The making of self: Multimodal narratives on self-care — The Association Specialists

The making of self: Multimodal narratives on self-care (20023)

Chi-hua Hsiao 1
  1. Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan

This study investigates narratives on self-care in a closed Facebook group, a community of practice whose members promote health via nutritious food and regular exercise. This community composing of like-minded people mostly living in Taiwan has a highly participatory culture in that members voluntarily share experience on their health conditions. They ask questions about eating habits, chronicle the adjustments they make in their lifestyle, and express joy or frustration over their pursuit to achieve well-being. To bring out their subjective experiences, most members adopt a first-person perspective in the style of autobiographical reflections, and they usually illustrate the texts with before and after photos of their body transformation. To analyze these multimodal narratives, I adopt digital ethnographic methods to collect data. As a member of this group for a long while, I collected narratives and the discussion threads between the authors and the other members from March to August 2023. I then used Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (Herring 2004, 2019) to explore two related research questions. First, how are the narratives on self-care composed multimodally? Secondly, how are self-disclosure and affect represented, and how do they engage discussions? I examine the discursively used lexio-grammatical components, discourse-level structures, and intimate self-disclosure embedded in these Mandarin Chinese narratives within the social context of this closed Facebook group. The significance of this study is three-fold. It will provide input on how narratives on self-care are mediated by Facebook communicative affordances. On a broad level, this analysis will illuminate the potentiality of narratives as social practices that demonstrate a better self. Moreover, this study will provide input into on how digital ethnography deepens the current understanding of narratives on self-care constituted within the webs of time, emotion, self, and multimodality.