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The Organised Self and Lifestyle Minimalism: Multimodal Deixis and Point of View in Decluttering Vlogs on YouTube
Abstract
This paper explores how people present their relationship to their domestic objects in decluttering vlogs on YouTube, where they show the process of getting rid of undesired items. These videos are associated with discourses of ‘minimalism’ that are currently prevalent on social media platforms. The paper adopts a multimodal social semiotic approach, focusing on how language, gesture, and the visual frame coordinate intermodally to make meanings about objects. The multimodal construction of deixis in coordination with a type of ‘point-of-view shot’, filmed from the visual perspective of the vlogger, is examined. The broader aim is to investigate what these videos reveal about how digital semiotic capitalism is inflecting the lived experience of social media users. What is at stake is how people articulate intersubjective meanings about their experiences and relationships through the way they communicate about their objects.
... Besides, Youtube researchers who used corpus linguistics as their instrument of study mainly analyzed a large number of words or huge English corpora (Schmidt & Marx, 2019;Shiryaeva et al., 2019;Zaikovskii, 2019) instead of focusing on a specific word (or also known as Key Word In Context (KWIC) in corpus linguistics) and its co-occurrences. These studies of English language in Youtube focused either on Multimodal of Discourse Analysis (Darvin, 2019;Schmidt & Marx, 2019;Zappavigna, 2019), communicative strategy (Shiryaeva et al., 2019), code-switching (Darvin, 2019), or non-verbal (Feng et al., 2020). ...
... Schmidt and Marx (2019) aimed to describe the intricate Youtube communication by outlining the framework of participation and explaining systematically vital elements that are part of a YouTube corpus using the discovered conceptual outline. Meanwhile, Zappavigna (2019) aimed to investigate the connection between people and their domestic objects in decluttering undesired items vlogs on YouTube. Despite both examining using Multimodality, Schmidt and Marx (2019) looked into Youtube's 'Let's Play' videos, and Zappavigna (2019) investigated beauty videos. ...
... Despite both examining using Multimodality, Schmidt and Marx (2019) looked into Youtube's 'Let's Play' videos, and Zappavigna (2019) investigated beauty videos. Zappavigna (2019) concluded that people expressed relief and find decluttering in vlogs on Youtube to be personally transforming as these objects that were decluttered are important to these vloggers' feelings of selfworth and happiness. Meanwhile, Schmidt and Marx (2019) discovered that Youtube is multimodal and data collected in Youtube need to be in either a single component (like video) or/and how it is connected to surrounding elements (like the video embedded in a webpage). ...
Youtube is one of the most famous video-sharing and social networking platforms in the world. Due to its comment section function, Youtube also plays a role in describing the perception and reaction of the general public. This study aims to examine the discourse prosody found in the adjective suki and its co-occurrences. This is a mixed-method research where corpus linguistics is used for quantitative data analysis and, discourse prosody for the qualitative method. The Youtube comments chosen are five videos from Japan’s number one Youtuber, Hajimeshachoo in January 2020. Only the first 24 hours comments were picked. The findings show that the adjective suki is the most significant na-adjective used in the Youtube comments gathered. Na-adjective mainly co-occurred with an adverb that modified the adjective suki mostly to elevate the sense of likeness, adoration, or fondness of the content and/or creator of the video. The adjective suki can have both positive and negative discourse prosody depending on its co-occurrence.
... Non-verbal expressions thus provide a convenient avenue to adhere to social norms while mitigating potential algorithmic repercussions. Second, the distinctive 'visual frame' (Zappavigna, 2019) characteristic of reaction videos, which presents a close-up view of the creator's facial expressions and their upper body, juxtaposed with the reviewed footage, not only renders this genre conducive to analyzing diverse modalities but necessitates their explorationas creators semioticize communicative strategies to convey meaning. Third, within the fiercely competitive landscape of social media, the strategic utilization of one's creative abilities becomes imperative in order to establish a distinct status (Andersson, 2023). ...
... Following Zappavigna's (2019) approach, features were explored until saturation, where no new data contributed to the analysis. Coding involved the examination of both non-verbal and digital audio-visual means of expression, encompassing well-documented features such as gestures, alongside less familiar elements like sound embeddings. ...
This study examines the genre of YouTube reaction videos as a distinct form of cultural production and social influence in online communication. Despite its prevalence and popularity, the genre has received limited scholarly attention, particularly with regard to reactions to ideological activism. This paper aims to fill this gap by conducting a social semiotic discourse analysis of videos reviewing the activism of transgender community on TikTok. The analysis demonstrates how intersecting non-verbal and technologically enabled modes, such as gaze, gestures, facial expressions, and various audio-visual effects, contribute to the expression of impoliteness arising from a sense of superiority over the target, shared with non-targeted viewers. Overall, the paper provides insights into the dynamics of online culture wars and the multimodal manifestations of impoliteness in contemporary social media discourse.
... We coded the videos and transcripts for paralinguistic and multimodal features of the videos, such as gestures, intertitles, text and image overlay, camera angles, and visual effects such as close-ups, time lapse, and slow motion. We considered linguistic and paralinguistic resources as well as the technologically mediated visual frame [21]. We captured these features in memos. ...
... The point-of-view (POV) shot is a shot in which the camera assumes the position of a subject to show us what that subject sees [28]. The POV shot also means that the TI's and the audience's gaze is conflated [21]. Within a shot, various other techniques are used to indicate salience: zoom, slow motion/time lapse, and repetition of salient sections of footage ( Figure 2). ...
Background
Gangstalking refers to a novel persecutory belief system wherein sufferers believe that they are being followed, watched, and harassed by a vast network of people in their community who have been recruited as complicit perpetrators. They are frequently diagnosed as mentally ill, although they reject this formulation. Those affected by this belief system self-identify as targeted individuals (TIs). They seek to prove the veracity of their persecution and dispute the notion that they are mentally ill by posting videos online that purport to provide evidence of their claims.
Objective
The objective of the study was to characterize the multimodal social semiotic practices used in gangstalking evidence videos.
Methods
We assembled a group of 50 evidence videos posted on YouTube by self-identified TIs and performed a multimodal social semiotic discourse analysis using a grounded theory approach to data analysis.
Results
TIs accomplished several social and interpersonal tasks in the videos. They constructed their own identity as subjects of persecution and refuted the notion that they suffered from mental illness. They also cultivated positive ambient affiliation with viewers of the videos but manifested hostility toward people who appeared in the videos. They made extensive use of multimodal deixis to generate salience and construe the gangstalking belief system. The act of filming itself was a source of conflict and served as a self-fulfilling prophecy; filming was undertaken to neutrally record hostility directed toward video bloggers (vloggers). However, the act of filming precipitated the very behaviors that they set out to document. Finally, the act of filming was also regarded as an act of resistance and empowerment by vloggers.
