Storytelling and Audience Reactions in Social Media

Language in Society 45, 473–498.
doi:10.1017/S0047404516000051
Storytelling and audience reactions in social media

ANNA DE FINA
Italian Department, ICC 306J Georgetown University, 37&O ST. NW,
Washington DC, 20015, USA
defi[email protected]
ABSTRACT
Storytelling is among the most common forms of discourse in human com-

munication. The increasing influence of technology in our life is having a sig-
nificant impact on the types of narrative that are told and on the way they are
produced and received. In order to understand such impact we need to ap-
proach the discursive study of narrative from a perspective that privileges par-
ticipant practices rather than texts. This is the approach taken in the present
article, which analyzes a specific aspect of storytelling practice: audience par-
ticipation within a blog open to comments. Using the notions of participation
frameworks and frames as starting points, the analysis examines the frame
focus of comments, the interactional dynamics established by participants
among themselves, the tone of messages, and the media used in messages.
Among the most important findings is a significant enhancement of reflexiv-
ity in comments as participants engage with the storytelling world much more
than with the taleworld. (Narrative, story, storytelling, social media, partici-
pation frameworks, computer-mediated communication)*
INTRODUCTION
Studies of communication in new media have seen an explosion of interest in

recent years. In sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, computer-mediated com-
munication was in the past a niche area of interest only to a handful of scholars
who pioneered its study in the late 1990s (Herring 1996, 2001), but nowadays
the field has become more and more important for understanding semiotic practic-
es in the digital age. The reasons for such change are obvious: media and mediated
communication occupy an increasing space in our lives. As Deuze (2014:3) notes,
we live in a ‘media saturated world’ and experience ‘a way of living that fuses life
with material and mediated conditions of living in ways that bypass the real or per-
ceived dichotomy between such constituent elements of human existence’.
For millions of people around the world, face-to-face interaction is increasingly
being complemented, and often substituted, with mediated communication through
digital technologies and social media that shape and are shaped by the way people
go about sharing information, creating bonds, and expressing themselves. Although
research on mediated communicative processes is growing and becoming more and
© Cambridge University Press, 2016 0047-4045/16 $15.00 473
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000051 Published online by Cambridge University Press

ANNA DE FINA
more mainstream, online storytelling is still a relatively virgin territory, particularly

from a sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspective. In this article, I contribute
to this little explored field by analyzing storytelling in a computer-mediated environ-
ment—a public blog—and focusing on an aspect that has received surprisingly little
attention in inquiry about stories in computer-mediated communication: audience
participation. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of the digital culture as
seen by many is its ‘participatory’ nature (Jenkins 2006). Few studies, however,
have addressed the concrete participatory practices that users put in place within dif-
ferent media, particularly in relation to storytelling. In order to contribute to filling this
gap, I investigate audience comments to a story posted online, concentrating on three
aspects of participation: the frames that comments focus on, the type of interaction that
commenters establish among themselves, and the resources that they use to convey
their points and stances. Such analysis is intended both to shed light on usage patterns
in these kinds of environments, and to offer insights into more general communicative
processes in social media. In particular, I highlight how in such environments the
center of attention shifts from story content to storytelling context and to participation
in the activity. Such a reflexive focus, as I argue, is a consequence of a general trend
away from content-focused interaction and towards performance as a central compo-
nent of digitally mediated communication, especially within social media.
First, I provide some background on studies of computer-mediated communi-
cation relevant to discourse analysis. Then, I introduce the theoretical framework
that inspires the study, focusing on approaches to storytelling as practice, and
review work on storytelling in computer-mediated-communication contexts. Sub-
sequently, I discuss two theoretical constructs that are important for the analysis
of participation in computer mediated environments, namely framing and partic-
ipation frameworks. Finally, I present the analysis and discuss its implications for
the study of communication in the digital age and for narrative analysis.
COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION AND

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) started attracting the attention of dis-

course analysts in the late 1990s. Early studies concentrated on structure, in that
they attempted to describe the kinds of genres that have developed in mediated en-
vironments and the way they differ from face-to-face interactional genres. These
studies described and analyzed, for example, blogs (Miller & Shepherd 2004), elec-
tronic mail (Eklundh 1994), chat-room conversations (Cherny 1999), and personal
homepages (Chandler 1998). They investigated general characteristics of internet
language (Herring 2004) and some sociolinguistic aspects such as gender differences
in discourse patterns among users (see Matheson 1991; Savicki 1996). In this sense,
their focus was on comparing and contrasting face-to-face discursive genres and
forms of discourse with their computer mediated counterparts from a structural
and taxonomic perspective.
474 Language in Society 45:4 (2016)

S TO RY T E L L I N G A N D A U D I E N C E R E AC T I O N S
Evaluating these early investigations that he characterizes as ‘first wave’,

Androutsopoulos (2006:420) notes that due to its focus on formal properties of
texts ‘this work has paid less attention to the socially situated discourses in which
these features are embedded’, and that the variety of practices that emerge in it ‘is
customarily noted, but not accounted for in any systematic way, thus inevitably sus-
taining homogenized and simplified conceptions of language use in CMC’.
In the second wave, represented in more recent approaches (see e.g. papers in
Tannen & Trester 2013), the attention has shifted from a description of genres and
structure to a focus on users and practices. Researchers do not take for granted the
existence or indeed homogeneity of CMC discourse genres and characteristics, but
investigate the practices that participants engage in and the specific types of interac-
tions that take place within them. Central to these more recent approaches is the idea
that in order to understand CMC it is important to attend to the particular affordances
that characterize different environments. The notion of affordances, defined by
Hutchby as ‘functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining,
the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object’ (2001:444), is central to
these more recent endeavors in that it has helped understand interactions of
humans with technology in dialectic, rather than mechanistic terms.
This shift in focus is, in my view, also related to two main factors. One is the
growing influence in discourse studies and sociolinguistics of approaches to the
analysis of discourse phenomena that stress the importance of the notion of ‘prac-
tice’ as a defining element for both identity and community building. This notion is
central to theories that have deeply influenced sociolinguistics such as, for example,
the Community of Practice framework proposed by Wenger (1998) and Bourdieu’s
theory of habitus as based on unconscious practices (Bourdieu 1991), and, as we see
presently, it has become pivotal also in narrative studies.
The second important factor in this change of focus has been the theoretical refl-
ection spurred by the advent of Web 2.0 technologies (O’Reilly 2005). Definitions
are still somewhat controversial, but here I take as my point of reference Herring’s
(2013:4) characterization of Web 2.0 as ‘web-based platforms that emerged as
popular in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and that incorporate user-
generated content and social interaction, often alongside or in response to structures
or (multimedia) content provided by the sites themselves’.
The characteristics of Web.2.0 described above demonstrate the profoundly interac-
tive nature of social media today and therefore also explain why practice oriented, user
focused approaches are the most adequate to analyze communication within them.
STORYTELLING PRACTICES IN CMC CONTEXTS
Before reviewing the studies in the area, I introduce a terminological clarification and
some considerations on the theoretical methodological approach taken here. I use the
term story to refer to a narrative centered on past events, temporally and causally or-
ganized, and generally following the canonical structure described by Labov (1972)
Language in Society 45:4 (2016) 475

