This book examines everyday stories of personal experience that are published online in contemporary forms of social media. Taking examples from discussion boards, blogs, social network sites, microblogging sites, wikis, collaborative and participatory storytelling projects, Ruth Page explores how new and existing narrative genres are being (re)shaped in different online contexts. The book shows how the characteristics of social media, which emphasize recency, interpersonal connection and mobile distribution, amplify or reverse different aspects of canonical storytelling. The new storytelling patterns which emerge provide a fresh perspective on some of the key concepts in narrative research: structure, evaluation and the location of speaker and audience in time and space. The online stories are profoundly social in nature, and perform important identity work for their tellers as they interact with their audiences - identities which range from celebrities in Twitter, cancer survivors in the blogosphere to creative writers convening storytelling projects or local histories.

Stories and Social Media brings together the stories told in well-known sites like Facebook and lesser-known community archives, providing a landmark survey and critique of personal storytelling as it is being reworked online at the start of the 21st century.

About the Author
Ruth Page is a Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Leicester. She is the author of Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology (Palgrave, 2006), editor of New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality (Routledge, 2010) and co-editor of New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age (UNP, 2011).

Reviews

"In the era of Web 2.0, this book treats previously deemed fleeting and inconsequential stories as narratives that merit serious analysis...This book is a recommended resource for narrative scholars who would like to keep track of the next chapter in the saga about stories and storytelling - now set in the social media context." - Neslie Carol Tan, De La Salle University, Discourse Studies

Book Information
ISBN 9780415837026
Author Ruth E. Page
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 544g