Conclusions
These data provide insight into a novel persecutory belief system. Interpersonal concerns are important for people affected, and they construe others as either sympathetic or hostile. They create positive ambient affiliation with viewers. We found that vloggers use multimodal deixis to illustrate the salience of the belief system. The videos highlighted the Derridean concept of différance, wherein the meaning of polysemous signifiers is deferred without definitive resolution. This may be important in communicating with people and patients with persecutory belief systems. Clinicians may consider stepping away from the traditional true/false dichotomy endorsed by psychiatric classification systems and focus on the ambiguity in semiotic systems generally and in persecutory belief systems specifically.
... We coded the videos and transcripts for paralinguistic and multimodal features of the videos, such as gestures, intertitles, text and image overlay, camera angles, and visual effects such as close-ups, time lapse, and slow motion. We considered linguistic and paralinguistic resources as well as the technologically mediated visual frame [21]. We captured these features in memos. ...
... The point-of-view (POV) shot is a shot in which the camera assumes the position of a subject to show us what that subject sees [28]. The POV shot also means that the TI's and the audience's gaze is conflated [21]. Within a shot, various other techniques are used to indicate salience: zoom, slow motion/time lapse, and repetition of salient sections of footage ( Figure 2). ...
BACKGROUND
Gangstalking refers to a novel persecutory belief system wherein sufferers believe that they are being followed, watched, and harassed by a vast network of people in their community who have been recruited as complicit perpetrators. They are frequently diagnosed as mentally ill, though they vehemently reject this formulation. Those affected by this belief system self-identify as targeted individuals. Targeted individuals seek to prove the veracity of their persecution and dispute the notion that they are mentally ill by posting videos online that purport to provide definitive evidence to substantiate their claims of harassment.
OBJECTIVE
The objective of the study was to characterize the multimodal social semiotic practices employed in gangstalking evidence videos.
METHODS
We assembled a group of 50 evidence videos posted on YouTube by self-identified targeted individuals. We performed a multimodal discourse analysis on a corpus of 50 YouTube vlogs. We employed a grounded theory approach to data analysis.
RESULTS
Targeted individuals accomplished several social and interpersonal tasks in the videos. They constructed their own identity as subjects of persecution and refuted the notion that they suffered from mental illness. They also cultivated positive ambient affiliation with viewers of the videos but manifested hostility to people who appeared in the videos. They made extensive use of multimodal deixis to generate salience and construe the gangstalking belief system. The act of filming itself was a source of conflict and served as a self-fulfilling prophecy; filming was undertaken to neutrally record hostility directed towards vloggers. However, the act of filming precipitated the very behaviours that they set out to document. Finally, the act of filming was also regarded as an act of resistance and empowerment by vloggers.
CONCLUSIONS
This data provides valuable insights into the social and linguistics construction of a novel persecutory belief system. The data is collected in a naturalistic setting and is not influenced by interviewers or clinicians, which may influence the disclosures of those affected in clinical settings. It demonstrated that interpersonal concerns figured prominently for those affected by this belief system and they constructed various subjects as either sympathetic or hostile. They created positive ambient affiliation with viewers of the videos. This study found that vloggers used multimodal deixis to construct the salience of the gangstalking belief system. The videos also highlighted the Derridean concept of differance, wherein meaning of polysemous signifiers is deferred without definitive resolution. This may have important clinical ramification in communicating with people and patients suffering from persecutory belief systems. Clinicians working with adherents to persecutory belief systems may consider stepping away from the traditional true/false dichotomy historically endorsed by psychiatric classification systems and focus on the fundamental ambiguity inherent in semiotic systems generally and in persecutory belief systems specifically.
... Digital spaces offer rich semiotic repertoires, enabling individuals to construct translanguaging space (Li, 2011) where transnational speakers have a sense of empowerment to connect with the world and represent themselves. Within these spaces, multimodal communication plays a crucial role, as demonstrated by Zappavigna's (2019) analysis of vlogs. Zappavigna (2019, p. 1) explored people's relations with their domestic (material) objects presented in vlogs adopting a multimodal social semiotic approach, highlighting 'how language, gesture, and the visual frame coordinate intermodally to make meanings about objects' . ...
Based on a new Turkish social media influencer corpus consisting of 30 YouTube vlogs, this study explores young adults’ translanguaging practices, prevalent linguistic events, and spatial repertoires in communication. The analysis focuses on vlogs, where linguistic resources become available in relation to the activities, audience, and organization of places or objects and young adults’ translanguaging practices and their situated functions. The findings demonstrate how to use translanguaging as a comprehensive methodology to analyze communication unfolding with multimodal, multilingual, and digital semiotic repertoires at speakers’ disposal and for the imagined audience integral to the communication in vlogs. Taking a corpus-linguistics perspective to translanguaging, we propose a usage-based focus and undertake a broader understanding of translanguaging as a linguistic and multimodal phenomenon.
... The visual structures in Table 21.1 have been observed in semiotic practices from areas as diverse as 'mommy blogging' (Zappavigna and Zhao 2017) to cycling (Ross and Zappavigna 2019), and on platforms. They have also begun to be explored in relation to the kind of perspectives that can be shared via video, for example, in Snapchat (Page 2019) and YouTube (Zappavigna 2019c) videos. These studies all suggest that reading selfies as enacting a narcissistic 'look at me' perspective, rather than 'look at my perspective on X' (where X might be from fields as varied as science to political discourse), is a naïve understanding of the meanings that can be made. ...
An essential one-volume reference to contemporary discourse studies, this handbook offers a rigorous and systematic overview of the field and its recent developments. Written by an international team of leading scholars, this volume covers the key methods, research topics and directions across 26 chapters, providing both a survey of current research and more practical guidance for advanced study.
Fully updated, revised and restructured to take account of developments over the last decade, in particular the innovations in digital communication and new media, this second edition features:
- 6 new chapters, covering the discourse of media, multimedia, social media, politeness, aging, and English as lingua franca.
- 6 completely rewritten chapters, covering conversation analysis, spoken discourse, news, intercultural communication, computer mediated communication, and identity.
- An expanded and updated glossary of key terms.
Identifying and describing the central concepts and theories associated with discourse and its main branches of study, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Discourse Analysis makes a sustained and compelling argument concerning the nature and influence of discourse and is an essential resource for anyone interested in the field.
