“Sharing Is Caring”: Participatory Storytelling and Community Building on Social Media Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

While most health communication studies tend to adopt an information-based approach to unpacking the communication issues around COVID-19, scant attention has been paid to the emerging narratives from local communities as a way of sensemaking, self-representation, and creative responses to the pandemic. Especially locally driven narratives that convey positive emotions and exhibit remarkable resilience of the great majority are underexamined. To narrow this gap, this study analyzed a Facebook-based, participatory storytelling program to reveal how local communities (co-)construct humanized narrative accounts of lived experiences and context-specific knowledge about pandemic responses. Data collection involved qualitative content analysis of 245 user-generated stories, associated with comments and engagement from the group members, for a 6-month period. Results show that open and participatory storytelling on social media affords a pathway of performing togetherness even though individuals narrate their lived pandemic experiences differently. Such performing togetherness somewhat facilitated virtual community building. This study contributes to the health communication literature with a refreshing perspective of understanding the grounded, participatory storytelling as a vehicle of collective sensemaking and community spirit-lifting.

Introduction

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), declared by the World Health Organization as a global pandemic in March 2020, has continued to shape economic, social, and geopolitical lives. People are adapting to this new normal world while vacillating between fear and faith, despair and hope, and pessimism and optimism. “Pandemic fatigue,” referred to as people’s lowered sensitivity of the protracted epidemic, tiredness of living with restrictions, and thus somewhat declining risk mitigation behavior (MacIntyre et al., 2021), became a pertinent portrait of the reality. Around the “pandemic fatigue” there have emerged blame-themed narratives—to criticize individuals’ reduced compliance with health norms (e.g., social distancing, mask wearing), government deficiency in health crisis response, and/or social inequalities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Jakovljevic et al., 2020). All these blame narratives can easily flame negative emotions such as anger, fear, shame, and sadness on social media and thus undermine people’s collective efforts or the confidence and trust they place on health authorities (Vemprala et al., 2021).

Communication scholars tend to unpack the COVID-19 blame games from a perspective of health communication, largely concerned about the issues associated with health information, such as low accessibility, lack of readability, poor outreach and engaging effects, and prevalent health-related misinformation (also called “misinfodemics”) (e.g., Brennen et al., 2020; Krishna & Thompson, 2021; van der Meer & Jin, 2020). Most studies have focused on the information produced by health authorities and experts, delivered through mass communication and/or digital and social media to public, with particular interest in analyzing negative emotions online (Feldman, 2021). Scant attention has been paid to the emerging narratives from local communities, which are enabled by participatory storytelling including uplifting storytelling on social media. Through sharing positive emotions (e.g., hope, humor, optimism), locally driven narratives showcase remarkable resilience of the great majority—even those who have been subject to blame (e.g., young people) while not receiving adequate support and guidance from governments (Reicher & Drury, 2021). The stories shared in virtual communities also represent people’s collective sensemaking, memory building, and creative responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

To divert from the top-down, information-based model of health communication to a more grounded, narrative approach to understanding community experience, this study explores participatory storytelling, especially the positive stories within an online community amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Such a community-based, participatory approach allows people to share not only personal lived experience, but also gain a sense of agency, connectedness, and empowerment from viewing others’ stories (Hou, 2021; Lejano et al., 2020) which, in turn, are essential to community resilience building (Holmes & McEwen, 2020). Especially positive storytelling—uplifting stories about hope, help, fun, and solidarity—facilitates building a reaffirming and acceptive environment where community members can draw on support networks to celebrate the hardiness of storytellers, normalize their own experience, and guide behavioral changes from within empowered audiences (Karsh & Eyal, 2015).

Specifically, this paper examines a case study called “Bridging the distance—Sharing our COIVD-19 pandemic experiences,” a Facebook campaign as part of a community outreach program led by the National Museum of Australia (NMA). NMA created this Facebook group as a national platform to collect stories, experiences, and reflections from communities to mark COVID-19 and connect people socially and emotionally while staying apart physically. This study addresses two questions: (1) what narratives including the positive ones unfold in this Facebook group through participatory storytelling as a way of sensemaking, self-representation, and creative responses to the pandemic; and (2) how users engage with the narratives in (co-) constructing the shared reality to support virtual community building (or not). This study contributes to, first, shifting the focus from expert/authority-driven health information dissemination to community-based participatory storytelling, thus offering alternatives to official responses to the pandemic. Second, this paper complements the predominant research into negative emotions online (e.g., Rao et al., 2020; Vemprala et al., 2021) by studying positive narratives characterized by reassuring and caring messages that may bring back a sense of control over one’s disrupted life and mobilize citizens to act in the face of adversity.

In what follows, this paper reviews the literature in the intersection of participatory storytelling, social media engagement, and positive emotions in the context of health communication, based on which the case study will be analyzed. The paper then discusses in what ways participatory, especially positive storytelling, facilitates narrative accounts of lived experiences and adaptive collective sensemaking of the pandemic, and to discern the potential shortfalls of community participatory communication. The implications of this case study will also be discussed to inform future practice in health communication amid an evolving crisis with lasting uncertainty.