ANNA DE FINA
as consisting of abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, and coda. Ca-

nonical stories in the Labovian sense are also centered on unexpected events and have
a specific point, which lies at the heart of the narrator’s evaluation. I refer to other
genres as narratives.
The distinction is important as narrative analysis has moved more and more from
a view of narratives as texts, which predominated until the end of the 1990s under
the influence of Labov & Waletzky’s (1967) model, towards a conception of story-
telling as a discourse and semiotic practice (see De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2008,
2012; De Fina 2009; Goodwin 2015). From this perspective, narrating is a process
of reconstructing, reevaluating, and making sense of events and characters that is
embedded within specific interactional and institutional contexts and that both
shapes and is shaped by those contexts. Thus storytelling is not only about
stories, but also about the people who tell and listen to them and the different
social activities and worlds in which those narratives take shape and are used. In
addition, narratives are the result of storytelling practices that determine norms reg-
ulating both generic expectations and relationships among participants. Thus, the
study of narratives should not be equated with the analysis of text structure and
content exclusively. Indeed, a practice-centered approach involves not only the
close observation of storytelling in context but also particular attention to partici-
pant norms and frameworks and the role of affordances in specific media.
The study of storytelling in CMC from a discourse analytic or sociolinguistic
perspective is still in its infancy, but it appears to be in line with this approach as
it is moving more and more towards a focus on practices rather than texts.
Genres that have been investigated include narratives told within hoax mail messag-
es (Chiluwa 2009), narratives in email messages (Georgakopoulou 2004), advice
narratives told in support groups (Harrison & Barlow 2009), social media narratives
such as Facebook and Twitter entries (Page 2012), coming out narratives (Wong
2009), and online retelling of public events (Georgakopoulou 2014). Without
doubt, the most studied narrative genre (although as I discuss below, not a
unified genre at all) are narratives told in blogs. Since data for this article come
from a blog, I devote some attention to research in this area.
It has been noted by scholars of CMC that weblogs, or blogs, have become amongst
the most popular media, so much so that it is hard to obtain precise figures on their
number as they come into being continuously in all parts of the world. Einslauer &
Hoffman (2010:80–81) define blogs as writing spaces that involve ‘hyper-textual col-
lections of entries in reverse chronological order’, which also often allow for recipients
to generate content through comments. This definition recognizes that blogs are not
genres, but spaces that have in common only very general characteristics. Throughout
the years many classifications of weblogs have been created. One of the most widely
used is the one proposed by Blood (2002), who distinguished between three basic
types: filters, personal journals, and notebooks. Filters are blogs focused on external
context such as news or information related to specific interests of the blog communi-
ty; personal journals are created as means of self-expression and networking by

individuals; notebooks are in-between genres in that they may combine personal ex-
pression with public content. These typologies have been enriched to include more
specific categories of authors, themes, and purposes, since blogs may be created not
only by individuals but also, for example, by corporations or commercial enterprises,
or by public media such as newspapers for a variety of purposes. With respect to sto-
rytelling specifically, Eilsauer & Hoffman (2010) have shown that blogs may present a
variety of storytelling genres, from personal narratives to news stories, with different
production formats (from single teller to multiple co-tellers) and also with a variety of
participation formats. Thus, general classifications have proved inadequate to capture
the variety of existing blogs and blogging practices.
STORY STRUCTURES AND GENRES IN SOCIAL MEDIA
The storytelling practices that emerge in each of the mediated environments discussed
above differ in terms of the media used, the platforms in which narratives are embedded,
and the communities that access and use such media. Thus, it is hard to make general-
izations. There are some general characteristics of social media interactions, however,
that deeply influence storytelling practices. According to Page (2012:8–9), social media
interactions are collaborative and dialogic in that they usually involve different authors
and participants. They are also emergent in that they develop over time and do not have a
definite beginning or end. Social media content is often episodic, in the sense that
entries and exchanges do not have a linear continuity but revolve around specific in-
stances and moments; and it is personalized in that it is tailored to the individual user
through photos, personal details, and often marketing choices (as in the case of Face-
book). These characteristics and the affordances that each medium provides have a
clear impact on the types of narratives that are found on social media and on the way
they are interactionally managed. For example, many have noted how social media
stories usually depart from the Labovian canonical narrative form. Narratives told on
Facebook updates or on Twitter revolve around recent events, are not long or elaborated,
do not have a canonical structure, and often recount trivial and everyday happenings and
encounters. But it must also be noted that this is not true of many other narratives found
in social media. Personal blogs, for example, are often sites for the telling of stories that
are very close to the canonical form and the same can be said of narratives told in internet
fora, or shared by communities that have social or political objectives. Digital stories,
which have been the object of great interest in pedagogy and in the study of a variety
of communities (Elia 2007; Norton & Early 2011; Porto & Belmonte 2014), are
another genre in which canonical stories are the norm. Thus, what is most distinctive
about storytelling in social media is precisely the way narratives are shared, recontex-
tualized, commented upon, and subject to continuous reconfigurations and reinterpre-
tations, how they are embedded within different media, how they are often recounted
through multimodal resources, and how their production and circulation are as much
a focus of attention as their content. In other terms, what is distinctive about such envi-
ronments is the dialogicity and openness of storytelling practices rather than the