... As some of our examples showcase, different genres or different ritual types are created with awareness of each other, and often as a reaction or as a response to the values voiced by other genres or rituals. For instance, the value of materialism embedded in rituals of consumption is questioned in genres such as closet "decluttering" videos (Zappavigna, 2019) where participants get rid of stuff they no longer need and "anti-haul" videos where participants outline all the products they plan not to buy (Wood, 2021). These genres respectively represent examples of rituals of transformation and rituals of pledging that challenge the values associated with rituals of consumption. ...
Given its massive volume and rapid development of new trends, the universe of user-generated content may seem utterly chaotic. Yet the flow of content is underlined by deep-rooted patterns of communication. In this article, we present the first systematic attempt to identify these patterns using the concept of social media rituals. Understood as typified communicative practices that formalize and express shared values, rituals offer a productive path to categorize popular genres of content and trace the values they convey. Integrating theoretical literature on rituals with empirical studies of social media genres, we develop a typology of 16 rituals that express diverse values, ranging from respect and responsibility to materialism and pleasure. Furthermore, we show that rituals embed different notions of good communication, as reflected in the values of authenticity, persuasion, affiliation, and demonstration. Finally, we discuss how our framework can facilitate comparative investigations of user-generated content and platform values.
... Also, since influencers may survive with small audiences and represent specific lifestyles (e.g., college student, knitter, party animal, young mother, South Asian dating guru, vegan cook, rich fashionista, transgender) that match the needs or aspirations of different audiences, they may sometimes provide more targeted information than friends (Raun, 2018). Lifestyle influencers' videos can include practical advice around many different topics, including makeup (Ananda and Wandebori, 2016), fashion, beauty (Mardon et al., 2018;Raun, 2018), fitness, health, domestic finance, friendship, relationships, restaurants, cooking (Forchtner and Tominc, 2017), decluttering (Zappavigna, 2019) and minority group lifestyles (Raun, 2018). They can also share intimate personal information, giving insights into the daily life from the perspective of the influencer (Ferchaud et al., 2018). ...
Purpose
Despite lifestyle information needs being an important part of our daily lives, little is known about the role of common sources. Whilst magazines and television are traditional providers of lifestyle content, including for fashion, makeup, fitness and cookery, they have been partly replaced by content-creating online influencers.
Design/methodology/approach
To investigate this new resource, this article analyses comments on the videos of 223 UK female lifestyle influencers on YouTube for information about possible viewing patterns.
Findings
Three quarters of comments are written during the week of the video being published, consistent with videos being consumed with an information browsing function, rather than treated as an information resource to be searched when needed. Commenting on the videos of multiple influencers occurred often, suggesting that many viewers are not loyal to a single influencer. Thus, influencers seem to primarily support active scanning rather than searching for specific information. Typical viewers of UK female lifestyle influencers can therefore expect to accumulate lifestyle ideas and knowledge for potential future use in addition to gaining timely suggestions for near future routine decision-making.
Practical implications
Public-facing information professionals, health professionals and counsellors may consider recommending selected videos or influencers to help with lifestyle concerns.
Originality/value
This is the first large scale study of content-creating influencers as a lifestyle information resource.
... Multimodal transcription involves many challenging theoretical and practical decisions for determining what should be transcribed and how (Norris, 2019). This is partly due to the high dimensionality of the data that means that it can be approached simultaneously from many different perspectives (Zappavigna, 2019). To manage this complexity, researchers have favoured annotation involving multiple tiers of analysis that allow intermodal connections to be perceived. ...
This article explores how digital intimacy is construed through ambient embodied copresence in ‘personal attention’ role play videos, a type of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) video that has become popular on YouTube. ASMR is the experience of positive sensations in response to visual and aural stimuli. Online video sharing platforms have provided a way for people who experience these ASMR sensations to watch, produce, and disseminate ASMR-invoking material. In ASMR role play videos the YouTuber constructs a conceit (e.g. a beautician visit) and uses visual and aural resources to encourage the feeling in the ambient viewers that they are there with the YouTuber experiencing the interaction. This article considers how these videos forge an immersive faux-interactional context, and invoke the visual and aural perspectives and embodiment of ambient viewers. The dataset explored is a playlist of 116 role play videos from the GentleWhispering ASMR YouTube channel, the most popular ASMR channel at the time of writing.
Vlogs, as one of the most popular digital genres for the construction of personal experience, are an important site
for the study of digital storytelling. Although the narration of ongoing events is becoming increasingly common
in vlogs, narration of past events is still present. As they incorporate both storytelling modes, vloggers also act as
editors curating and commenting on their materials. Thus, vloggers are presented with the task of transitioning
between different chronotopic identities as characters, storytellers, and vloggers in their narratives. Research has
shown that vloggers are judged based on perceived authenticity and credibility, as well as their ability to involve
viewers, therefore managing these self-presentations is complex in view of the above requirements which have to
be met if vloggers want to attain greater popularity. Drawing on a corpus of 47 YouTube vlogs documenting
vloggers’ experiences of COVID-19, we analyze how vloggers transition between these chronotopic identities,
and describe such transitions according to a dual system of categorization based on the chronotopes involved in
the transitions and their function. We find that vloggers shift focus between their roles as vlogger, storyteller, and
character through the use of multimodal resources such as captions, overlaid media, and camera movement, and
in doing so, address the demands that they need to meet in order to gain followers by presenting themselves as
competent, credible, and engaging content creators.
Information disorders have become prevalent concerns in current social media research. This thesis is focused on the interpersonal dimension of information disorders, in other words, how we can trace, through linguistic and multimodal analysis, the social bonding that occurs when online communities commune around misinformation and disinformation, and how these social bonds are legitimated to enhance perceived credibility. Social bonding in this thesis refers to a social semiotic perspective on the shared values that communities use to construe alignment with others. False information can spread when groups have a shared vested interest, and so information disorders need to be elucidated through an investigation of sociality and bonding, rather than via logical points alone. The term ‘information disorder’ encompasses the spectrum of false information ranging from misinformation (misleading content) to disinformation (deliberately false content), and it is within this landscape of information disorders that this thesis emerges. Two key forms of social semiotic discourse analysis were applied to a dataset of YouTube videos (n=30) and comments (n=1500): affiliation (analysis of social bonding) and legitimation (analysis of resources used to construct legitimacy). The dataset constituted two contrasting case studies. The first was non-politically motivated misinformation in the form of an internet hoax leveraging moral panic about children using technologies. The second was politically motivated conspiracy theories relating to the Notre Dame Cathedral fire. The key findings of this thesis include the multimodal congruence of affiliation and legitimation across YouTube videos, the emergence of technological authority as a key legitimation strategy in online discourse, and the notion of textual personae investigating the complex array of identities that engage with information disorders in comment threads. Additionally, six macro-categories were identified regarding communicative strategies derived from comment threads: scepticism, criticism, education and expertise, nationalism, hate speech, and storytelling and conspiracy. This shows not only how information disorders are spread, but also how they can be countered. The method outlined in this thesis can be applied to future interdisciplinary analyses of political propaganda and current global concerns to develop linguistic and multimodal profiles of various communities engaging with information disorders.