Literature Review

Participatory Storytelling in Health Communication

Prior research on health communication in general and pandemic communication particularly tended to adopt information-based approaches to analyze the sources and qualities of messaging, outreach strategies, and the impact of mis/disinformation on the general public (e.g., Koch-Weser et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2014; van der Meer & Jin, 2020). During the COVID-19 pandemic, public communication still features information broadcasting or daily updates on statistics, which falls into a “deficit model”—a model of top-down, unidirectional information dissemination from authorities to the public (Lam & Tegelberg, 2019). Many scholars concern about how health misinformation is exacerbated by digital technologies (e.g., algorithm, social bots) to induce public maladaptive behaviors such as panic buying of toilet paper or making unnecessary trips to emergency rooms (e.g., Brennen et al., 2020; Depoux et al., 2020). While accurate information is crucial to health-related outcomes, the lack of empathy and emotional appeals in communication may not motivate or sustain desirable health behaviors. One-sided emphasis on the authority and expert voices could miss an important opportunity to engage individuals and local communities in grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic.

In recent years there has emerged a “narrative turn” to health communication (e.g., Shen & Han, 2017; Shen et al., 2015)—unlocking the hidden persuasive power of storytelling in raising awareness, altering worldviews, and enacting proper behavior toward a health risk. Storytelling can foster or effect changes because human beings are “evolutionarily hardwired . . . to think in story terms” (Haven, 2007, p. 4). When reading stories, humans process information efficiently, with minimal effort, yet high recall. Especially when people identify with story characters and immerse themselves into narratives, they may suspend disbelief, reduce counterarguments, thus being involuntarily persuaded (Shen & Han, 2017). Given this implicit persuasive effect, scholars (e.g., Gray, 2009; Shen et al., 2015) call to use more stories than information to improve health literacy and intervene in health behaviors.

Further, scholars advocate participatory storytelling as a vehicle to engage, unite, and empower people during sudden disease outbreaks. Instead of treating stories as another tool of one-way, asymmetrical communication or promotion, participatory storytelling offers pathways for agentic comprehension and adaptive collective sensemaking from which practical and situated knowledge can be mobilized from people’s shared experiences (Bietti et al., 2019). Through relieving uncertainty and validating experiences, participatory storytelling can normalize unusual and distressing feelings within communities. Also, participatory storytelling can empower the marginalized, and thus more vulnerable, members of society to produce diverse sensemaking and adaptive self-concepts leading to enhanced capacity to prepare for and respond to the pandemic (Tagliacozzo et al., 2021). In this sense, participatory storytelling has the potential of building social connectedness and inclusivity by enabling community members to co-develop a shared meaning system and form bonds when physical contacts and interaction become sources of threat during COVID-19.

In addition, the therapeutic effect of storytelling has increasingly been applied to support recovery in a healthcare context. In Dolman’s (2020) term, this is called “narrative therapy” whereby people gain self-authored forms of empowerment through cathartic narration of pathetic experience to mediate traumatic feelings. Narrative therapy does not change reality but rather modifies people’s relationships to what is problematic, through exploring alternative, new meanings. As Launchbury (2021) explains, participatory storytelling reveals the hidden agency of storytellers in accounting for shared experience and harnesses dissent where it challenges power and authority to offer radical therapeutic potential. Reflecting on COVID-19, it is not hard to find such narrative therapy projects as UK’s “Write where we are now” and Australia’s “Bridging the distance,” which encourage people to make sense of the non-routine, novel situations by sharing stories for mutual reassurance.

On a practical level, research has identified relevant techniques to develop health narratives that engage target audiences in appropriate behaviors. For example, Liu et al. (2020) propose prioritizing hero (agency, self-efficacy arousing) and victim (empathy, solidarity arousing) over blame narratives because the former two narratives (i.e., hero, victim) induce information-seeking and protective action during infectious disease crises. Seeger and Sellnow (2016) theorize three types of heroes: ordinary hero (lay people), the first responder (who responds first to a new challenge), and leader hero (formal leaders), all carrying unique political or cultural significance to help create networks of meaning, value, and social change. While fictional narratives (e.g., comics, animations) aid in explaining complex health information by anthropomorphizing disease with human characteristics, personalized stories (e.g., autobiographies, anecdotes) with first-hand insights often elicit a high level of emotional engagement conducive to risk reduction behavior (Burchardt, 2016; Djerf-Pierre & Lindgren, 2021). Based on this rationale, social media storytelling becomes increasingly prevalent in the health communication context.

