ABSTRACT
The stories told in social media sites are interesting from a sociolinguistic perspective, for they can be narrated in more or less creative ways by different groups of tellers and might shift in style across different sites and over time. In 2008, the author was interested simply in how different members of the social network site might tell stories in their status updates. Within days of completing her data collection, Facebook changed the update template to remove this default setting, adding the option to comment and “like” updates. In 2011, Facebook introduced another change to its format by arranging the news feed into a timeline. For a narrative scholar, this change was important as it foregrounded the reverse chronological order as a resource for narrativizing the content posted to a Facebook member’s account. In 2012, the author had the opportunity to work with colleagues at Microsoft Research on a project to explore the narrative potential of check in buttons resources.