Aklı ve duygularıyla diğer varlıklardan ayrılan insanın ihtiyaçları arasında mutluluk, huzur ve hayatın anlamı gibi soyut şeyler mevcuttur. Gelişen teknoloji ve değişen yaşam koşullarının etkisiyle uzun zamandır statü ve mutluluğun fazla eşya ve maddiyat ile alakalı olduğu görüşü insanlar arasında yayılmakta ve yayın organlarıyla bu fikir lanse edilmektedir. Son dönemde ise mutluluğun ve hayatın anlamının eşya biriktirmekle değil, sade bir yaşamla elde edileceğini iddia eden minimalizm akımı popüler hale gelmektedir. Bununla birlikte, dinî öğretilere bakıldığında eşyaya yönelik tavır hususunda minimalizmle benzerlik olduğu görülmektedir. Bu bağlamda, minimalizm ile dinî hayat arasındaki ilişki çalışmanın konusunu teşkil etmektedir. Gerçekleştirilen çalışmada yöntem olarak nitel araştırma yöntemi seçilmiştir. Araştırmanın deseni ise nitel yöntem desenlerinden olan durum çalışması desenidir. Araştırmanın verilerinin elde edilmesinde nitel araştırma yöntemi veri toplama tekniklerinden olan doküman analizi tekniği kullanılmıştır. Yapılan araştırma sonucunda minimalist yaşam tarzı ile dinî hayat arasında gerek uygulanma şekilleri gerekse nihâi etkileri bakımından birçok ortak noktanın mevcut olduğu görülmüştür.
Through an interactionist analysis of guitar pedal review videos this paper explores the communicative practices of product reviewing in YouTube. Focussing on one guitar pedal, the analysis reveals how reviewers positioned the pedal as an ‘idealised object’ and as part of the ‘material good life’ of guitarists. Reviewers’ communicative strategies projected a sense of shared intersubjective experience of the pedal by bracketing out issues of knowledge, skill, and access to technology, and by constructing the vloggers’ credentials as reviewers. This analysis contributes to our understanding of the structures of consumer cultures on YouTube, showing how reviewers communicatively construct audiences, products, themselves, and, more generally, the practices of material culture use in this specific art world. I argue that the interactionist perspective adopted here is an important and under-used framework for analysing consumer culture, and that it helps us to see how material culture is manufactured as a discursive, communicative act through the mundane activities of reviewing.
YouTube challenges the media monopoly by providing spaces for everyone to produce including the cultural industry products like podcasts. Deddy Corbuzier took advantage of this opportunity by opening a channel on YouTube. At first, Deddy criticised the ‘garbage’ broadcast on television, but then he invited Dinar Candy and managed to become a top view the worst video he has ever made. This study looks at the commodification of two Deddy Corbuzier’s YouTube content with Dinar Candy and Siti Fadilah Supari and sees it from Adorno’s critical point of view of the cultural industry. This research uses multimodality analysis and critical discourse analysis. The result is Deddy Corbuzier, who was first known as a YouTuber with critical content and used YouTube to resist media monopoly. However, he compromised his integrity, followed capitalism’s flow, and created content for profit by repeating his success for popular and uncritical videos.
This study draws on interactionist frameworks of sensorial communication to analyse product reviews on YouTube. Existing studies of YouTube review work have focused on how vloggers manage conflicting neoliberal identity discourses such as ‘authenticity’, ‘being entertaining’ and ‘selling’. I argue that this focus has been at the expense of the communicative work involved in constructing products in reviews, and I suggest that identity issues should be conceptually expanded through a much broader focus on communicative action and conventions of practice. In order to achieve a first step in this expansion, my analysis focusses on reviewers’ sensorial engagement with objects and explores the communicative processes through which they symbolically transform products into enlivened, sensorially rich phenomena. I argue that these communicative strategies are important for situating neoliberal discourses within ‘mundane’ actions of description and in broader cultural practices of reviewing.
The post-2008 financial crisis era has seen an upsurge in popular cultural narratives that implicitly challenge principles of economic productivity, consumption and growth by lamenting a so-called ‘world of too much,’ advocating ethics of minimalism, and renouncing everyday busyness. Narratives range from lifestyle advice on simplicity and de-cluttering private homes, to quests for the reduction of individual labor, communication, social contacts and distraction. This article questions these narratives in terms of eco-politics. Using Kate Soper’s concept of ‘alternative hedonism,’ the article analyzes a selection of five self-help books and one blog that promote lifestyle minimalism in order to interrogate their potential in stimulating de-growth eco-politics through popular culture. Drawing on post-ecological theory, it argues that narratives of lifestyle minimalism are paradoxical in that they resist yet at the same time promote capitalist cultures of growth. To overcome this limitation, it is crucial to understand and transform the narrative premises of lifestyle minimalism in ways that contextualize problems of ‘excess,’ ‘clutter’ and ‘a world of too much’ as intrinsic to the current system of capital accumulation. The article concludes by reflecting on the potential of an eco-movement that joins the alternative culture of minimalist hedonism with the eco-political agenda of de-growth.
Abstract This paper develops a framework for analysing paralanguage, initially inspired by systemic functional linguistic (hereafter SFL) research on early child language development. A distinction is drawn between non-semiotic behaviour (somasis) and meaning (semiosis), and within semiosis between language and paralanguage (using the term paralanguage to refer to semiosis dependent on language and realised through both sound quality and body language, the latter including facial expression, gesture, posture and movement). Within paralanguage a distinction is drawn between sonovergent resources in sync with or in tune with the prosodic phonology of spoken language, and semovergent resources supporting the ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning resources of spoken language’s content plane. The paper closes with a brief discussion of the intermodal relations among language, paralanguage and other modalities of communication.
"Il y a eu une telle fertilisation réciproque des idées de la sémiotique de Saussure, centrée sur le code et le langage, et de la sémiotique inspirée par Peirce, qui est pragmatique et interprétative, qu'il est difficile de trouver aujourd'hui un sémioticien qui ne croit pas à la nécessité de développer une socio-sémiotique, interprétative et pragmatique ».
S'il fallait donner l'illustration de cette conception ouverte des avancées en sémiotique, l'ouvrage de Gunther Kress et Théo van Leeuwen : Reading Images - The Grammar of Visual Design, en serait
la meilleure preuve.
