engleski

'Hello my Priends, Welcome Back to My Channel!' Narrativity, Tellership, and Authenticity on TikTok

Narrative analysis within sociolinguistics and discourse-oriented approaches to language has seen significant turns over the last several decades. Its focus shifted from the linguistic structure of narrative seen as text-type towards recognising narrative as performance, a type of social practice, and a prominent locus of identity construction (De Fina & Perrino 2017). Recently, narrative analysis has turned towards heterogeneous storytelling contexts and genres that depart from the canonical single, linear (usually textual) sequences told by a single active teller (Georgakopoulou 2015, 2017). The contemporary landscape of narrative analysis is oriented towards narrativity and sharing stories in various online and digital contexts that people inhabit through their everyday practices (Page & Bronwen 2011, Giaxoglu 2020). The ways in which people engage in contemporary communicative practices to construct and share stories are multi-semiotic, multimodal, and greatly prompted by the affordances of social media platforms. This invites researchers in the field to re-think once again how they define narrative and to respond to consequent methodological challenges. To illustrate this, I use the example of TikTok, a popular video-focused social network. I analyse posts by user Pinky Patel, a comedian of South Asian heritage living in suburban Chicago, who is known for her humorous videos containing recounts of everyday situations and social commentary laced with a distinct Gujarati accent. My aim is to analyse strategies that Pinky uses to engage in “formatted storytelling” (Georgakopoulou, forthcoming), and to investigate how traditional notions such as narration, tellership, tellability, linearity, and positioning surface in this social networking context.

narrative analysis ; online storytelling ; multimodal discourse ; social networks ; TikTok

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