Social Media Engagement During COVID-19 Pandemic

Participatory storytelling seems impossible without social media amidst COVID-19. With recommended measures of social distancing and quarantine, the traditional networks and associated resources that people typically resort to for support are confined. People need to cope with an extended period of isolation without access to normal social lives, thus causing a heavy psychological toll on the community. Especially, the lingering nature of the pandemic has largely undermined community confidence and perception of resilience and recovery from such a devastating epidemic (Zhang & Sung, 2021). The pandemic has thus stimulated ever-growing demands on virtual relationships and the ability to communicate online, because of which social media engagement turns out to be indispensable for a pandemic life.

Social media have changed the ways people cope with COVID-19, enabling information flow among publics and from publics to authorities to support self-resilience building, seek mutual assurance, and forge collective action. Lambert (2020) summarized four key functions of social media during emergencies: providing/receiving information, warnings, and updates; seeking general support; expressing emotions, concerns, and needs; all of which can be achieved by telling or reading stories. Social media make peer-to-peer communication during the pandemic more salient than at other times. In this regard, social media engagement is fundamental to create social media social capital or virtual social capital, namely, social relations and resources embedded in social media, as a means of offsetting the inability to maintain traditional social networks (Zhang & Sung, 2021). The interpersonal ties developed online resemble the glue to hold distressed communities together and the lattice upon which communities could be rebuilt.

Previous studies have often measured social media engagement in distributive ways such as counting the number of social media likes, mentions, and sharing of posts (Tagliacozzo et al. 2021). John (2013) proposes that communicative (co-creative) engagement should be valued equally, if not more, important to the distributive (reactive) one. That is, measuring communicative engagement entails recognizing how user-generated-content (e.g., participatory storytelling) co-constructs the reality and facilitates relationships and value exchange within online communities. Such a communicative dimension fits well with this study aim. Further, this study adopts Tefertiller et al.’s (2020) definition of social media engagement as individuals’ coping behaviors on social media to share information, resources, or experiences for the benefit of others during the pandemic. The act of sharing or offering emotional support is one of the most caring behaviors because it potentially brings back a sense of normalcy to one’s disrupted life while producing positive ambience within virtual communities (Hou & Macnamara, 2017; Zhang & Sung, 2021).

In addition, scholars have found helping behaviors manifested on social media to build community solidarity during difficult times (Tandoc & Takahashi, 2016; Zhang & Sung, 2021). For example, helping behaviors on social media range from sharing experience, offering advice, making recommendations, donating resources, and providing moral support. Those behaviors of helping or self-helping in times of a pandemic can not only relieve the coping individual’s distress, but also empower community members to develop a healthy and positive outlook. Especially when sharing personal narratives, people can (re)create themselves while reviewing and reflecting upon their lives, beliefs, and actions, in dialogue with others. The participatory storytelling aids people developing shared meanings to organize the past, explain the present, and imagine possibilities about the future (Gray, 2009).

Positive Emotions and Community Building Online

Making sense of COVID-19 inevitably involves emotional storytelling, conveying fear about being caught in the middle of a storm, skepticism about the cause of the virus, sadness of losing a loved one, and frustration about government response strategies. Thousands of people took to social media to express their feelings about the unprecedented challenges. Since emotion has been found to predict health behavior (Feldman, 2021), it is important to understand the collective emotions during various intervals of a disease outbreak so that management authorities can formulate effective coping strategies. Policymakers can also engage the public in cognitive-behavioral thinking for decision making during the time of uncertainties (Vemprala et al., 2021).

The healthcare literature has drawn dominant attention to negative emotions online (e.g., anger, grief, shame), making those despondent narratives more visible than cheerful ones (Rao et al., 2020; Vemprala et al., 2021). Social media function like a typical vehicle of swiftly spreading negative emotions across geographical boundaries and riling up like-minded users. For example, Vemprala et al. (2021) examined an outpouring of fear and sadness on Twitter in the wake of COVID-19. Lambert (2020) identified anger as an overwhelming emotion online related to individual behavior. The emotional outpourings often create a toxic chain of negative emotions that travels like wildfire online and trigger strong reaction. de Saint Laurent et al. (2021) therefore emphasize keeping track of the progression of negative emotions by creating an effective map of the emotional patterns among online communities.

However, the other side of stories under COVID-19—positive emotions and experience—also warrants a close examination to understand how it creates reassurance, reduces the focus on negative emotions, and guides citizens to take right action during the pandemic. As Lejano et al. (2020) find, narratives that highlight positive emotional cues over negative appeals can induce greater behavioral change. Compared to negative, issue-focused narratives that are useful for raising awareness but insufficient for empowering action, positive action-based narratives that put action at the center of storytelling, can mobilize people to take agency in enacting behavioral change (De Meyer et al., 2020). Framing personal stories in a positive light can also generate a therapeutic effect, making bearable the stories of hardship that might otherwise have been too painful to share. As such, it is crucial to tap into positive emotions to engage individuals in health behavior and uplift community spirit for COVID-19.

