‘We/YouTube’: exploring sign-making in video-interaction

Abstract

On the video-sharing website YouTube, the ‘video response’ option triggers a new interaction practice, i.e. communication threads started by an initial video, built up by video responses and resumed by a video-summary. This article examines a video-thread that starts from one of YouTube’s ‘most responded’ videos; by using a social semiotic multimodal analysis, the author investigates how video responses relate to the initial video and how the video-summary selectively transforms the resources of the responses while presenting itself as a resume of the video-thread. This analysis helps to explore the notion of ‘interest’, which shapes sign-making in a chain of semiosis in video-interaction, thus creating an approach to communication in which traditional notions of coherence and relevance are reshaped in terms of an interest-driven prompt—response relation.