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characteristics of the text used, which may vary widely. Indeed, online narrative types
can go from autobiographical or biographical stories, to stories of personal experience,
to anecdotes, to small stories, and even though there may be some genres that are
specific to online communication, the differences from face-to-face environments
reside in storytelling practices rather than in story structures.
AUDIENCES AND PARTICIPATION
As discussed above, many Web 2.0 environments are characterized by their open-
ness to users’ participation. Studies of CMC have shown that online commentary
features allow users to express their views about many issues, including the use
of dialects and language varieties (Androutsopoulos 2014; Porto & Belmonte
2014), race and ethnicity (Chun 2013; Doerr & Kumagai 2014), political news
(Neurauter-Kessels 2011), and commercial products (Vasquez 2011). The analysis
of users’ comments constitutes, in my view, a window into a better understanding of
the function of particular texts and practices. In the case of storytelling as a form of
communication in social media environments, such analysis throws light on how
stories are received and manipulated in these environments and what kinds of
users’ practices are established around them.
Audience participation in storytelling was first systematically analyzed by
Goodwin (1986), who built on Harvey Sacks’ ideas about stories in interaction
and on Erving Goffman’s theories about participation frameworks. Goodwin
showed that stories are not texts uttered by a solitary narrator, but that they are
joint enterprises from the moment they are told by someone to someone. This is of
course true of online environments as well, as tellers shape their stories in view of
their possible audiences and audiences interact with stories. As in the case of face-
to face communication, however, simple notions of teller and audience are inade-
quate to account for this process, which is rather complex. Goffman’s (1981)
notion of participation formats helps explain these complexities. Goffman regarded
communicative events as characterized among other things by different formats of
production and reception. In terms of production, he proposed decomposing the cat-
egory of ‘speaker’ into the ‘animator’ (the individual who utters the words), the
‘author’ (the individual who produces the text) and the ‘principal’ (the individual
who takes responsibility for the content of the text). In terms of reception, he distin-
guished between addressed and unaddressed recipients, and between different ways
in which participants may make their presence felt. If we think of online environ-
ments such as blogs, these distinctions are important. Bloggers who originally
post a story may not be the story authors, but its mere animators. They may also
not be the ‘principals’ of the story as they bear no responsibility for its content. If
bloggers have posted somebody else’s story, however, they may be seen to some
extent as co-tellers, since, having regarded it as worthwhile posting, they share the
responsibility for telling it. The audience of the story is generically composed by ev-
eryone who has access to the blog, but participants may choose as their principal and

ratified addressees other commenters, the blogger, or the storyteller, or they may not
orient to a specific addressee at all. Participation roles are always related to the various
frames that may be available in an interaction and therefore both concepts—partici-
pation and frames—are important to analyze participation patterns.
A particularly fruitful way of combining these notions and applying them to storytell-
ing has been proposed by Young (1987) and, as I show here, her framework is a useful
tool for approaching the analysis of comments. Young argues that when people tell
stories there are always two realms involved. One is the taleworld—the world where
characters move and live—and the other is the storyrealm—the storytelling event at
the center of which the taleworld lies, which in turn is embedded in a conversation (or
in other kinds of communicative practices). Young combines the construct of realms
with Goffman’s (1974:21) notion of frames as ‘schemata of interpretation’ used by
people ‘to locate, perceive, identify, and label events and occurrences’ to understand par-
ticipants’ perspectives on stories. She also takes from Bateson (1954) the idea that frames
constitute meta-communicative tools, that is, that they provide a bracketing of current ac-
tivities that characterize them for the participants as they develop in real time and thus
provide tools for interpreting what is going on in an instance of communication.
Young distinguishes between types of story frames. A first distinction should be
made between frames that ‘set the realm status of the Taleworld or the Storyrealm’
and frames that ‘reveal attitudes towards either’ (1987:21). Within frames that ‘set
the status’ there are those that distinguish stories from other discursive sequences
such as explanations, arguments, confessions, and those that distinguish them
from other sorts of narrative-centered encounters such as films, theatre productions,
or the telling of fairy tales. There are also frames that separate story genres. The
second category of story-specific frames applies to the evaluation and the expression
of attitudes towards story events or the story itself. These frames may describe a story
as a whole as boring or exciting, witty or pertinent, or may apply to individual events
qualifying them as ‘disgusting or enchanting, as romantic, adventurous, daunting,
dreadful, or dreary’ (1987:21). If we extend these insights, we can include in the cat-
egory of evaluative frames not only evaluations or stances about the story itself, but
also evaluations about tellers, other participants, and the activity in which they are all
engaged. Thus, applying these notions to the analysis of comments, it is possible to
distinguish different frames for comments depending on whether they focus on the
taleworld, the storyrealm, or the external world outside the interaction.
The notions of participant roles and frames are applied in the analysis that
follows in order to understand participation in the blog, as they point to aspects
of the storytelling that become the main focus of participant comments and kinds
of interactional dynamics that they establish among themselves.
DATA AND CONTEXT
The story that is the focus of the participants’ comments analyzed here was told in
video format by a radio host and TV personality called Charlamagne Tha God, a