Different positive emotions often generate differential impacts on at-risk or disease-affected people. As Ernest-Samuel (2021) argues, humor functions like a “safety valve in a steam pipe, (which) releases built up nervous energy” (p. 162). Vicari and Murru (2020) explain that “when life becomes hard, humor is a tactic of displacement that lightens bad feelings and frames them from a detached perspective.” From a critical perspective, humor can also serve as a resistance to elite power and create space for solidarity. Besides, Feldman (2021) emphasizes a dual message of fear and hope, but most COVID-19 campaigns have preferred the former to the latter, thus missing a great opportunity to foster positive behavior. According to Feldman, hope goes beyond optimism, a generalized expectancy that a better future will occur irrespective of actions. Hope explicitly involves personal motivation and planning of pathways to achieve goals. In short, hope entails taking a proactive stance to prepare for the unexpectedness. When positive emotions (e.g., humor, hope, optimism) are circulated via participatory storytelling, people involved are likely to develop positive outlooks about safety, sustainability, and community resilience (Rao et al., 2020).

Methods

Informed by the preceding literature this paper employs a case study approach to address two research questions: (1) what narratives including the positive ones unfold on social media through participatory storytelling as a way of sensemaking, self-representation, and creative responses to COVID-19; and (2) how users engage with the narratives in co-constructing the reality to support virtual community building (or not). This study examines the case of “Bridging the distance—Sharing our COIVD-19 pandemic experiences,” a Facebook-based community building initiative led by the NMA. This Facebook group offers an open platform for Australians to record shared experiences and develop collective memories about COVID-19. As a public group, it has attracted 2.6k members who can share stories, objects, images, and videos to mark this time in a joint effort, and to discover their competence by shifting from viewing themselves as recipients of life circumstances to active agents in their own lives.

Data collection involved qualitative content analysis of the group members’ posts (i.e., user-generated narratives) between April 6, 2020, when NMA launched this project under the national lockdown, and October 5, 2020, by which time the official health restrictions had lifted to allow social life to a certain extent. By using the group page’s “date posted” filter, two screening conditions were applied to manually extract the content: (1) Posts must embed story elements (e.g., characters, storylines, plots, causalities), excluding information, statements, notices, adverts, and the like. (2) Posts must be original, not sharing or reposting from other sources. This generated 245 story entries (each including the post and associated comments) to an excel spreadsheet.

Data analysis involved two stages: First, qualitative content and thematic analysis of participatory storytelling by analyzing the story contexts, storytellers and characters/roles, story angles/themes, emotions/tones, and creativity; second, the interaction or engagement patterns among storytellers and other group members were analyzed in both distributive (e.g., reaction to narratives—likes, shares, comments) and communicative aspects (e.g., co-constructing meaning or values). A research assistant (RA) performed the initial data analysis, followed by the author of this article to cross-check the codes, and address any outstanding issues in consultation with the RA. The objective was not to check one reading against others (as in inter-coder reliability), but rather reflect on plausible interpretations (Barthes, 1993) by immersive reading and considering how individual storytelling relates to the ongoing dialogue within the virtual community and the wider societal narratives.

Results

Multifaceted Narrative Building and Positive Storytelling to Make Sense of COVID-19

In response to RQ1, the analysis of 245 story entries revealed a rich and dynamic landscape of how individuals participated in the Facebook group storytelling as a way of sensemaking, self-representation, and creative responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. As shown in Figure 1, the overall trend of participatory storytelling between April and October 2020 started with a fast-rising level of enthusiasm to share/post personal experience. It then reached a peak in June, 2 months after the launch of the community building campaign, followed by a notable decline of sharing, somewhat indicative of the “pandemic fatigue” (people’s lowered sensitivity of the protracted epidemic) during August, and then a slight increase of sharing again about the “new normal” pandemic life in October.

Figure 1.

The trend of participatory storytelling during a six-month period in the Facebook group.

Specifically, a range of storytellers shared their multi-contextualized pandemic experiences from diverse perspectives that involved colorful story characters/personalities and conveyed mostly positive emotions to creatively navigate the national lockdown (see Table 1).

Table 1.

A Summary of Multifaceted Narrative Storytelling About COVID-19 in the Facebook Group.

