Intermediality and social media

Abstract

This chapter provides examples of basic analyses of macro and micro levels of intermediality in social media: YouTube entertainment, an example of a multi-layered social media practice, and GIFs, which derive from other media and migrate across different platforms on the internet. Apart from media combination and integration, even the two aspects of media transformation, transmediation and representation, are also persistent intermedial processes in social media practice as content creation. Social media entertainment stages the body, voice and personality, or persona, of a content creator outside the traditional media and acknowledges, or even addresses, the social community directly. In the authenticity discourse of social media entertainment, YouTubers pose themselves as an alternative to traditional media. The chapter looks at the Let’s Play genre and how the YouTuber PewDiePie engages with the social media entertainment dimensions and with his audiences.