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At a time of increased monetization of social media, there is scope and need for critical-linguistic perspectives to go beyond the focus on users’ linguistic and multi-modal resources. Drawing on the project ‘Life-writing of the moment: The sharing and updating self on social media’ (www.ego-media.org), in this article, I make a case for a corpus-assisted critical perspective which allows the scrutiny of media companies’ design of stories as communication features in their apps. What definitions and views of stories underpin such story-features? What facilities are on offer for posting stories, how are they branded, and why? Who is positioned as an ideal story-creator and audience of those stories and why? I address these questions with reference to the recent story-designing spree on Snapchat and Instagram. The corpus analysis of how stories as an app feature are launched and discussed on online media, incl. keyword analysis and lexical and thematic associations of the term ‘story’, has brought to the fore three mismatches between the marketing rhetoric or branding of stories as a feature and the actual affordances offered for them. These involve tensions and trade-offs between: continuity of self and ephemerality; textuality and visuality; creativity and control for the user vs. pre-selection templates and customization. These mismatches are revealing of a re-designation of key-ingredients of stories, in particular time, memories and audience engagement, so as to suit the apps’ agenda of metricization of users’ lives and their ever closer links with advertising.

Designing stories on social media: A corpus-assisted critical perspective on the mismatches of story-curation