Multimodal Construction of Interculturality in YouTube Videos

Social media platforms such as YouTube are becoming increasingly popular for information sharing, and for identity performance. Online video-mediated communication has been further popularised by the COVID-19 pandemic which sees more recreational and educational content posted online to reach a global audience. Online video-sharing platforms provide a space for influencers or educators to interact with audiences from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, thus creating opportunities for intercultural communication through online videos. In particular, how cultural identities are conveyed through the multimodal affordances of online videos warrants further investigation.

Multimodal resources play an important role in the creation of video-based materials. The multimodality of videos offers content creators an enlarged set of resources, in addition to the use of language, to make meaning, and to perform their cultural identities. The notion of interculturality emphasises the interconnectedness of different cultures and considers how participants use different resources available to them to perform their cultural identities.

Dr Jenifer HO, Assistant Professor of CityU’s Department of English, investigated how a multilingual YouTube influencer and his co-presenter who have a transnational trajectory orchestrate their multilingual and multimodal repertoires to make aspects of their identities relevant or irrelevant in a strategic way, to perform their multiple cultural identities.

The study found that interculturality is made visible in online videos through influencers’ performance of dynamic and flexible multilingual practices. Furthermore, medium affordances such as images, camera angle, video-editing effects and so on are also deployed to construct the influencers’ transnational cultural identities.

The study has implications for influencers, educators and the general public who want to create video-based materials for a global audience. The study highlights how influencers strategically deploy their multilingual and multimodal repertoires when creating videos. While it is important for content creators to convey information linguistically, the multimodal dimension of meaning-making and intercultural communication is equally significant.