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man who is fairly well known to followers of celebrities and entertainment in general
in the US. He was the teller of the story posted by the blogger Jordan Sargent on
Gawker on January 25, 2014, but the video itself had originally been posted on
the Vlad TV website on that same day under the title ‘Charlamagne “Rihanna is
the realest since Tupac”’, and then reposted on a number of social media. What at-
tracted my attention to this particular narrative was that, in contrast to many narratives
that are distributed and shared online, this one was a canonical story in the Labovian
sense. It was the telling of a highly unusual encounter that Charlamagne had with the
pop singer Rihanna. It also had high tellability since it involved a character who is
both popular and extremely controversial, as Rihanna has been at the center of an
affair involving physical abuse by her former boyfriend. In addition, it was a mono-
logic and highly performed narrative since the teller deployed many performance
strategies including intonation, gesture, constructed dialogue, detail, and the use of
slang and of African American Vernacular accent and vocabulary at different
points. Space considerations prevent me from analyzing this story in depth as I am
concentrating here on comments, but I provide a synopsis below.1
Charlamagne recounts that he was in the lobby of a hotel in Los Angeles after the
MTV Awards with some friends and that he sent a tweet saying to his followers that
he was “drunk in LA”. To his surprise, the pop star Rihanna tweeted back telling
him that she wanted to join him. After that, he describes how he and his friends
met the singer who came out of a black SUV and took them to “the hood” for a
night of drinking and pot smoking. The evaluation of the story revolves around
his big surprise at the fact that Rihanna had decided to join him, but also around
his regarding her as “the coolest chick” and the “realest nigga in the game since
Tupac”, presumably because she was up for a whole night of fun and because
she was not afraid of going around with people who were not celebrities.
As mentioned, the story was reposted on Gawker under the title ‘This is an
amazing story about Rihanna partying’ and with the following caption: From
New York hip-hop radio and TV personality Charlamagne Da God, who calls
Rihanna “the realest n*gga in the game since Tupac” (gawker.com/this-is-an-
amazing-story-about-rihanna-partying-1509002561; accessed January 26, 2015).
The story elicited 394 comments posted by a total of 197 participants. Most of
the comments were posted on the day on which the story was published, a few were
added in the following days, and some of the comments that I collected have since
disappeared from the website. Before proceeding to the coding and analysis of the
comments, I provide some background information on Gawker.
THE BLOG
Gawker is a North American web blog founded in 2003 by Nick Denton and Eliz-
abeth Spiers and based in New York City. It promotes itself as ‘the source for daily
Manhattan media news and gossip’ and focuses on celebrities and the media indus-
try. Gawker is the flagship blog for Denton’s Gawker Media being just one of the

subject specific blogs owned by the company, which is regarded as one of the most
popular blog networks. What is interesting about Gawker is that it has devoted a
great deal of attention to readers’ comments. In 2013, it added a new platform
for comments and posts called Kinja, which allows users to write their own head-
lines and introductions (Coddington 2014). Gawker has also eliminated the tradi-
tional format consisting of comments in reverse order in favor of a two-column
format with much greater space for photos, video, and images. Indeed, the two-col-
umn format presents entries mostly in chronological reverse order on the right and a
summary of ‘trending’ entries on the left (see gawker.com).
Following Blood’s classification (2002), Gawker can be regarded as a filter: it is
a public blog with a focus on entertainment and gossip about the entertainment
world, and even though it encourages reader participation, its bloggers still filter
content and comments. It is not easy to find exact data on the blog’s readership
but data on Gawker media in general2 indicate that the audience is composed of
men and women (with a slight majority of men) of different ethnicities, whose
most frequent age range is twenty-five to thirty-four, and mostly composed of
middle-class individuals who have a college or postgraduate education.
In terms of the platform’s affordances: comments can only be posted by people
who sign up for an account with Kinja, but all content is public. Comments are
posted within a thread defined by an initiating comment. The criteria for appearance
of the threads and comments on the blog seem to be a combination of number of re-
sponses and time of posting. Thus, most popular threads appear first in the blog, but
they are not in strict reverse chronological order as, in the case of the posts analyzed
here, threads with fewer comments posted earlier may appear before threads with a
greater number of comments but posted later. Within each thread, comments
appear in chronological order, with the comment originating the thread in first place.
Participants identify themselves through a pseudonym and sometimes a photo or
some kind of visual symbol.
CODING
Comments were collected within one week of the first posting and then I checked
periodically to see whether new comments had been posted. Since literature on
online comments has focused mainly on reactions to Youtube videos (see e.g.
Leppänen & Häkkinen 2012; Chun 2013; Koven & Marques 2015), no system
for coding comments was available for the present analysis. Thus, in order to char-
acterize the frame focus of the comments, the type of interactions among partici-
pants, and the use of different media, I devised a system of coding that was first
applied to the data by myself and a research assistant and then subsequently
refined until we arrived at a number of agreed upon categories that we could
apply to our data with little or no disagreement. Based on this system, each
comment was coded for the categories given in (1) below.

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(1) Categories of comments
a. Thread to which the comment belonged

b. Participant name
c. Interactional dynamics
d. Frame focus of the comment
e. Medium
f. Tone
With respect to ‘interactional dynamics’, each comment was coded for its rela-
tion to the other comments within each thread in order to ascertain to what extent
participants engaged with each other in a sustained way. The subcategories
devised are given below in (2).
(2) Interactional dynamics subcategories
a. INITIATING THREAD COMMENT: Comments that start a new thread
b. RESPONSE TO INITIATING THREAD COMMENT: Comments that are direct responses
to the first comment in a thread
c. RESPONSE TO PREVIOUS COMMENT: Comments that respond to the comment
directly preceding them in the thread
d. RESPONSE TO A COMMENT: Comments that respond to another comment in the
thread that does not directly precede them or initiates the thread
In the ‘frame focus’ category we looked for the main topic of the message. Based
on the frames discussed above, we recognized the following foci: the storyrealm,
the taleworld, the outside world, or a second story. Each of these frame foci was
then subdivided into more specific categories, as shown in Table 1.
TABLE 1. Frame focus on comments.
Frame focus of comments Subfocus
Storyrealm Comment on participants

Comment on tellability
Comment on aspects of the activity at hand
Meta-comment
Comment on the teller as a teller
Comment on the co-teller
Taleworld Comment on some other aspect of the story world
Comment on the character
Comment on action
Outside world Unrelated comment
Comment on a character as a person in the world
Loosely related comment
Comment on the teller as a person in the world
Second story Initiation of second story
Comment on the action of the second story

