innovative combination of methods applied to engaging case studies of shared stories in online contexts, thus developing our understanding of a new and complex narrative genre. A significant contribution to mediated narrative analysis, pushing forward the frontiers of the field. Multifaceted and stimulating. Share this story!' Nina Norgaard, University of Southern Denmark