From “Being Real” to “Relatable Tales”: Formatted Authenticity and Stories in TikTok Short Form Videos
Keywords:
formatted authenticity, small stories, TikTok short form videos, reconfigurations & repurposings, sharing-life-in-the-moment, relatabilityAbstract
Authenticity in the sense of off-the-cuff, raw, believable presentation of the teller and their everyday life through storytelling has been a widely circulating discourse in digital storytelling (e.g. brand storytelling). In my longitudinal technographic study of stories online, I have explored the connections of this type of authenticity with stories as a feature on platforms (Georgakopoulou 2022). I have shown authenticity to be a platformed directive, supported by specific affordances and design, and integrally connected with the storytelling practice of sharing-life-in-the-moment. These choices have developed recognizability and normativity (i.e. formatting). Building on this research, in this article, I examine how formatted authenticity in stories migrates onto TikTok short form videos. I focus on a series of videos with conventionalized captions “when your/my mum …” that build a generic tale about roles and relationships within the family. Using small stories and positioning analysis, I show how the formatted authenticity that I have attested to in previous work is reconfigured and repurposed at different levels, in line with TikTok affordances for creating multi-layered, intertextual storytelling. The intermingling of the personal with the collective/generic within sharing-life-in-the moment emphasizes the shift of authenticity from teller-based truth-telling to a tale-based relatability. The discussion shows how studying authenticity in social media narratives requires a historical, media-genealogical approach so as to understand the evolution and trans-platformization of storytelling genres and choices that serve as recognizable emblems of authenticity.
References
Abidin, Crystal (2018) Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online. Emerald Group Publishing.
Abidin, C. (2020). Mapping Internet celebrity on TikTok: Exploring attention economies and visibility labours. Cultural Science Journal 12: 77-103.
Agha, A. (2007) Language and social relations. CUP.
Bamberg, M. and Georgakopoulou, A. (2008) ‘Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis’, Text & Talk, 28: 377–396.
Barton, D. and Lee, C. (2013) Language Online. Routledge.
Bhandari, A., & Bimo, S. (2022). Why’s everyone on TikTok now? The algorithmized self and the future of self-making on social media. Social Media + Society, 8(1), 20563051221086241.
Bucher, T., & Helmond, A. (2017). The affordances of social media platforms. In J. Burgess, T. Poell, & A. Marwick (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Media (pp. 233-253). Sage.
Blommaert, J. with Smits, L. & Yacoubi, N. (2020) Context and its complications. In De Fina, A. & Georgakopoulou, A. (eds.) The CUP Handbook of Discourse Studies. CUP. 52-69.
Blommaert, J. & Varis, P. (2011) “Enough is enough”: The heuristics of authenticity in superdiversity. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 2. www.tilburguniversity.edu
Bucher, T. (2018) If … then. Algorithmic power and politics. Oxford University Press.
Bucholtz, M. (2003) Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7:398–416.
De Fina, A. & Georgakipoulou, A. (2012) Analyzing narrative. CUP.
Deschrijver, C. & Georgakopoulou, A. (2024) Context in discourse analysis. In Romero-Trillo, J. (ed.), Language in context. CUP. 71-94.
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in ethnomethodology. New York: Prentice Hall.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2007) Small stories, interaction and identities. John Benjamins.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2015) Sharing as rescripting: Place manipulations on You- Tube between narrative and social media affordances. Discourse, Context & Media, 9, 64–72.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2017) Sharing the moment as small stories: The interplay between practices & affordances in the social media-curation of lives. Special Issue. Storytelling in the Digital Age. Narrative Inquiry 27: 311–333.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2019) Designing stories on social media: A corpus-assisted critical perspective on the mismatches of story-curation. Linguistics and Education. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2019.05.003
Georgakopoulou, A. (2021) Small stories as curated formats on social media: The intersection of affordances, values & practices. System 102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2021.102620
Georgakopoulou, A. (2022) Co-opting small stories on social media: A narrative analysis of the directive of authenticity. Poetics Today 43: 265-286. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9642609
Georgakopoulou, A. (2024a) In search of context online: Technography as a synergetic methodology for the study of stories. Discourse, Context & Media 61: 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100801
Georgakopoulou, A. (2024b) Reconfiguring and repurposing authenticity: Influencers and formatted stories on Instagram during the pandemic. In Blitvich, P. & Georgakopoulou, A. (eds) Influencer Discourse. Affective relations and identities. John Benjamins.20-42.
Georgakopoulou, A. & Bolander, B. (2022) “New Normal, New Media: Covid Issues, Challenges & Implications for a Sociolinguistics of the Digital”. In Working Papers in Urban Language & literacies. Paper 296. 1-19.
Georgakopoulou, A., & Giaxoglou, K. (2018) Emplotment in the social mediatization of the economy: The poly-storying of economist Yanis Varoufakis.” Language@Internet 16, article 6. https://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2018si/georgakopoulou.giaxaglou
Georgakopoulou, A. Iversen, S. & Stage, C. (2020) Quantified storytelling: A narrative analysis of metrics on social media. London: Palgrave.
Georgakopoulou, A. & Page, R. (forthcoming) Analyzing short form video as storytelling: The case of TikTok. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Giaxoglou, K. & Georgakopoulou, A. (2021). A narrative practice approach to identities: small stories and positioning analysis in digital contexts. In: Bamberg, M. Demuth, C. & Watzlawik, M. (eds). Cambridge Handbook of Identity. CUP. 241–261.
Goffman, E. (1981) Footing. In Forms of Talk. Ed, by E. Goffman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 124-159.
Goodwin, C. (2007) Interactive footing. In Holt, E. & Clift, R. (eds.), Reporting talk. CUP.
Halliday, M.A. & Hasan, R. (1989) Language, Context and Text, p. 52-69.
Hennink, M., Kaiser, B. & Weber, M.B. (2019) What influences saturation? Estimating sample sizes in focus group research. Qualitative Health Research 29: 1483-1496
Herring, S.C. (2013). “Discourse in Web 2.0: familiar, reconfigured, and emergent”. In D. Tannen and A.M. Trester (eds.), Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2011: Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC. 1-25.
Jewitt, C. (2017). Multimodal analysis. In A. Georgakopoulou & T. Spilioti (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language and digital communication (pp. 69–84). Routledge.
Kanai, A. (2019) On not taking the self seriously: Resilience, relatability and humour in young women’s Tumblr blogs.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 22: 60–77.
Lou, A. (2017) Multimodal simile. The “when” meme in social media discourse. English Text Construction 10: 106-131.
Page, R. (2018) Narratives online: Shared stories in social media. CUP.
Pers, M. L. (2023) Telling-by-doing life as a mother in YouTube vlogs. In Georgakopoulou, A., Giaxoglou, K. & Patron, S. (eds.) Small Stories Research: Tales, Tellings, and Tellers Across Contexts. New York & London: Routledge. 292-309.
Shuman, A. (2005) Other People’s Stories. Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy. University of Illinois Press.
Taylor, C. and Marchi, A. (eds.) (2018) Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review. Abingdon: Routledge.
Zappavigna M. (2016) Social media photography: construing subjectivity in Instagram images. Visual Communication 15: 271-292.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Alexandra Georgakopoulou
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