Frame foci were coded based on the most prominent message. If a comment
went in more than one direction, we coded for the most prominent category, under-
stood as the category that best summarized the content and function of the message.
Thus, there were cases of comments that contained references to more than one cat-
egory, particularly the longer ones. In those cases, we made a decision based on
what appeared to be the most prominent focus of the comment. We coded for the
thematic foci below since, as noted above, each of them makes different participant
roles and frames potentially relevant.
Storyrealm
As explained in Table 1, comments on the storyrealm focused on the participants
(teller, co-teller, and fellow commenters), on the story’s tellability, or on aspects
of the activity at hand, as can be see from the subcategories specified in (3).
(3) Storyrealm subcategories
a. COMMENT ON THE TELLER AS A TELLER: Comments about Charlamagne Tha God

as the teller of the Rihanna story
b. COMMENT ON THE CO-TELLER: Comments about Jordan Sargent as the person
who posted the story
c. COMMENT ON PARTICIPANTS: Comments about fellow commenters, who were
also participating in the online discussions on Gawker. Comments made
by participants about themselves also are captured in this category.
d. COMMENT ON TELLABILITY: Comments about how interesting and worthy of
being told the story is
e. COMMENT ON ASPECTS OF THE ACTIVITY AT HAND: Comments about the discus-
sions occurring in Gawker, on a thread in particular, or more in general on
the blog as a medium
f. META-COMMENT: Comments clarifying or commenting about the linguistic
meaning of something that has been written
Taleworld
Comments about the taleworld focused on the characters and the actions in the story
itself.
(4) Taleworld subcategories
a. COMMENT ON THE CHARACTER: Comments about the characters in the story world
b. COMMENT ON ACTION: Comments about actions in the story world
c. COMMENT ON SOME OTHER ASPECT OF THE STORY WORLD: Comments about any-
thing else that specifically relates to the story world
Outside world
Comments on the outside world focused on the participants and the story characters
as people in the world, not as storytellers, audiences, or blog participants.

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(5) Subcategories of outside world
a. COMMENT ON A CHARACTER AS A PERSON IN THE WORLD: Comments about people

who were characters in the story, discussed outside the context of their actions
in the story
b. COMMENT ON THE TELLER OR CO-TELLER AS A PERSON IN THE WORLD: Comments
about Charlamagne or Jordan outside the story world context
c. LOOSELY RELATED COMMENT: Comments about other celebrities, the celebrity
world, or anything else that is tangentially related to aspects of the story
d. UNRELATED COMMENT: Comments that have no relation to the story or any
second story
Second story
Comments on a second story sometimes initiated a second story based on the orig-
inally posted narrative or followed up on someone else’s second story.
(6) Subcategories of second story

a. INITIATION OF SECOND STORY: Comments that introduce a new story
b. CONTINUATION OF SECOND STORY: Comments that further develop a second
story that has already been introduced
c. COMMENT ON THE ACTION OF THE SECOND STORY: Comments about the action that
occurs in the second story
d. COMMENT ON SOME OTHER ASPECT OF THE SECOND STORY WORLD: Comments
about the second story that do not focus on the characters or actions
Medium
Each comment was coded for the medium (or media) that the participant used.
(7) Subcategories for medium used

a. Text only
b. Text and video
c. Text and photo
d. Text and GIF
e. Photo only
f. Video only
Tone
Each comment was coded for the overall tone of the message.
(8) Subcategories for tone of message
a. AGGRESSIVE: Comments that have a negative or hostile tone towards some-
thing or someone

b. NEUTRAL: Comments that are neither positive or negative

c. AMICABLE: Comments that have a positive or friendly tone towards something
or someone
d. IRONIC: Comments that have a humorous, sarcastic, or mocking tone towards
something or someone
Of course these categories are not as clear-cut as they may look. It is not easy, for
example, to distinguish between irony and aggressiveness. Thus, in order to decide
whether a comment was aggressive rather than ironic we relied on the direct use
of insults, bad words, and disparaging expressions. Cues for irony included exag-
geration or the use of metaphoric and sophisticated vocabulary. Positive com-
ments were characterized basically by the presence of expressions of praise and
solidarity with previous commenters. Coding tone was important in order to un-
derstand how confrontational or nonconfrontational these online exchanges were.
I consider examples of most of the categories described above later, together
with the discussion of the results of the analysis, since these concrete instances
help illustrate their implications.
ANALYSIS
As mentioned, most of the comments analyzed here were published on the day the
story was posted on the web and in the immediately following days. Those com-
ments that disappeared after some time were included in the analysis but remained
uncoded in terms of the participant’s name. As can be seen in Table 2, the discus-
sion included 394 comments that were posted by 197 participants. Most of the com-
ments (about 83%) were posted as part of a discussion thread, which was separated
on the blog from other threads by a dotted line. There were ninety-five threads, but
only twenty-eight of them (29%) had more than one participant, while sixty-seven
(71%) were constituted by single comments that did not have a follow up.
TABLE 2. Comments and participants.
Number of comments 394
Number of threads Number of interactional threads 28

Number of single-comment threads 67
Total 95
Number of participants Number of coded participants 192
Number of unknown participants 5
Total 197
As seen in Table 3 below, only three threads had more than ten participants. The
thread with the most participants and comments had 154 comments, which

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TABLE 3. Threads by number of participants.
Participation in threads Number of threads
1 participant 67
2 participants 8
3 participants 7
4 participants 3
5 participants 2
6–10 participants 4
31 + participants 1
constitute almost 40% of the total. Thus, while interaction was sustained in some
cases, in other cases there was practically no interaction.
Figure 1 shows the interactional dynamics in more detail. What emerges is that
almost one quarter of the comments were in the initiating thread category and the
most populated category was a response to some (not a previous) comment (36%).
Thus, most of the comments were not posted in response to a previous comment
in the thread, which means that sustained dialogues on the same topic were not the
most typical kind of interaction. Rather, as we see below, users tended either to put
out their own opinions without paying much attention to what had come before, or
to digress into new topics. This lack of topic development, which is compatible with
the findings of previous research (see Herring 2013) points to the fact that partici-
pants are not really focused on the content and informational components of online
communication, but rather on other aspects of it, and therefore they do not feel par-
ticularly obliged to stay on point.
FIGURE 1. Interactional dynamics.

