Affordances and practices: The case of YouTube video responses

The introduction of the Video Responses functionality in YouTube in March 2006 paved the way for video interaction, a new type of interaction, in which videos respond to other videos. A previous work (Adami, 2010) analysed the results of a 14-month period of monitoring of the Most Responded Videos chart, categorized the videos with the largest number of responses over the period and investigated the main video interaction practices by examining a sample video-thread for each typology. Drawing on this work, the present paper discusses selected examples of video exchanges that illustrate non-deterministic and recursive interaction between the affordances of the Video Responses option and the ways in which these are actualized by sign-making practices. The range of possible video interaction practices is determined by the set of affordances (Kress, van Leeuwen, 2006), what the Responses option enables/encourages interactants to do or prevents/discourages them from doing, both materially and socially. Within this range of possibilities, participants exploit affordances in unexpected ways, according to their diversified and sometimes conflicting interests. When institutionalized, these innovative practices lead to structural changes in the affordances themselves, in much the same way as Saussurean acts of parole bring about innovations in langue (Saussure, 1916/1931). As with language here, too, any innovative act of sign-making that becomes socially established is the result of the dominance (both in frequency and prestige) of a specific practice from among the set of many existing and conflicting practices. Eventually, some norms become institutionalized; this depends on sociocultural, as well as material, factors and forces; the cause-effect relationship is never deterministic; it cannot be predicted beforehand but only explained retrospectively. Once institutionalized, the innovation in its turn paves the way for further creative and unexpected uses of the system’s renewed possibilities. Analysis of the patterns of relatedness in the video exchanges arising from this interrelationship, indicates that creative uses of the affordances lead to acceptability of exchanges which disregard traditional standards of coherence. As we shall see from what follows, far from giving rise to communicative failure, exchanges that disregard interlocutors’ intended meanings bring about video interaction successfully. Since video interaction shares its affordances with all other online semiotic spaces and digital forms of text production, the practices observed here may well be indicative of broader phenomena characterizing communication in digital environments.