WP100 Small stories research & social media: The role of narrative stance-taking in the circulation of a Greek news story

This paper shows how small stories research can offer a conceptual apparatus for the study of new/social media practices that facilitate the circulation not just of personal stories, but of public and ?news? stories too. It connects with recent pleas and attempts within sociolinguictics for the development of a new vocabulary for the analysis of text and discourse circulation beyond the single speech event and within processes of globalization, and it focuses on a particular incident that became a ?viral? story in the run up to the recent second election in Greece: The assault of two female leftwing party MPs, in particular the ?slapping? and ?punching? of one of them, by a male MP candidate from the far-right party Golden Dawn, on a breakfast news show of live TV (7 June 2012).? Using this as a ‘telling case’, the analysis employs the small stories heuristic ‘ways of telling/sites/tellers’ to explore the connections between specific choices of telling and the affordances or constraints that specific new media environments pose.