The selfie is one of the most widely publicized, criticized, and debated visual phenomena of our time. However, formulating a definition of the selfie is not straightforward, as visual clues – be they representational or compositional – alone are not sufficient for identification. Recognizing an image as a selfie, rather than a portrait, often requires viewers to interpret the image in relation to the technological and sociocutural context in which the photo was taken and shared. In this paper, we consider the technological conditions that have shaped the evolution of the selfie as a visual genre. Central to our discussion is the premise that the selfie is not simply a genre for self-representation, but means of generating various perspectives: that of the selfie maker, the represented visual participant, and the viewer identification. This unique perspective-generating affordance of the selfie is both facilitated and constrained by the various technologies involved in selfie practices. On the one hand, the technological and physical constraints of the smart phone camera give rise to a specific form of “distorted” look which makes certain types of selfie possible. On the other hand, social media platforms facilitate the sharing of selfies, which results in increasingly stylized and creative ways in which perspectives of the self can be represented, negotiated, and, in the case of selfies manipulated via apps, augmented.
In this paper, we explore the semiotic dimension of digital scrapbooking. In particular, we look at how technological affordances of social media platforms, such as reposting and scrolling functions, facilitate the creation of a unique form of semiotic artefact—curated visual blogs. We argue that the curatorial practices of digital scrapbooking create a form of aesthetic experience—the aesthetics of the everyday, both for the creator and viewers.We call this phenomenon ambient aesthetics to highlight the social nature of the digital aesthetic experience, that is, a collective aesthetic experience shared by all social media users, and created through collective participation in social media practices, whether as a producer, viewer, and/or curator of digital photography. Through social media photography practices, we experience the extraordinariness of the ordinary in everyday life through a shared subject position in the ‘perpetual now’. This digital aesthetic of the everyday, we believe, is one of essential experiences that shape our existence in the age of social networks.
In this paper, we explore how video blogs (vlogs) evoke the sense of “presence”, by examining famous U. K. video blogger (vlogger) Zoe Sugg’s “Haul” videos. As a result of this analysis, we argue that vlogs could evoke presence through two main elements: sensory and social elements. Sensory elements refer to colour, camera usage, video image and sound qualities. Social elements are eye contact, facial expression, conversation and gesture. Past studies have rarely applied “presence” theory to vlogging. As vlogs have become a popular format on the Internet, this study could provide new directions for research into the experiences of vlog viewers. It also offers video bloggers initial understandings of how their content could affect their popularity by altering audiences’ feelings of presence.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, austerity has been deployed as a public policy geared towards reducing sovereign debt and restoring economic order, on the one hand, and descried as an example of punitive moralizing by political and economic elites, on the other. This article challenges the economic understanding of the concept of austerity. Some recent examples from popular culture are adduced to indicate societal dissatisfaction with the accumulation of material things, examples of what has been called ‘the new minimalism’. Contextualizing this phenomenon within a culture of intensive consumption, it is argued here that there is a history of austerity as an aversion to ostentation and excess in western tradition that runs from the Stoics through to recent pronouncements by Pope Francis and that provides a vantage point from which to question the economistic deployment of the term. When understood in this way, the austere can be seen to carry an important political meaning today and may contribute to the sorts of transformation necessary in order to reduce material demand on a societal scale.
This article is part of the themed issue ‘Material demand reduction’.
The present study investigates the interplay between language, material and embodied resources in one specific type of service encounters: interactions at theatre box offices. The data consist of video recorded interactions in Swedish at three box offices, two in Sweden and one in Finland. Cases representative of the interactions are selected for a multimodal micro-analysis of the customer-seller interactions involving artefacts from the institutional and personal domain. The study specifically aims at advancing our understanding of the role of artefacts for structuring and facilitating communicative events in (institutional) interaction. In this way, it contributes to the growing research interest in the interactional importance of the material world. Our results show that mutual interactional focus is reached through mutual gaze in strategic moments, such as formulation of the reason for the visit. Artefacts are central in enhancing intersubjectivity and mutual focus in that they effectively invite the participants for negotiation, for example, about a seating plan which can be made visually accessible in different ways. Verbal language can be sparse and deictic in these moments while gaze and pointing to an artefact does more specific referential work. Artefacts are also a resource for signalling interactional inaccessibility, the seller orienting to the computer in order to progress a request and the customer orienting to a personal belonging (like a bag) to mirror and accept such a temporary non-accessibility. We also observe that speech can be paced to match the deployment of an artefact so that a focal verbal item is produced without competing, simultaneous physical activity.
Mall haul videos or vlogs are short videos in which young women not only present their fashion and beauty purchases but express their evaluations and opinions as well. The attitudes expressed could help the vlogger reap social rewards from a reference group or demonstrate the consistency between privately held attitudes and publicly expressed ones. In four studies, using the self-monitoring construct to identify which function an attitude may serve for an individual, the self-monitoring propensity of mall haul vloggers and the social-adjustive and value-expressive functions that posting and watching such vlogs fulfill for the individual was explored. In the first study, those who post and do not post mall haul vlogs were surveyed and results suggested that more high self-monitors than low self-monitors posted mall haul vlogs. In Study 2, a content analysis was conducted and revealed that low self-monitors in comparison to high self-monitors mentioned more brand names in their mall haul vlog. In Study 3, the valence of the product evaluations conveyed in mall haul vlogs by high and low self-monitors was analyzed. High self-monitors generated more positive messages than low self-monitors. Finally in Study 4, the links between self-monitoring on individuals’ willingness to watch rather than post mall haul vlogs were examined. High self-monitors were more likely to watch a mall haul vlog when the retailer mentioned was perceived to possess high status (compared to medium or low status); while low self-monitors were more likely to watch a mall haul vlog when the retailer mentioned was perceived to possess low status (compared to medium or high status). Across all four studies, results indicated that mall haul vlogs were fulfilling a social-adjustive function for high self-monitors whereas they were fulfilling a value-expressive function for low self-monitors. Implications for marketing are discussed.
Companies are increasingly allocating more of their marketing spending to social media programs. Yet there is little research about how social media use is associated with consumer-brand relationships. We conducted three studies to explore how individual and national differences influence the relationship between social media use and customer brand relationships. The first study surveyed customers in France, the U.K. and U.S. and compared those who engage with their favorite brands via social media with those who do not. The findings indicated that social media use was positively related with brand relationship quality and the effect was more pronounced with high anthropomorphism perceptions (the extent to which consumers' associate human characteristics with brands). Two subsequent experiments further validated these findings and confirmed that cultural differences, specifically uncertainty avoidance, moderated these results. We obtained robust and convergent results from survey and experimental data using both student and adult consumer samples and testing across three product categories (athletic shoes, notebook computers, and automobiles). The results offer cross-national support for the proposition that engaging customers via social media is associated with higher consumer-brand relationships and word of mouth communications when consumers anthropomorphize the brand and they avoid uncertainty.