Narrative elements	Explanations	Examples
Life experiences as story contexts • Public venues • Home/self-quarantine • Personal/ceremonial occasions	In which situations or contexts narrators were trying to tell a story, or share situated experience	Public transportation, shopping centers, parklands, sports fields, personal weddings, funerals, working from home, self-quarantine
Storytellers • Lay people (one-off narrator) • Professional/active narrators	Who are posting/sharing personal lived experiences during the pandemic	Someone who posted/shared a personal story randomly; active posters like photographers, bloggers, citizen journalists
Story characters/personalities • Ordinary/everyday heroes • First responder • Anthropomorphized characters	About whom the narratives are speaking and/or who are portrayed in the narratives	Bus/train drivers, essential health workers, Indigenous couples, kids and teenagers, dolls family in isolation
Story themes/angles • Authentic record of strange/unusual experience • Reconstruct meanings of the living history/reality • Affirmation and adherence to official restriction rules • Self-resilience building	How narrators make sense of, represent, or reconstruct their pandemic lives, and creatively respond to the unexpected challenges associated with COVID-19	Describing the new reality of empty cities and ubiquitous warning signs of 1.5 m social distancing, looking for the positive side of distressing isolation, affirming government rules by sharing personal coping experience and self-resilience
Emotional appeals • Mixed feelings yet looking for the positive • Uplifting community spirit	What emotional cues or appeals are conveyed from diversified storytelling	In a dual mood of sadness and hope, or feeling optimistic, grateful, playful, humorous, forward thinking
Creative communications • Photo + text • Audio-visual + text • Text • Memes, comics, emojis	How narratives are constructed and circulated in creative forms and genres	Sharing personal daily reflection via diaries, posting a video with illustrative texts, creating story memes to spark conversations

The narrative elements and associated categories (namely, the bullet points) summarized in Table 1 accounted for the majority of the 245 story entries included in this study. The Facebook group members tended to ground their pandemic experiences in personal life contexts which, thus, provided a more credible portrait of individual needs and feelings than a top-down, homogenous assumption of people’s lives under COVID-19. For example, the frequently covered life contexts included but not limited to public venues (e.g., public transportation, shopping malls, parklands), private space (e.g., individual homes), and personal occasions (e.g., weddings, funerals). Within these contexts, narrators built compelling stories and grounded knowledge about lived experiences of the pandemic. The storytellers/narrators fall into two major categories: One is lay people who felt they needed to share personal accounts of the lived experiences, while the other is professional and active storytellers such as photographers, artists, freelancers, and citizen journalists who attempted to create public knowledge about not only the localized experiences but also the world dynamics (e.g., stern realities of COVID-19 spread around the globe).

The story characters and personalities represented in the community-based narratives are colorful and familiar to most people, ranging from ordinary/everyday heroes (who take small acts in everyday life to enact restriction rules), first responders (who take initiatives to respond to a new challenge), and anthropomorphized characters (fictional characters with human traits) (de Saint Laurent et al., 2021; Seeger & Sellnow, 2016). For example, stories about ordinary heroes described how essential workers (e.g., bus/train drivers, health workers) maintained critical business and services, or how a narrator’s family members (e.g., grandfather, kid, mom at an aged care center) did their own part in combatting COVID-19. Stories about first responders depicted how a young couple live broadcast their wedding via Zoom to families overseas by reconciling different time zones. Another interesting story about anthropomorphized characters is called “Dolls family in isolation,” which imagined the dolls’ family activities (e.g., Easter camping at home; ANZAC Day; Grandpa home schooling old style; Mom working in the bathroom) like human beings living through the lockdown (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Dolls family in isolation.

Source. The Facebook group, June 14, 2020. Image adapted from Kate Doyle.

Four typical story themes emerged from the participatory storytelling, which represented people’s collective sensemaking of and creative responses to the pandemic challenges: (1) Authentic record of strange and unusual experiences. This theme focuses on describing of the impact of COVID-19 on people’s everyday lives such as empty streets, closed stores, ubiquitous signs of 1.5 m social distancing, and hygiene requirement, albeit seeming bizarre yet gradually adopted as a new reality. (2) Reconstructing meanings of the living history/reality. This theme refers to people’s positive thinking or new appreciation of the mundane isolation and disrupted life. For example, a storyteller reinterpreted the scene of a railway station in COVID-19 days: “One tiny sliver in all this darkness is I get to photograph some buildings on my daily walk that would usually have a heap of cars blocking the view.” Likewise, another narrator called to “see the space between us as a gift of life.” (3) Affirmation and adherence to official restriction rules. Under this theme, narrators reinforced government key messages (e.g., by posting a picture of a highway billboard “Where are u going? Is it essential?”) or shared their practices in following restrictions in personal ceremonies (e.g., weddings, funerals, anniversaries). (4) Self-resilience building. This theme represents people’s creative and resilient efforts in dealing with COVID-19 by acts such as writing songs to translate the 1.5m social distancing rule, making hand-washing dance videos, and sharing a fun game to play online. One narrator shared her story about staying hopeful even though her sick mother died while she, the daughter, was traveling back to Brazil.

The emotional appeals embedded in these first-hand narratives are mostly positive, conveying feelings like hope, optimism, faith, humor, bliss, bravery, gratefulness, and forward thinking, although some stories delivered mixed feelings or dual emotions such as fear and confidence, nostalgia and appreciation, and anxiety and calmness. Through such positive storytelling the group members have projecte the protracted pandemic in a new light, from which they can take pleasure in finding alternate interpretations. The creativity that surfaced from the participatory storytelling is praisable, as demonstrated in the group members’ skillful use of photos, texts, artworks, audio-visuals, comics, memes, and emojis to perceive the pandemic from novel perspectives. For example, a professional artist named Elizabeth Russell-Arnot made toilet paper earrings as a humorous response to the panic buying of toilet paper that ensued after Australia’s announcement of national lockdown (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Earrings made of toilet paper.

