Snap-by-Snap! How to Analyze Identity W...

Social networking sites (SNS) allow for complex (inter-)actions between users and the medium by means of their specific technical affordances and limitations; this facilitates users’ multimodal discursive construction of multifaceted, flexible, in-the-moment identities. With its image-based and ephemeral, time-limited content, Snapchat is particularly popular among younger people. Via Snaps, users creatively produce fluid and semiotically complex online identities that enter the social world through interaction with others. This project aims to carve out the multimodally created, managed and negotiated (youth, gender, athletic, cultural, etc.) identities of young female (Austrian) football players and to analyze how these interact with the medium, Snapchat. For this purpose, “My stories” from 7 players were collected during 5 months in 2018. Our contribution proposes a multi-perspective, multi-level and multimodal linguistic analysis involving both bottom-up and top-down methodological approaches, yet also documents and critically addresses the challenges of linguistically analyzing social practices such as Snaps.