Contemporary digital game developers offer a variety of games for the diverse tastes of their customers. Although the gaming experience often depends on one's preferences, the same may not apply to the level of their immersion. It has been argued whether the player perspective can influence the level of player's involvement with the game. The aim of this study was to research whether interacting with a game in first person perspective is more immersive than playing in the third person point of view (POV). The set up to test the theory involved participants playing a role-playing game in either mode, naming their preferred perspective, and subjectively evaluating their immersive experience. The results showed that people were more immersed in the game play when viewing the game world through the eyes of the character, regardless of their preferred perspectives.
Purpose
– This paper aims to delineate the meaning, conceptual boundaries and dimensions of consumer engagement within the context of online brand communities both in term of the engagement with the brand and the other members of the online brand communities. It also explores the relationships of consumer engagement with other concepts, suggesting antecedents of engagement.
Design/methodology/approach
– Data are collected through semi-structured interviews with 21 international online brand community members, covering a variety of brand categories and social media platforms.
Findings
– This paper suggests that individuals are engaging in online communities in social network platforms both with other individuals and with brands. The study also identifies three key engagement dimensions (cognition, affect and behaviours). Their meaning and sub-dimensions are investigated. The paper further suggests key drivers, one outcome and objects of consumer engagement in online brand communities. These findings are integrated in a conceptual framework.
Research limitations/implications
– Further research should aim at comparing consumer engagement on different social media and across brand categories, as this study takes a holistic approach and does not focus on any particular category of brands or social media. Consumers’ views should also be evaluated against and compared with marketing managers’ understanding of consumer engagement.
Originality/value
– This paper contributes to the fast-growing and fragmented consumer engagement literature by refining the understanding of its dimensions and situating it in a network of conceptual relationships. It focusses on online brand communities in rich social media contexts to tap into the core social and interactive characteristics of engagement.
Through a qualitative study of YouTube bereavement vlogs and posts by young people about parental death, this article examines the rise and significance of intimate mourning between strangers. An unexpected finding of this research has been the speed with which young people create vlogs or post messages of their bereavement; very often within hours of a death. The question of time in relation to bereavement grief is thus a feature of this article’s analysis. The article argues that YouTube, like other social media, exposes and contests the disenfranchising of grief in offline social settings and relationships while, at the same time, enfranchising disaffected and excluded bereavement discourse via media sociality. It also argues, conversely, that YouTube, like other social media, is now a primary social space (not secondary or supplementary); it provides the where and how and who to connect with regarding personal grief and bereavement.
On the world’s most utilised video-sharing social networking site, YouTube, Charlie McDonnell (Charlieissocoollike), Dan Howell (Danisnotonfire) and Jack and Finn Harries (JacksGap) are Britain’s most popular video-bloggers (vloggers). With more than two million regular subscribers to each of their channels, along with millions of casual viewers, they represent a new form of authentic online celebrity. These young men, whose YouTube careers began as teenagers, do not espouse a traditional form of masculinity; they are not sporty, macho or even expressly concerned with being perceived as heterosexual. Instead, they present a softer masculinity, eschewing the homophobia, misogyny and aggression attributed to boys of previous generations. These behaviours are theorised using Anderson’s Inclusive Masculinity Theory. Drawing on analysis of 115 video-blogs (vlogs), along with an in-depth interview with Charlie McDonnell, this article examines how these young men developed and exhibit their inclusive masculinities and attitudes, which we postulate are a reflection of dominant youth culture.
Drawing on the literature on interaction in new media and on participation models underlying (non)fictional multi-party media talk, this paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on computer-mediated communication. Specifically, this article advocates a new participatory framework holding for multi-party interaction on YouTube, which is compared to that underlying films and televised programmes. YouTube users’ participation is more complex than television viewers’, who are involved primarily as ratified hearers dubbed “recipients”. YouTubers, on the other hand, engage in asynchronous computer-mediated interaction, changing their participatory statuses at the production and reception ends. The extended participatory framework proposed here for YouTube resides in three levels of communication: the level of the speaker and hearers in video interaction, the level of the sender and the recipient of a YouTube video, and the level of YouTube speakers and hearers who post and read comments, respectively. These communicative levels are realised by: interactants in videos and the (collective) sender, i.e. the production crew (both typical also of televised films and broadcasts), together with YouTube users, who may be video interactants and/or senders, as well as take other participatory roles.
This paper presents an analytical tool for constructing characters' action patterns in film. Understanding characters in moving images has been regarded as one of the most significant elements of narrative comprehension and interpretation because spectators' inferences of narrative structures are substantially mediated by characters. The social semiotic method presented in this paper shows how characters' actions and interactions can be systematically constructed based on the co-patterning of textual elements in film and how the patterns provide an analytical foundation for understanding and interpreting characters. In addition, this paper also reviews the previous explorations of the more fine-grained approaches to character analysis and then demonstrates how the method the paper suggests can support and strengthen the accounts provided to date. Most importantly, by comparing scenes within and across two war films, The Thin Red Line (1998) and Black Hawk Down (2001), the article will show the potential of this method for effectively constraining hypotheses for empirical investigations of filmic meaning.
Volume 1 provides a general and comprehensive introduction to semantics, synthesizing work on meaning and communication from many disciplines and setting semantics in the larger framework of semiotics.
Branigan effectively criticizes the communication model of narration, a task long overdue in Anglo-American circles. The book brings out the extent to which mainstream mimetic theories have relied upon the elastic notion of an invisible, idealized observer, a convenient spook whom critics can summon up whenever they desire to "naturalize" style. The book also makes distinctions among types of subjectivity; after this, we will have much more precise ways of tracing the fluctuations among a character's vision, dreams, wishes, and so forth. Branigan also explains the necessity of distinguishing levels of narration.
