"Look it up on the Web": Approaches to the Analysis of Clip-Based Knowledge Communication

Abstract

Knowledge, especially useful knowledge, is increasingly disseminated and acquired through short videos clips circulating on the internet or distributed via social networks. This contributes to a significant transformation of individual and social stocks of knowledge. Digital media proliferation and its subsequent pervasive utilization have served as crucial catalysts for this development with the boundaries increasingly blurring between everyday contexts, work environments, and institutional spheres. This has lasting consequences for the social distribution of useful knowledge. These clips thus promote a shift away from the previously dominant oral and text-based forms of knowledge-sharing, which are complemented, and sometimes even completely replaced, by audio-visual formats. Clips serve as easily accessible and ubiquitous sources of knowledge, used both by laymen to solve their everyday problems and by experts seeking swift assistance for specific difficulties. Focusing on Instagram, in our ongoing study, we examine clip-based audio-visual communication from a perspective grounded in the new sociology of knowledge. We use a combination of qualitative methods, namely genre analysis as a corpus-based method and sociological hermeneutics as a case-analytical approach. With this research, we aim to provide results that contribute to the overarching sociological question of how social stocks of knowledge change through visual communication.