028_Georgakopoulou.pod 687 06-04-03 09:45:11 -mlb- mlb 28. Narrative analysis and computer-ediated communication Alexandra Georgakopoulou 1. Introduction Studies concerned with the classification of computer-mediated communication (henceforth CMC) have to date tended to concentrate on the identification and specification of genres, thus following developments in the available technologies and the emergence or popularity of CMC discourse activities: For instance, an ear- lier focus on email and newsgroups was succeeded by attention to e-chat and more recently, weblogs (Herring 2004). This line of inquiry has shown that the types of discourse engaged in through CMC are by no means homogeneous or singularly definable entities. Instead, they present considerable textual and contextual varia- bility, as well as hybridity, creatively adapting and re-casting elements of genres from old media or face-to-face environments (Androutsopoulos 2006). This has partly to do with the ways in which CMC users in their communication both cir- cumvent medium constraints and maximize affordances (see, e.g., Danet 2001). Furthermore, the plurality of genres and styles in CMC is by now well recognized, and various studies have explored their interrelations with their local (mediated, situational) and broader (sociocultural) contexts of occurrence (e.g., Baym 2000; Cherny 1999; Danet 2001; Georgakopoulou 1997; articles in Danet and Herring 2003). Although this line of inquiry has come a long way in documenting how CMC genres are associated with different possibilities and affordances for the support of a wide range of discourse activities, an emphasis is missing on what for many scholars is a special or archetypal genre (e.g., Swales 1990), namely narrative. At a time, with the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, when personal stories abound in CMC, from status updates on Facebook to re-tweets (i.e., sharing interesting tweets) on Twitter, there is much need and scope for taking a narrative-analytic ap- proach to CMC. Such an approach should scrutinize the different types of stories engendered or prohibited in different environments and online communities and the ways in which they are “told” (produced) and received or engaged with, as well as how they are shaped by properties of the medium. In sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and discourse analytic research on face-to-face communication, conversational stories have been studied and analysed extensively in the last four decades, particularly since the publication of Labov’s influential model of narrative structure (1972; also Labov and Waletzky 1967), which is dis- cussed below. Alongside this line of inquiry, the study of what kinds of stories in-