Co-Operative Action proposes a new framework for the study of how human beings create action and shared knowledge in concert with others by re-using transformation resources inherited from earlier actors: we inhabit each other's actions. Goodwin uses videotape to examine in detail the speech and embodied actions of children arguing and playing hopscotch, interactions in the home of a man with severe aphasia, the fieldwork of archaeologists and geologists, chemists and oceanographers, and legal argument in the Rodney King trial. Through ethnographically rich, rigorous qualitative analysis of human action, sociality and meaning-making that incorporates the interdependent use of language, the body, and historically shaped settings, the analysis cuts across the boundaries of traditional disciplines. It investigates language-in-interaction, human tools and their use, the progressive accumulation of human cultural, linguistic and social diversity, and multimodality as different outcomes of common shared practices for building human action in concert with others. Illustrates formal patterns of organization that cut across diverse phenomena, thus creating possibilities for discovering common practices implicated in the constitution of human practice, social life, path-dependent historicity, and knowledge Demonstrates how to move from what people do and know to build the actual events that create their cognitive and social lives, to the analysis of general practices that organize what might appear to be quite dissimilar events Moves beyond the analysis of separate modalities to investigate how their intrinsic diversity as semiotic fields makes possible unique forms of action when joined to each other.
Consumer-to-consumer brand message sharing is pivotal for effective social media marketing. Even as companies join social media conversations and generate millions of brand messages, it remains unclear what, how, and when brand messages stand out and prompt sharing by consumers. With a conceptual extension of speech act theory, this study offers a granular assessment of brands’ message intentions (i.e., assertive, expressive, or directive) and the effects on consumer sharing. A text mining study of more than two years of Facebook posts and Twitter tweets by well-known consumer brands empirically demonstrates the impacts of distinct message intentions on consumers’ message sharing. Specifically, the use of rhetorical styles (alliteration and repetitions) and cross-message compositions enhance consumer message sharing. As a further extension, an image-based study demonstrates that the presence of visuals, or so-called image acts, increases the ability to account for message sharing. The findings explicate brand message sharing by consumers and thus offer guidance to content managers for developing more effective conversational strategies in social media marketing.
In this article, we challenge dominant perceptions of social media as an archive of endlessly positive self-documentation by examining two subgenres of YouTube vlogging predicated on the expression of negative affect. Through analysis of the crying and anxiety vlogs of YouTubers ZoeSugg, Trisha Paytas and Nicole Klein, we recognize the productivity of negative affect, charting the translation of the mediated tears, sobs and struggles of these young female vloggers into affirmations of authenticity, (self-)therapy and strengthened ties of intimacy with followers. While these negative affect vlogs work outside of YouTube’s consumer economy, their popularity points to a booming economy of affective labour, where the exchange of tears for sympathetic ears is in consistently high demand.
With over a billion users, YouTube constitutes almost a third of the online population, and is one of the most used video-sharing sites in the world, becoming a major part of popular culture. A primarily user-generated platform that relies on the creation of video-blogs (vlogs) by content creators (also known as YouTubers or vloggers), YouTube has been responsible for the development of a new strand of digital professions. Within these professions, vloggers create and market profitable channels, offering an informal learning environment which has given rise to an emerging professional genre of 'how-to-tutorials'. Of this user-generated content, beauty has become YouTube's most competitive industry, with the publication of over 1.5 million beauty videos in 2015 alone (). It is for this reason, that this paper will focus on the digital beauty industry, to investigate the interdiscursive construction of expertise on YouTube, specifically the sub-category of beauty how-to-tutorials, drawing on framework of Critical Genre Analysis (CGA). Analysis of the data reveals that in the pursuit of establishing themselves as both engaged and interactive participants of the YouTube community but also expert and savvy users of YouTube keen on building their subscriber base, vloggers discursively exploit the boundaries between the expert and layperson by drawing on their discursive competence, disciplinary knowledge and professional practice ().
Youth are often perceived as passive and disengaged from civic and political life. However, many researchers have countered such discourses of youth passivity and isolation, highlighting young people's active and interactive political engagement through less traditional outlets, especially online. In this article, we are influenced by a poststructural orientation to agency to identify themes across the social change-oriented YouTube channels of eighteen young Canadians. The themes we have identified counter a dominant focus on youth civic disengagement, political apathy, and isolation, instead highlighting the diverse political issues young Canadian vloggers address, the strategies they use, their multiple subjectivities, the interaction and support of their online community, and the relevance of inequality. We show how YouTube has become an important venue for the production and dissemination of youth perspectives.
This study seeks to analyze the relationships between content features, video attributes, and parasocial attributes – the characteristics that could lead to the creation of parasocial relationships—among the top most subscribed YouTube channels. A quantitative content analysis was utilized in order to explore the videos of the most popular YouTube personalities. A stratified random sample was used to select 24 videos from each the top ten most subscribed YouTube channels. The findings of this study illuminate the relationship between content features, production features, and parasocial attributes.
This article employs multimodal discourse analysis to explore how mothers represent their everyday experiences of motherhood on Instagram through different forms of self-portraiture. It investigates whether the ‘selfies’ that they share can be characterized as a visual genre and identifies four subgenres: presented, mirrored, inferred and implied selfies. The article illustrates the different ways in which the photographer’s perspective can be represented in each subgenre. The aim is to show that the function of the selfie as a multimodal genre is not solely to represent ‘the self’ but rather to enact intersubjectivity, that is, to generate various possibilities of relations between perspectives on a particular topic, issue, or experience and hence to open up potential for negotiating different points of view.
As an iconic image of our time, the selfie has attracted much attention in popular media and scholarly writing. The focus so far has been on the representation of the self or subjectivity. We propose a complementary perspective that foregrounds the intersubjective function of the selfie. We argue that the presence of selfhood is often an assumption. What distinguishes the selfie from other photographic genres is its ability to enact intersubjectivity – the possibility for difference of perspectives to be created and this difference to be shared between the image creator and the viewer. Based on a social semiotic analysis of selfies on Instagram, we identify four subtypes of selfie, each deploying a combination of visual resources to represent a distinct form of intersubjectivity. Our analysis suggests that the potential for empowerment is inherent in the visual structure of the selfie, and that, as a genre, it is open for recontextualisation across contexts and social media platforms.
Digital data is constitutive of many forms of popular culture and user engagement. How data feeds back and is integrated into practice is of critical importance when it comes to analysing the place of the ‘self’ in contemporary culture. This article provides an account of video-blogging on YouTube. It takes as its case study three UK ‘YouTube Celebrities’ – Charlie McDonnell, Chris Kendall and Benjamin Cook – and focuses upon three vlogs which all express disquiet with their celebrity. This unease is articulated in relation to the digital consummation of self YouTube provides its users. Through a textual and performance analysis the article explores the cultural heritage of the vlog in what Charles Taylor calls western culture’s ‘expressive turn’. It argues that what a digitised popular culture gives us is a novel space to rework longstanding cultural ideals around the self, individuality and self-expression.
