Elisabetta Adami

The power of showing: Signs of knowledge in social media videos

Over the past decade, video-based content has gained increased prominence in social media platforms alongside institutional media and corporate websites. Platform algorithms prioritise videos in users’ feeds for their capacity to attract and generate engagement: Users are more likely to watch than read content, to stay longer with moving images than with static text or image posts, and to respond to videos through sharing, commenting, and reacting. Hence, online videos have become central for the communication and circulation of knowledge beyond traditional institutional settings and formats.

Available linguistic and discourse-analysis frameworks allow research to investigate social media video content creation in relation to knowledge communication, expertise construction, identity performance, and the shaping of relations with viewers. While acknowledging videos’ multimodal meaning-making, the available frameworks and disciplinary traditions make it easier to focus on language. Hence analytical detail more readily attends to what content creators say in videos, what they write in captions, and how audiences respond in comments, in relation to what is shown or performed in the video.

My talk invites to reverse the perspective, i.e., to look at social media video as a knowledge communication format for its capacity to show, alongside telling. If videos succeed because they compel us to watch, then analysis must attend at least equally to what is shown, and how, as to what is written or said. Using the case of tutorials, do-it-yourself videos, and wellbeing advice videos as typical genres communicating knowledge by showing (and telling), I will ask which multimodal social semiotic tools and concepts can be used to examine knowledge shaped through the interplay of gesture, camera work, sequencing of action, material arrangement, visual framing, and embodied demonstration.

By foregrounding the semiotics of showing, my talk calls for a rebalancing of analytical attention in research on social media communication: To understand how expert and experienced knowledge is shaped, reshaped and circulated by asking which semiotic resources make it visible, credible, demonstrable, and actionable.