Source. The Facebook group, April 7, 2020. Image created by Elizabeth Russell-Arnot.

Performing Togetherness as Collective Community Building Efforts around COVID-19

In response to RQ2, the analysis of both distributive and communicative engagement among the Facebook group members showed that they tended to perform togetherness toward building a supportive and caring virtual community. Performing togetherness refers to navigating the pandemic-related precarity through demonstrating a sense of unity and camaraderie (Ndlovu, 2021) while allowing for co-existence of different or even critical voices within the community. In the spirit of “sharing is caring,” the group members were found to share not only tangible stories/posts of their interests and concerns, but also intangible thoughts, experience, and emotions associated with the narratives as an act of mutual caring and reassurance. Specifically, data on both distributive (e.g., likes, shares, comments) and communicative (e.g., co-constructing meanings, values) engagement suggested that the group’s performing togetherness was mainly embodied in the following three ways.

Validating Communal Experience

This relates to the group members’ mutual reassuring efforts to create an affirmative environment where individuals can feel safe to share authentic experience and feelings which, in turn, are validated or appreciated by others. By nature, such a validating process is built on empathy that motivates people to provide emotional support (e.g., sending condolence, compliments, and reassurance) or offer helping behaviors (e.g., sharing information, resources, and solutions). Comments to show empathy and resonation with the storyteller’s experience include “You are not alone,” “I’m with you,” “We must love one another,” “We were made for each other. Be safe,” “Thanks for posting. It tells my heart and must be shared,” and so forth.

One of the most engaging stories (145 likes/love, 34 comments, 5 shares) was about a young couple who live streamed a small wedding ceremony to families overseas by reconciling seven time zones. The storyteller shared many plots around how to adhere to the restrictions (e.g., arranging witness and guests, taking photographs, delivering flowers), with a positive conclusion: “We feel bizarre not having a crowd celebration but it’s absolutely a memorable experience” (Source: The Facebook group, May 12, 2020). This story generated warm responses and endorsement from other group members (see excerpts below):

A: Congrats to you both, beautiful people!

B: Well done! You guys set an exemplar for others to host a special wedding ceremony.

C: My daughter did the similar thing! Don’t allow COVID-19 to stop love from winning!

D: An extraordinary culmination to the amazing milestone—it’ll be a story that'll be part of your family’s history indefinitely—special in its own way! Best wishes moving forward to you both.

. . . .

The storyteller liked back all comments and addressed specific questions for those who may want to follow suit. This story also inspired peers to share similar wedding experiences during COVID-19. One narrator posted her story about changing the wedding venue to their backyard, a small act that received multiple compliments and warm wishes. Another narrator, a loving mother, posted her daughter’s wedding story titled “Love in times of corona: Marry now, party later.” This mother seems a skillful narrator, smartly using a story cliff hanger:

When Caitlin (25) and Nathan (25) first kissed in the cubby at pre-school in Hughes, little did they know that more than twenty years later they’d be marrying each other for real in front of a computer screen audience of their family members using Zoom!

Unsurprisingly, this story solicited social approval and commendation from many others (126 likes, 26 comments).

In another seemingly sad story, the narrator shared how a small town grieved for a late yet loved community member during COVID-19. The story recounted the personal contributions that the late community member had made to the town which, voluntarily, avoided mass gathering but commemorated this member by placing purple (the late community member’s favorite color) decorations in front of houses. Using a range of emotional appeals (e.g., grief, love, unity), the storyteller called to follow the restriction policies yet develop solidarity during such a difficult time. This touching story was well received by the Facebook group members (112 likes/love, 19 sad, 21 comments), who relayed sending condolence on the community’s loss and appreciated their loving tribute. As one member commented: “What a wonderful idea to send thoughts to Denise [the late community member] with these displays of her favourite colour.” Other group members were aroused to share similar experiences of losing loved ones during COVID-19 yet still strove for hope and positiveness.

Mediating Potential Dissent

The narratives spread within the Facebook group are not without criticism, skepticism, and dissent. Alongside the mainstream positive storytelling, there are some pessimistic and critical voices to contemplate the social problems exacerbated by COVID-19 such as the homeless people on street, the shortage of health resources, the growing unemployment rate, and the mental health risk arising from home isolation. It is interesting to notice that when the narratives involve worrisome issues or imply negative emotions (e.g., anxiety, frustration, blame), the group members’ responses are not as active as to those uplifting storytelling. Some “opinion leaders” may jump into those despondent narratives as an intermediary to reconcile potential dissent and maintain the positive vibe within the virtual community. In this sense, the community group appeared to spontaneously focus more on spirit lifting and solidarity building than confronting pressing social issues.

