Dissertation the Working Narrative
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DISSERTATION THE WORKING NARRATIVE: ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES AND STYLES IN LIFE STORYTELLING ON SOCIAL MEDIA Submitted by Michael Humphrey Department of Journalism and Media Communication In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado Fall 2017 Doctoral Committee: Advisor: Patrick Plaisance Marilee Long Ashley Anderson Sarah Sloane Kate Mason Copyright by Michael Lee Humphrey 2017 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT THE WORKING NARRATIVE: ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES AND STYLES IN LIFE STORYTELLING ON SOCIAL MEDIA The stories we tell ourselves, and others, define us. What does that mean when we enter digital life and populate social media networks? In this dissertation, I examine the linguistic structures and styles of content created by people who are specifically prompted to tell a story from their lives. This dissertation focuses on two distinct types of storytelling social media platforms: Cowbird is an self-mediatizing, open site that primes users with life story cues and prompts them to “Tell a story,” while Humans of New York is a filtered, gated-mediatized platform run by one curator who posts pictures and short life narratives on Facebook, Tumblr, his own blog and several other social platforms. I sought to find distinct and/or common narrative structural and stylistic characteristics of the content. Using a combination of Quantitative Content Analysis and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker et al., 2007; Pennebaker et al., 2015), this project includes three related studies that begin with basic questions about narrative structures and concludes with two factor analyses of latent linguistic variables. On Cowbird, the latent variables internal vs. external focus created two styles of storytelling, regardless of the structure of the stories. Humans of New York, on the other hand, had its own style that complicated the role of singular first-person in the narratives. I suggest the overarching phenomenon in this data is what I’ve termed a working narrative, which is in flux, ii performative and filtering information in accordance with present goals, either to be encoded to long-term memory or forgotten. This suggests a model, the Digital Self Memory System, that combines insights from Autobiographical Memory (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000) and the Infosphere (Floridi, 2014) I conclude with a discussion about the philosophical implications of the working narrative in light of current and future technological affordances. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing a dissertation about the topic that pestered my mind for a decade has been one of the great privileges of my life. I first want to thank Patrick Plaisance, my advisor, and the committee members who spent so much time helping me develop these studies: Dr. Marilee Long, Dr. Ashley Anderson, Dr. Sarah Sloane, Dr. Kate Mason and Dr. Donna Rouner. Each added vital pieces to this process and the hours we spent talking are the best part of this experience for me. If there can be a concurrent expression of gratitude, I want to also start with Lorie Humphrey. Being the wife of a Ph.D. student is grueling. To do it 20+ years into our marriage, while getting her own Master’s, working full time and helping me tend to two elderly parents in separate cities is nearly miraculous. Our life together is filled with stories, but themes of love, dedication and grace persist in all. Other teachers played a vital role in this document. I am grateful to Dr. Cindy Christen for helping me find this path in the first semester of my Ph.D. program, department chair Greg Luft for his constant support, Dr. Eric Aoki, who worked hard to help me transition from a journalist to a scholar, Dr. Michael Losonsky, who helped me pold through the philosophy of language portion of Chapter 8, and to all of the teachers of my courses here at CSU, NYU, William Jewell and all the way down to Ms. Swinden, my demanding 6th grade teacher who taught me how to properly hike the Rockies. Among those teachers I would also like to thank Drs. Lois Anne and Kim Harris, Dr. Dean Dunham, Dr. Kenneth Chatlos, the late Dr. Myra Unger, the late Dr. Robert Trotter, Dr. Bradley Chance, Dr. Gina Lane, Meryl Gordon, Ted iv Conover, Robert Boynton, Blake Eskin, Adam Penenberg, Sally Law, Caroline Miller and many others. There are too many friends to name, but two went beyond the mile-marker for me in this journey. Thank you Anna Foote and Michelle Holden, one Kansan and one Coloradan, who did the hard work of training for, preparing and coding the Cowbird stories with me. I also want to acknowledge my life mentors, three of whom I named in the dedication. I am grateful for John Stafford, who saved my academic life, and maybe the whole life, when I was flailing in high school. I am also eternally grateful to Mary K. Meyer and Margaret Dart, both who fueled the love of story in me, and spent hours in conversation with a naive young man forty to sixty years their junior. I feel their presence in my life almost every day. v DEDICATION To Lorie Humphrey, John Stafford, Mary K. Meyer & Margaret Dart: Believers and storytellers, all in their own way. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iv DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................... vi LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................... ix LIST OF FIGURES .........................................................................................................................x CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................1 The Future of Memory ............................................................................................................1 The Problem ............................................................................................................................3 Significance of the Study ........................................................................................................3 Two Definitions ......................................................................................................................4 Summary .................................................................................................................................4 CHAPTER 2 – LITERATURE REVIEW .......................................................................................6 Autobiographical Memory ......................................................................................................7 Identity and Performance ......................................................................................................10 Big Stories vs. Small Stories .................................................................................................12 Life Story in the “Infosphere” ...............................................................................................19 Performance and Performativity Example: Gender ..............................................................26 Primes, Prompts and Mediatization ......................................................................................28 Language as Thinking ...........................................................................................................29 Review of Related Research .................................................................................................33 Summary ...............................................................................................................................37 CHAPTER 3 – TEXTS ..................................................................................................................38 Cowbird.................................................................................................................................38 Humans of New York ...........................................................................................................40 CHAPTER 4 – CONCEPTUALIZATION AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS .............................45 Research Questions and Hypotheses ....................................................................................46 Study 1: Prompting Narrative Structure ...............................................................................46 Study 2: Linguistic Factors in Prompted, Open-Platform Stories .......................................48 Study 3: Linguistic Patterns in Filtered Stories ....................................................................49 Chapter 5 – Research Methods .............................................................................................50 Research Design #1: Quantitative Content Analysis ............................................................50 Research Design #2: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count ....................................................54 Ethical Considerations ..........................................................................................................58 Analysis.................................................................................................................................59 CHAPTER 6 – RESULTS