Multimodal time–space-interaction analysis of content creators’ translocal trajectories

Abstract

This paper examines social media content creators’ practices development over time and across platforms, through the case of @foodqood, an Italy-based food content creator who achieved megainfluencer status. An integrated multimodal time–space-interaction analysis of the creator’s 3-year long production on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube maps shifts in semiotic resources and audience engagement. Findings identify three phases in the creator’s practices, showing a trajectory from experimentation to institutionalisation. Changes through time and variations across spaces, cross-checked with followers’ prompts and responses, reveal shifts in identity performances and prioritised audience segments. The time–space-interaction analysis evidences complex dynamics of influence between grassroots and institutional practices, and between agency in sign-making and dominant semiotic regimes, including ethnoracialised linguistic ideologies. The study advances a social semiotic approach that includes translanguaging for the analysis of translocality. Using provenance to identify the cultural dimensions in semiotic assemblages allows for nuanced considerations of the import of dimensions such as lifestyles and space-specific affiliations alongside geopolitical and ethnolinguistic provenances. It mitigates the risks of unbalanced analyses towards named languages, and reductionist interpretations of cultural phenomena solely/chiefly along a geopolitically-defined local–global continuum. The study addresses gaps in research on content creators by integrating a longitudinal perspective to multimodal analysis. It also raises questions regarding the (self-)exploitation and (self-)erasure of minoritized identities in social media ecosystems increasingly shaped by corporate interests.