One typical example is when a narrator posted to criticize the political leadership during COVID-19 in Australia, compared to New Zealand, reactions to this post tended to shift the focus from blame to support of each other. The narrator wrote:

Australia: an island. New Zealand: an island. Difference in this pandemic: New Zealand has a leader who has almost eradicated the virus (less than 5 cases per day since April). Australia has Scomo [Scott Morrison, the then Prime Minister]—marketing manager for himself and his rich capitalism mates. It could have been the same—zero cases of COVID-19 if Scomo had acted like a leader. Unofficially unemployment at 13 % (officially 7%)—when was this last the case Australia? (Source: The Facebook group, September 24, 2020)

In response, while 5 of the 19 comments seconded the narrator’s opinion, the majority tried to advise people to stay positive from a global comparative perspective (see excerpts below), which signified a clear sense of mediating dissent yet performing togetherness:

A: Compared to most parts of the world, Australia is doing well!

B: I think most people did the hard times back in March/April and unfortunately there might be harder to come. Be gracious and extend support to fellow Australians.

C: Alas we all saw what happened to Boris who could not even give up the handshake. Ours [Scott] is not the worst. Stay together, recover stronger.

D: US people think Australia has a leader who is at least trying to solve problems. Look at Donald Trump and his blame game (a meme attached to this comment) (see Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Meme—Trump’s blame game.

Source. The Facebook group, July 24, 2020. Image created by Heng.

Showcasing Playful Resilience

The third way of performing togetherness was found in the group members’ sharing of playful resilience in response to the prescriptive home quarantine, which turned out to be an opportunity for community building through co-celebrating the hardiness of lay people. Playful resilience, in Heljakka’s (2021) definition, refers to people creatively mitigating the negative impacts of forced self-isolation, and in difficult times, finding a resolution through play to enhance resilience and well-being. As exemplified within the group storytelling, people shared different stories about their creative and playful navigation of the adversity, ranging from toy-playing (e.g., Teddy bear hunt around neighborhood to show collectivity), orchestra over the fence (e.g., musicians playing an orchestra with a fence between them), and a relay on showing drawings, paintings, and handcrafts to memorize COVID-19. There was even a hashtag initiative called “#artsborninCOVID” prevailing in this group. All these efforts demonstrated a high level of agency, self-efficacy, and mutual empowerment within the COVID-19 confinement.

Further, the positive energy embedded in the narratives about playful resilience seemed to pass on and, to a certain extent, boosted the social morale within the virtual community. For example, a loving mother posted a story about a creative way to celebrate her son’s fifth birthday without breaking social distancing rules. The story wrote:

We organised a birthday parade for our son on Easter Monday. Our family, friends and neighbours all came out and waved to him for his “party.” It turned into a lovely opportunity for people to check in from a safe distance. (Source:. The Facebook group, April 17, 2020)

Under this text is a YouTube video titled “Angus’ Isolation Party,” which recorded the family members and neighbors driving past the house, sending good wishes, and dropping the gifts on the grass. The little boy looked very happy to have such a special party. Apparently, this cheerful storytelling has triggered warm responses from the Facebook group, with 178 views of the video, 98 likes, and 21 comments to send birthday wishes to this boy. The ripple effect of such playful resilience is that other group members “competed” to share stories about different yet equally creative birthday celebrations.

Another story that exemplifies performing togetherness through playful resilience is called “Keep calm and play harp.” It was about a shared online music performance by 25 harpists across the world (e.g., Australia, New Zealand, UK, Netherland) who paid tribute to essential workers. The narrator, a harp teacher, along with her students and fellows in the video, tried to keep themselves and those in the community entertained and distracted from the pandemic. Their story described:

There must be an awful lot of people out there who are losing sleep over the COVID-19 issue. A lot of people who are in the essential workforce are worried about their families at home and their families are worried about them, so we really wanted to send out a message of peace and gratitude for the amazing work that they are doing keeping us safe and sound at home. We really, truly appreciate that. (Source: The Facebook group, July 5, 2020)

This uplifting storytelling has attracted 1514 views of the video and 278 likes/love/care.

Discussion and Conclusion

This study has examined a Facebook-based community-building initiative which encouraged Australians to share personal account of lived experiences and develop collective memories of COVID-19. Results show that both lay people and professional storytellers have actively expressed and represented themselves, rather than being written about by others. This testifies a strong need of local communities to construct grounded knowledge, articulate authentic feelings, and create space for mutual caring through participatory storytelling. Apart from depicting vivid story characters ranging from ordinary/everyday heroes, first responders, and anthropomorphized characters (fictional characters with human traits) (Djerf-Pierre & Lindgren, 2021; Seeger & Sellnow, 2016), the community-based narratives mobilized emotional appeals, especially the positive emotions (e.g., hope, optimism, humor) to create not only a reassuring environment for people to appreciate the pandemic in a new light, but also inspire them to take protective action such as adhering to restrictions and developing self-resilience against mandatory home isolation.