The most important results of the analysis of frame foci of comments are summa-
rized in Figure 2. The main focus of comments was the storyrealm (56%), followed by
the outside world context (30%), then by comments on a second story (8%), and
finally by comments in the taleworld (2%). Thus, more than half of the comments
were devoted to the storytelling context and more than one third to the world
outside of the story.
FIGURE 2. Main thematic focus.
Table 4 summarizes the data for all of the subcategories analyzed. Among other
things, Table 4 shows that while in the storyrealm the most discussed objects were
the participants, in the taleworld the least discussed were the characters. It is also
worth noting the importance of ‘tellability’ and ‘activity at hand’ as topics of dis-
cussion. Also notable is the highest category in the ‘outside world’ context: the un-
related comment. This shows once again how blog participants tend to go off in
different directions when engaged in a discussion.
Let us now look closely at examples of comments in the different categories.
With respect to the storyrealm, as mentioned above, a lot of attention was
devoted by the participants to other participants, either as commenters or as teller
and co-teller. These kinds of comments contained (usually negative) judgments
about other participants’ personal traits, attitudes, or states, and, while touching
upon what the other commenter said, actually evaluated him or her as a person.
See, for example, the following comments addressed to fellow commenters:
(1) Fess up: How high are you right now.

(2) You are ordinary. If you party with people who are not ordinary let Gawker know
and they might report it.
(3) Man you are dumb! Glad we have a record of it here.

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TABLE 4. Focus of comments organized by subfocus.
Focus of Number of Percent of total

comments Subfocus comments comments
Storyrealm Comment on participants 94 23.9%

Comment on tellability 42 10.7%
Comment on aspects of the activity at 41 10.4%
hand
Meta-comment 28 7.1%
Comment on the teller as a teller 13 3.3%
Comment on the co-teller 4 1.0%
Outside world Unrelated comment 56 14.2%
Comment on a character as a person in 27 6.9%
the world
Loosely related comment 20 5.1%
Comment on the teller as a person in 16 4.1%
the world
Second story Initiation of second story 18 4.6%
Comment on the action of the second 8 2.0%
story
Comment on some other aspect of the 5 1.3%
second story
Continuation of second story 2 0.5%
Uncoded Uncoded 7 1.8%
Taleworld Comment on some other aspect of the 9 2.3%
story world
Comment on the character 2 0.5%
Comment on action 2 0.5%
In examples (1) through (3), commenters are targeting negative traits of the in-
terlocutor, who is being described as on drugs, ordinary, or dumb. Comments on the
teller and co-teller (the blogger who posted the story) were not very different. In (4)
the blogger is presented as an unsuccessful storyteller:
(4) Half way through, I started to feel embarased [sic] for him. [referring to the
blogger]
Comments on tellability directly challenged the interest and significance of the

story. Many criticized the fact that just being about a celebrity made the story worth-
while. See, for example, the following comments that showed strong disagreement
with the story evaluation as ‘amazing’:
(5) So she’s [referring to Rihanna] amazing because she went to a party with ordi-
nary people? I’m going to a party with ordinary people tomorrow, can I get an
article on Gawker about that

(6) I’m trying to understand what about that story is “amazing”. Charlamagne, who
has an influential NYC radio show, goes to L.A. and publicity-savvy Rihanna
takes him to where the after-hours party is. Amazing.
Comments on the activity at hand are interesting because of their reflexive

nature, as they demonstrate participants’ attention to their own role in the story-
realm. Indeed, they focus on posting on the blog as an activity and to the actions
of other commenters as participants in the blog:
(7) I LOVE GAWKER COMMENTS!!!!!!!!!!!! HAHAHHAHA

(8) You could call this thread a Trivial Pursuit into the nothingness.
Meta-comments were also reflexive in that they referred to language as a code.

They included clarifications about meaning and clarity and observations on how
words or expressions were written. In (9) below, one of the participants quotes
another participant’s words and explains them to a third one.
(9) I don’t understand why you don’t understand that. “You kind of have to though.
Go to a party with ordinary people.”
You kind of have to go to parties with ordinary people, since you are presumably
not famous enough to get invited to parties with celebrities. Whereas Rihanna is
famous, so she doesn’t have to go to parties with ordinary people.
In (10) a participant asks for a clarification about the meaning of an expression

used by another commenter.
(10) What does “with two roadies in her coat pocket” mean? a) Two people who
work on concert tours somehow became small enough to fit in a pocket.
b) There was a very large coat and two normal-sized roadies in the pockets.
c) Roadies does not mean what I think it means.
The second more popular category of comments refers to the outside world. In
this case, participants talk about the tellers and the characters as entertainment per-
sonalities or just as people. Thus, the general frame of the comment refers to a
domain that is external to the storytelling and mostly has to do with the world of
entertainment. For example, see the following comments, both quite ironic,
about Charlamagne making fun of his ‘ego’ as reflected in the name in (11) and
Rihanna as a bad singer in (12).
(11) I sincerely hope that the gentleman who calls himself Charlamagne Da God has
a sidekick who calls himself Will.i.am. Da Klonkerer.
(12) It would be more amazing if someone told me that she was capable of singing
more than four different musical notes.

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Included in the outside world category were loosely related or completely unre-
lated comments, that is, statements and observations that deviated from the topics
described above and that sometimes initiated a side sequence. For example, the
comment in (13) initiated a whole side sequence about names.
(13) You know we were actually asked in class the other day what the name of
Gwyneth Paltrow’s son was? Everyone knew Apple, nobody knew Moses.
Comments classified as second stories were narratives (and narrative compo-

nents) that presented alternative developments to the ones offered by the teller
and co-teller or follow-ups to them. Example (14) represents a beginning to a
second story, again with a critical twist.
(14) This one time I was walking down the street and I saw Rihanna. She was also
walking down the street.
Seriously……. SHE WAS FUCKING WALKING DOWN THE STREET.
Cray Cray.
Data on the medium used by participants confirms the primacy of textual re-
sources with respect to other media in many online environments (see Page
2012). Figure 3 summarizes the analysis:
FIGURE 3. Media used in comments.

