Narratives of life experience in the digital space: a case study of the images in Richard Deitsch’s single best moment project^†

On 8 July 2013, Sports Illustrated media critic Richard Deitsch–inspired by a photo that captured a friend celebrating with a brother who had won the NCAA Hockey Championships–asked his 90,000-plus Twitter followers if they had the best moment of their life captured in a photograph. Deitsch retweeted the initial pictures, which prompted many more people to send out photos of their favorite moments. Many of his followers shared photos of some of their most intimate moments, leading CNN to call Deitsch ‘the sportswriter who made Twitter cry’ [Mendoza, D. (2013, July 11). The sportswriter who made Twitter cry. CNN. Retrieved December 11, 2013, from http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/11/tech/storify-best-moments/.s]. Through a thematic examination of 314 photos shared in the Deitsch exchange, the authors reveal that an overwhelming number of images are identified as milestone moments, or narratives of life experience, which denotes that as communication platforms evolve and technologies offer different modes of expression, users are still selecting narrative structure to disseminate their messages.