Millennials Talking Media: Creating Intertextual Identities in Everyday Conversation

This introductory chapter, “Intertextual Media References in Millennial Friend Discourse,” begins with a brief “field work narrative,” which includes an explanation of how the author began to record conversations among Millennials in their late twenties for this study, the crystallization of the topic, and the events that occurred before and afterwards that would make their way into the recorded conversations, in which Millennial friends use media references to navigate awkward or difficult moments in talk. Included in this chapter is the purpose of the book, followed by a brief review of the key concepts: Knowledge (intertextuality and epistemics), framing, and identity construction. The chapter concludes with an explanation of the interactional sociolinguistic methodology and conversational data and a preview of each following chapter.