Figure 3 shows that about 93% of comments used text only, about 4% used text
and a photo, 1.3% used text and video, and 1% used text and GIF. Only rarely
did people use a photo or a video without text. Some photos and GIFs featured,
of course, Rihanna herself in all kinds of poses.
Sometimes the image clarified and complimented the text, while at other times
photos were posted without text so that their implications and meanings were left to
the reader. In other cases, commenters creatively played on related or unrelated
topics through their use of videos, photos, and GIFs.
With respect to tone of the messages, the results are summarized in Figure 4.
FIGURE 4. Tone of the message.
As mentioned above, the coding here had a certain level of subjectivity as the
boundaries between aggressiveness, irony, and sarcasm are not that clear. But, in
any case, if we put together ironic and aggressive comments, what unsurprisingly
emerges is that they constitute more than half of the data (about 67%), while ami-
cable comments were the least frequent, and neutral comments only constituted
22% of the data.
DISCUSSION
The analysis of this data offers the basis for some interesting reflections on the di-
rections taken by participant-initiated practices in social media. The results confirm
the lure of the participatory culture. When given the opportunity, blog readers like
to speak their minds and take advantage of the possibilities for interaction and
opinion sharing offered by the media. We are now in a position, however, to be
more specific about the kind of participation that takes place in this type of

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digital environment. It is clear, for example, that interactions among participants are
mostly neither sustained, nor very much on topic. Most of the posts do not receive
direct comments, that is, authors are rarely chosen as principal addressees by other
participants, and when comments are issued they are usually not part of a set of
turns by the same participants. Because there are so few commenters that enter
into dialogue with each other, topics and frame foci change both from one thread
to another and within the same thread. Another tendency, which has been
observed elsewhere in social media exchanges (Oegema, Kleinnijenhuis, Anderson,
& van Hoop 2008) and is confirmed here, is the generally ‘unfriendly’ nature of
many online environments. Researchers have talked a great deal about aggressive-
ness in online environments (see papers in Dery 1994). In this case, we see that
most of the comments have a non-neutral tone and more than half are either
directly negative or ironic. It is also remarkable how in cases where two participants
disagree with each other, when there is a continuation of the interaction, there is also
an escalation in negativity. This too is in line with research suggesting that online
environments, very likely because of their ability to afford anonymity or the assump-
tion of virtual identities, facilitate what has been called ‘emotional excess’ (Deuze
2014:52).
The analysis of frame foci also provides very interesting insights into participa-
tion trends. As we have seen, the most important frame foci of comments are the
storyrealm and the outside world, while comments that center on the taleworld
and characters constitute a minimal part of the data. Even though a direct compar-
ison with offline environments is not possible, as studies of story evaluation in
face-to-face interaction are scarce, literature on story openings and closings (e.g.
Jefferson 1978) suggests that audiences usually comment on the story itself and
try to make their talk topically relevant and in line with the message of the story.
Labov (1972) talked of story evaluation as being fundamentally about the point
of the story, intended as the main message. He and many others have talked
about stories being a prime genre for audience engrossment and involvement.
According to his and many others’ view of stories, particularly canonical ones
like the story that initiated the comments analyzed, these have the power to draw
audiences into the taleworld, making them forget the interaction where the
telling is happening.
Storytelling is also usually regarded as a cooperative environment, so much so
that analyses of uncooperative or challenging audience reactions are not common.
Of course, these observations refer to everyday storytelling and not to more com-
petitive environments such as legal or political settings. On the contrary, in the
data analyzed here, challenges to tellers’ personalities and rights and to tellability
are common. This focus on aspects of the storytelling event is compounded by
attention to the medium and the activity at hand and to the use of language
(meta-comments), which together make up about 18% of the comments in the
storyrealm focus category. These results point to the enhanced reflexivity that
online environments afford. Such reflexivity may be regarded as related to

different factors. On the one hand, the fact that comments are posted and written
paradoxically allows for greater permanence of opinions and therefore for less
spontaneous reactions to a story or to other participants’ contributions. On the
other hand, the participatory culture and online environments encourage perfor-
mance as a central act of self-presentation. Indeed, according to Bauman
(2010:20), media environments are not so much about ‘being known but about
being seen’. And being witty or funny or confrontational makes individuals defi-
nitely more visible than being cooperative or friendly, as it allows them to put
forth their individuality. Miller (2008) argues that new media culture is becoming
less and less focused on content and on the exchange of information and more
and more phatic. In this case, therefore, the story itself loses its attraction,
while other aspects of the storytelling come into prominence. And of course,
with Gawker being a gossip blog, the outside world, which in this case is the
world of celebrities and their fans, acquires a more prominent focus than the
story world, too.
The study also has some wider implications for narrative analysis as it dem-
onstrates that online environments do not always represent the demise of the big,
highly performed monological story. Indeed, Charlemagne’s story responds to
all of the criteria of a canonical narrative: it presents a series of chronologically
ordered events, a complicating action, a resolution, and it is highly evaluated
and performed. What happens to the big story in social media is that it
becomes, as everything else, subject to recontextualizations, contestations,
and all sorts of manipulations that would not have been possible in offline
environments.
To conclude, let me go back to the beginning. At the start of this article, I
quoted Androutsopoulos’ call for contextualized studies of online practices and
his caution against easy generalizations. The observations made here are very
much tied to the context in which this storytelling took place: a blog focused
on gossip. It is therefore important to note that the characteristics of audience
participation described here are closely related to this kind of environment.
However, many of the phenomena discussed—that is, the enhancement of refl-
exivity, the performative aspects of communication, the reduced topicality of
interactions, and the mostly non-neutral tone of exchanges that were found
in the participatory practices of this community—seem to be the norm in
other social media environments. Thus, looking at online communication as
semiotic practice offers a glimpse into both ways in which resources and affor-
dances are deployed by users of particular platforms and more general ways in
which the use of technologies is shaping interaction and culture in the late-
modern world.

