Video-Interaction on YouTube: contemporary changes in semiosis and communication

This thesis investigates the interaction by means of videos on YouTube Website. Video-interaction is a new form of communication which has been taking place on YouTube since May 2006 thanks to the introduction of the ‘video response’ option. The functionality enables (You)Tubers to reply to any given video by means of another video; hence whole communication threads are built composed of videos interacting one with another. Given that so far no study has investigated this new type of communication, the general aim of the research is to provide a thorough description of video-interaction, in terms of both its process and products. Specifically, the analysis of the process of video-interaction focuses on (a) its distinctive features and structural characteristics, (b) its semiotic ‘affordances’ (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001: 67), in terms of the material and social constraints and possibilities which the medium imposes over the semiosis, and (c) the diversified (and often conflicting) semiotic practices with which the affordances are actualized by the interactants. The analysis of the texts of video-interaction focuses on video-threads which start from some of the most responded videos on the Website and investigates the multimodal patterns of regularities and variations of sign-making in the chain of semiosis, that is to say, how videos establish relatedness in the thread while differentiating themselves. The theoretical chapter reviews some of the most influential theories of communication, namely the coding-decoding and inferential models of communication (Grice, 1957, 1975; Shannon and Weaver, 1949; Sperber and Wilson, 1986), together with the notions of coherence and cohesion traditionally used in text analysis (Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981; Fairclough, 1992; Halliday and Hasan, 1976; van Dijk, 1985). Furthermore, it confronts these models and notions with the practices of video-interaction; finally, it discusses the inadequacies of these theories for the description of video-interaction, crucially because, in video-interaction, the interlocutors’ mutual understanding of their intended meaning is not essential for communication to succeed. On these grounds the framework adopted for the analysis is introduced, i.e., social semiotics multimodal analysis (Hodge and Kress, 1988; Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2006; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). Within this framework and on the basis of the social-semiotic category of ‘interest’ (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2006: 13), the heuristic notion of an ‘interest-driven prompt-response relation’ is devised as an analytic tool used for the description of both the process and the texts of video-interaction. The methodological chapter discusses the issues of representativeness, significance, reproducibility and verifiability implied in collecting a corpus of online data. It illustrates the criterion of popularity which has driven the selection of the data in order to overcome the aforesaid hardly solvable issues. A review of the current practices of transcription highlights their inaptness for the purposes of the present research and motivates the ad hoc transcription devised for the threads. Then the chapter illustrates the analytical methodology, which, in a cyclic process, has involved all stages of the research, from the selection of the data and their transcription, to the pilot study and up to the consequent refinement of the theoretical framework and of its analytic tools. The analysis follows a funnel process; indeed, from the regularities and variations detected at more general levels, it zooms in to more fine-grained levels of analysis. The analysis combines quantitative and qualitative methods with a textual interpretation focused on signifiers (on the semiotic resources present in the texts, rather than on their signifieds). Finally, the chapter discusses the ethical stance which has grounded the choice of conducting a covert observation on the Website, with no prior consent asked to the participants. This choice is motivated by the manifest publicity of the Website (and by the criterion of popularity driving the data selection) and by the intention of avoiding any patronizing attitude towards the authors of the videos, considered here as film-makers. This standpoint adds to the debate currently ongoing on online research ethics.