The US minimalist movement represents an increasingly popular critical reflection on the ills of consumerism and an effort to forge new ways of living amidst consumer capitalism. In the face of escalating consumption, debt, and environmental degradation, minimalists’ calls for rethinking “needs” is timely and highlights important problems that typify US capitalism. This article explores minimalists’ social-theoretical insights and resistance to consumerism considering whether, and to what extent, minimalism represents a radical, anti-capitalist movement.
This book presents a new approach to film analysis. It provides methods for analysing meaning making in film through tracking concrete details of film images such as characters, objects, settings and character action. It also represents new ground for investigating empirical issues in film.
This article reflects on recent challenges emerging from the study of language and the body in social interaction. There is a general interest in language and the body across disciplines that has invited a reconceptualization of the broader issues relative to action, cognition, culture, knowledge, social relations and identities, spatiality and temporality. The study of social interaction focuses on how multimodal resources – including language and bodily movements – are holistically and situatedly used in building human action. This article discusses some consequences and challenges of putting the body at the center of attention: it repositions language as one among other modalities, and invites us to consider the involvement of entire bodies in social interaction, overcoming a logo-centric vision of communication, as well as a visuo-centric vision of embodiment. These issues are developed through a series of conversation analytic studies, firstly of classic topics in linguistics like deixis, then of more recent topics, such as mobility and sensoriality.
Researchers seeking to analyse how intersubjectivity is established and maintained face significant challenges. The purpose of this article is to provide theoretical/methodological tools that begin to address these challenges. I develop these tools by applying several concepts from multimodal (inter)action analysis to an excerpt taken from the beginning of a tutoring session, drawn from a wider data set of nine one-to-one tutoring sessions. Focusing on co-produced higher-level actions as an analytic site of intersubjectivity, I show that lower-level actions that co-constitute a higher-level action can be delineated into tiers of materiality. I identify three tiers of materiality: durable, adjustable and fleeting. I introduce the theoretical/methodological tool tiers of material intersubjectivity to delineate these tiers analytically from empirical data, and show how these tiers identify a multimodal basis of material intersubjectivity. Building on this analysis I argue that the durable and adjustable tiers of material intersubjectivity produce the interactive substrate, which must be established in order for actions that display fleeting materiality to produce intersubjectivity. These theoretical/methodological tools extend the framework of multimodal (inter)action analysis, and I consider some potential applications beyond the example used here.
The point-of-view shot is usually perceived as a "natural" device, yet its naturalness is illusory. This book provides an answer to the question: "Where does the point-of-view shot come from?" It investigates the emergence of this filmic form as the product of a culture and its history, unravelling the difference between a point-of-view shot and a character's subjective viewpoint. In so doing, it shows that what would become the point of-view shot developed from the interposition, between the eye and the world, of a prosthesis capable of modifying the conditions needed to access the visible, and thus to expand the potential of human vision. Moreover, the book offers inspiration for further research on modern (and postmodern) vision as a mediated vision, an important topic in contemporary debates in the digital media landscape.
Video blogs are a form of CMC (computer-mediated communication) that feature speakers who talk into a camera, and thereby produce a viewer-directed performance. Pointing gestures are part of the resources that the medium affords to design vlogs for the absent recipients. Based on a corpus of 40 vlogs, this research categorizes different kinds of common pointing actions in vlogs. Close analysis reveals the role multimodal factors such as gaze and body posture play along with deictic gestures and verbal reference in the production of a viewer-directed monologue. Those instances where vloggers point at referents outside the video frame, e.g., elements of the Web site that represent alternative modes of communication, such as written comments, receive particular attention in the present study, as they require mutual knowledge about the shared virtual context the vlog is situated in.
An exploratory mixed-methods study involving a combination of online ethnography and descriptive statistics was conducted to investigate school-related vlogging. Five areas were emphasized: (1) characteristics of school-related vlogs, vloggers, and viewers; (2) vlog context (where recording occurred); (3) vlog content (what was said and shown); (4) vlogger culture (patterns of speech or practice); and (5) motivations for vlogging about school. A purposive sample of 120 personal video blogs (vlogs) was collected through a systematic process on YouTube during a three-month period. Results of the study revealed that vloggers were young, recorded in multiple settings including classrooms, showed and described their school experiences, shared a vocabulary for interacting with an audience, and vlogged for a variety of reasons including the desire to alleviate boredom, for fun, because friends were doing it, to build confidence or improve their speaking skills, document their experiences, share information, or to connect with others.
Following Goffman (1963), research on embodied interaction in the tradition of conversation analysis has largely approached embodiment as visual conduct. This paper addresses aspects of embodiment, surfacing in interaction episodes in an auto-shop, that resist such an approach, including embodied knowledge and kinesthetic experience, and discusses a variety of approaches that offer alternative views of the human body. These include phenomenology, Philosophical Anthropology, and neuroscience, among others. The question is raised how a rigorous, observational methodology of interaction analysis can be married to a holistic conception of the human body.
Branigan effectively criticizes the communication model of narration, a task long overdue in Anglo-American circles. The book brings out the extent to which mainstream mimetic theories have relied upon the elastic notion of an invisible, idealized observer, a convenient spook whom critics can summon up whenever they desire to "naturalize" style. The book also makes distinctions among types of subjectivity; after this, we will have much more precise ways of tracing the fluctuations among a character's vision, dreams, wishes, and so forth. Branigan also explains the necessity of distinguishing levels of narration.
We present a data-driven approach to discover different styles that people use to present themselves in online video blogging (vlogging). By vlogging style, we denote the combination of conscious and unconscious choices that the vlogger made during the production of the vlog, affecting the video quality, appearance, and structure. A compact set of vlogging styles is discovered using clustering methods based on a fast and robust spatio-temporal descriptor to characterize the visual activity in a vlog. On 2268 YouTube vlogs, our results show that the vlogging styles are differentiated with respect to the vloggers' level of editing and conversational activity in the video. Furthermore, we show that these automatically discovered styles relate to vloggers with different personality trait impressions and to vlogs that receive different levels of social attention.
The empirical studies of this book examine how objects feature in the momentto-
moment conduct of social interaction and activity. The studies draw on naturally
occurring data, video recordings of people interacting with one another
as they engage with objects for a wide range of purposes, across many real-life
settings, situations and occasions. Here in this introductory chapter we define
‘object’, and highlight how objects in the social world have been investigated
across scholarly fields. We outline the dominant methodological and analytic
influences for this collection, ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation
analysis (CA), and emphasise the significance of embodiment and materiality.
We describe the broad arrangement of the chapters around two overarching
themes, ‘Objects as situated resources’ and ‘Objects as practical accomplishments’.
Lastly, looking across the chapters we identify a number of possible alternative
points of convergence which emerge when objects in and for social interaction
are themselves treated as the principal focus of analysis.