On an interactive level, the results indicate that the group members tend to reserve potential disagreement but maintain a harmonious community by co-constructing a sense of unity and camaraderie to navigate the pandemic-related precarity, in what I call, performing togetherness. Specifically, this virtual community appeared to perform togetherness by three means: (1) Validating communal experience by empathizing with and appreciating others’ experience or sharing own stories of tackling similar challenges. In this respect, the therapeutic potential of storytelling is for another just as much as it is for oneself (Dolman, 2020). Through storytelling, the group members gain insights into how others have overcome various hardships and incorporate the wisdom into their own lives; (2) Mediating potential dissent by looking for the positive and prioritizing solidarity-building over intense debate. As exemplified in this study, some group members (opinion leaders) have smartly used humor or irony as a vehicle of releasing negative energy and tactfully challenging political power (Ernest-Samuel, 2021) without damaging the community’s positive ambiance; and (3) Showcasing playful resilience by building cheerful counternarratives to mitigate the adverse impacts of COVID-19 and facilitate self-/community resilience. As found in the group members’ sharing of creative ways to counteract loneliness and isolation, their uplifting storytelling demonstrated a spirit of “playing for the common good” (Heljakka, 2021).

Nevertheless, the community-based, participatory storytelling still falls short in several aspects. The results revealed a lack of voices from disadvantaged people who may have less capacity to participate in social media storytelling, thus, affecting their self-expression and self-advocacy. This finding corroborates Spiegel et al.’s (2020) assertion: narratives “depicting experiences and aspirations of indigenous communities . . . have been almost completely absent” (p. 14), and people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds may feel unable to engage with the mainstream conversations in Facebook groups. The narrators who interpreted “pandemic as opportunity” seem to be middle-class, educated, and technology-savvy, while the marginalized groups did not report such experiences. Further, since this Facebook group lacks expert guidance, the members’ participatory storytelling mainly stayed in a level of providing moral or emotional support, rather than addressing practical problems (e.g., long waiting of polymerase chain reaction test). Thus, it becomes essential to adopt Coombs and Holladay’s (2018) hybrid model of planned (organization-led) and emergent (community/users-generated) storytelling, or to integrate expert knowledge with different local experiences to foster desired health behaviors (Holmes & McEwen, 2020). With the host organization’s (i.e., NMA) strategic planning, the current drawback of unsustained participatory storytelling (e.g., large reduction of posts after 2021) could have been improved to build long-term, relational trust with local communities.

Overall, this study has made two theoretical contributions. First, it detours away from the dominant information approach to health communication but applies a narrative perspective to understand local communities’ shared experiences and creative responses to the protracted COVID-19 pandemic through participatory storytelling on social media. Compared to complex information processing, personalized storytelling can better engage individuals in producing agentic comprehension and diverse sensemaking of a new challenge, thus gaining a sense of self-efficacy while caring for community building (Tagliacozzo et al., 2021). In this sense, this study has valuably bridged the theories of health communication, participatory storytelling, and social media engagement. Second, this study explores the under-examined positive emotions online (e.g., spirit-lifting, playful resilience) as an important complement to the predominant research into negative emotions (Vemprala et al., 2021). While negative emotions can alert management authorities to take action to curb a potential crisis, positive emotions can create reassurance for the affected publics to foster collaborative resilience. Thus, it is revealing for future health communication studies to engage more with the empowering effect of positive emotions.

This study has also provided practical implications for government agencies, cultural institutions, community groups, civic and grassroots organizations to use a participatory storytelling approach to handle an ongoing public health crisis like COVID-19. Since a pandemic affects socio-cultural groups disproportionately, it is vital not to sacrifice “canaries in the coal mine” (Di Chiro, 2018, p. 527)—not to ignore or downplay the interest of the minorities. Rather, an inclusive approach is needed to enable free sharing of stories that privilege vulnerable groups who may also possess localized knowledge and practices of resilience building. Understanding their minds and hearts can make a difference between coming out of this crisis stronger, together, or letting it deteriorate further by division and polarization. To achieve this inclusivity, both health authorities and civic leaders need to collaborate on building a story sharing pipeline across differential power structures to integrate ground knowledge meaningfully within health communication programs and policy development. Only by doing so can a robust virtual community (e.g., a digital square town) be cultivated on social media. Future studies can either quantitatively measure the varied correlations between different constructs (e.g., storytelling genres, emotional appeals, health engagement behaviors), or continue to explore more tailored storytelling approaches to effectively include the disadvantaged and/or CALD communities in pandemic response efforts.

Author Biography

Jenny Zhengye Hou (PhD, University of Queensland) is Senior Lecturer and Chief Investigator of Strategic Communication at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her research interests revolve around strategic communication in the digital age, transmedia storytelling in disaster risk communication, and social media intervention in behaviour change. In addition to her journal publications, she also co-edited the anthology The Global Foundations of Public Relations: Humanism, China and the West (Routledge).