Language in context seminar

Speaker: Dr Ruth Page (English Language and Linguistics, University of Birmingham)

Title: Relatability and the shared stories of social media influencers

Abstract: In this paper, I analyse the discursive construction of ‘relatability’ in the shared stories (Page, 2018) posted by social media influencers. ‘Relatability’ is a non-linguistic concept which has become a ‘buzzword’ for social media marketing particularly associated with social media influencers (Abidin, 2016), and has shifted its meaning over time from the evaluation of a narrative text to the evaluation of the narrator’s interpersonal qualities.  I explore relatability in a dataset from the Instagram interactions of 10 British influencers, consisting of 314 posts and 43,915 comments collected between November 2019 and January 2020. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis, I map out

1. the dimensions of relatability as these are realised linguistically by the commenters who respond to SMI posts;
2. how these dimensions relate to each other;
3. What kinds of stories produced by social media influencers is evaluated as ‘relatable’.

I used the collocations, word sketch and thesaurus functions of Sketch Engine (http://www.sketchengine.eu), in the English Web2015 corpus to identify the dimensions of relatability: authenticity, affect, aspiration and humour. These dimensions are realised lexically through the synonyms for ‘relatability’ in the 155,867 word corpus of comment threads from the influencer Instagram posts. I used the frequency of the synonyms of relatability to identify which posts were most frequently evaluated as ‘relatable’ by the commenters, finding that they contained self-deprecating narratives, which were framed as humorous or appealed to positive affect.

I interpret relatability as a discursive performance which highlights the ‘double bind’ for social media influencers to appear both aspirational and authentic, and which collapses social connection with quantification and commercial imperatives (Georgakopoulou et al., 2020). This allows the influencers to market the products and their personality as aspirational ‘life-style gurus’ (Baker and Rojek, 2020) while complying with Leech’s (2014) modesty maxim (to minimize praise of self).