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APPENDIX A:PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF THE YOUTUBE

VIDEO ‘CHARLAMAGNE “RIHANNA IS THE REALEST
SINCE TUPAC”’
In the absence of permission from the copyright holder, the transcript of the video cannot be
reproduced in its entirety, but a partial transcript is given below. Dotted lines indicate missing
parts of the transcript. The video was originally posted on the Vlad TV YouTube channel
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejRwLJcXjGQ) and reposted on many social media.
The transcript was made by the author, from a reposting on Gawker (gawker.com/this-is-
an-amazing-story-about-rihanna-partying-1509002561; accessed 26 January 2015).
1. ………………
2. I’m in LA. I’m in LA for the MTV Movie Awards.
3. ………………
4. ………………
5. ………………
6. ………………
7. ………………
8. We in the lobby drunk as hell,
9. ………………
10. ………………
11. I put on Twitter, “I’m drunk in LA.”
12. Rihanna retweets me and says “I want in.”
13. So I retweet her and say “Check your DM.”
14. ………………
15. I send her a DM like “Yo, I’m at the Beverly Hills SLS Hotel, you know, waon’t you
16. come trough, have some drinks?”
17. ………………
18. She hits me back, “Word.”
19. ………………
20. ………………
21. ………………
22. ………………
23. She was like “Well what-chu wanna do?”
24. I said, “Well this your town, take me somewhere.”
25. She was like “A-ight I’m on da way.”
26. ………………
27. ………………
28. Bout fifteen-twenty minutes later, black SUV pulls up.
29. Rihanna jumps out.
30. ………………
31. Coolest chick in the world.
32. ………………
33. ………………
34. ………………
35. ………………

36. She like “Let’s go.”

37. ………………
38. Wsh- we go to the hood.
39. ………………
40. Like, when I tell you Rihanna is the realest nigga in the game since Tupac,
41. ………………
42. ………………
43. And it wasn’t even like a club.
44. ………………
45. Da club was so hood, Beanie Sigel was in da club, my nigga
46. ………………
47. ………………
48. ………………
49. We orderin mad bottles of Patron, you know, d-f- mad weed bein rolled up,
50. ………………
51. ………………
52. I’m in a fuckin hood club, with Rihanna.
53. ………………
54. End of the night comes, Rihanna’s like, “Yo,”
55. ………………
56. She was like “I got a car outside for you.”
57. ………………
58. ………………
59. She went outside, paid the car, we got in the car service, and left.
60. And so it’s like, n- people don’t even really believe that that story happened.
61. “………………
62. took you to the hood? Beanie Sigel was in da club?”
63. ………………
64. ………………
65. ………………
66. This shit really happened.
67. That’s why I say Rihanna, Robyn Rihanna Fenty is one real-ass nigga.
68. She is the realest mother-fucka, in the game, since Tupac.
69. ………………
70. ………………
71. ………………
72. And when I tell you she jumped out the spot at this hood club, and all the
hoodniggas
73. was showin her respect,
74. ………………
75. ………………
76. ………………
77. ………………
78. She ain’t even had no- it was just and her- when she picked me up it was just her
79. and the driva.
80. ………………

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81. ………………
82. ………………
83. ………………
84. This was, super pop star Rihanna.
85. Eh, I got numbas love, and respect for her, I gotta salute her.
APPENDIX B:TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS
? rising intonation
. falling intonation
, slight pause, but not end of unit
! emphasis
“word” constructed dialogue (determined by context, often including a higher
pitch)
(word) sounds in conversation, descriptions of voice/sounds
word emphatic stress
: elongated sound (placed after a vowel)
- abrupt stop in speech, sometimes after a false start
NOTES
*I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for insightful comments on a previous draft of this article,
Kristine Bundschuh for her invaluable help in the data analysis, and Michèle Koven for great comments
on an early draft.
1
A partial transcript can be found in Appendix A, and transcription conventions are in Appendix B.
2
https://www.quantcast.com/gawker.com?country=US; accessed November 21, 2014.
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accepted 22 November 2015; final revision received 28 November 2015)

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Language in Society 45, 473–498.

Storytelling and audience reactions in social media

Storytelling is among the most common forms of discourse in human com-

Studies of communication in new media have seen an explosion of interest in

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000051 Published online by Cambridge University Press

more mainstream, online storytelling is still a relatively virgin territory, particularly

COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION AND

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) started attracting the attention of dis-

474 Language in Society 45:4 (2016)

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000051 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Evaluating these early investigations that he characterizes as ‘ﬁrst wave’,

STORYTELLING PRACTICES IN CMC CONTEXTS

Language in Society 45:4 (2016) 475

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000051 Published online by Cambridge University Press

as consisting of abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, and coda. Ca-

476 Language in Society 45:4 (2016)

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000051 Published online by Cambridge University Press

STORY STRUCTURES AND GENRES IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Language in Society 45:4 (2016) 477

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000051 Published online by Cambridge University Press

AUDIENCES AND PARTICIPATION

478 Language in Society 45:4 (2016)

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000051 Published online by Cambridge University Press

DATA AND CONTEXT

Language in Society 45:4 (2016) 479

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480 Language in Society 45:4 (2016)

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Language in Society 45:4 (2016) 481

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(1) Categories of comments

a. Thread to which the comment belonged

TABLE 1. Frame focus on comments.

Frame focus of comments Subfocus

Storyrealm Comment on participants

482 Language in Society 45:4 (2016)

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000051 Published online by Cambridge University Press

a. COMMENT ON THE TELLER AS A TELLER: Comments about Charlamagne Tha God

Language in Society 45:4 (2016) 483

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(5) Subcategories of outside world

a. COMMENT ON A CHARACTER AS A PERSON IN THE WORLD: Comments about people

(6) Subcategories of second story

(7) Subcategories for medium used

484 Language in Society 45:4 (2016)

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b. NEUTRAL: Comments that are neither positive or negative

TABLE 2. Comments and participants.

Number of comments 394

Number of threads Number of interactional threads 28

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000051 Published online by Cambridge University Press

TABLE 3. Threads by number of participants.

Participation in threads Number of threads

FIGURE 1. Interactional dynamics.

486 Language in Society 45:4 (2016)

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FIGURE 2. Main thematic focus.

(1) Fess up: How high are you right now.

Language in Society 45:4 (2016) 487