Pragmatics of Short Videos: Embodied Communication in Algorithmic Environments
Panel organisation: Silva Ladewig (University of Göttingen, DE),
Martin Luginbühl (University of Basel, CH), Simon Meier-Vieracker (TU Dresden, DE)
People who create short videos for social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram communicate with their bodies. TikTok’s predecessor musical.ly started as an app for lipsync and dance videos that confine creators’ expressive means to their bodily behaviour, and these genres are still popular on the platform today (Meier-Vieracker 2025). But even in original sound videos – often recorded as selfie videos – creators use their bodies in a variety of ways for their multimodal meaning-making. The semiotic resources range from vocal and prosodic means to proxemics, gestures, and facial expressions to playful alterations by digital means like film editing or filters as a way of “synthetic embodiment” (Jones 2023: 27). Indeed, the platform’s technical affordances shape creators' bodily communication in a variety of ways: The 9:16 vertical frame compresses the periphery of the gesture space and privileges centre-front upper-body articulations, so that creators noticeably reorganise where and how their hands move (Meier-Vieracker to appear). Highly expressive intonation and rhythmic patterns are used to attract the viewers’ attention (Han & Zappavigna 2024) scrolling through their feeds, shaping embodied performances of gender identity (Weiß et al. 2025) and affect (Backes 2026), and the camera shake caused by taking the selfie is deliberately employed as a stylistic device to convey immediacy. In turn, the adaptations of established genres or activity types to the short-video format like, e.g., news (Luginbühl 2025), teaching (Hartung et al. 2023), or political activism (Sigurdardottir & Rautajoki 2024) are notably characterised by alterations in bodily behaviour.
In our panel, we want to bring together scholars doing empirical research on short videos and short-video platforms to discuss the complex interrelationships between the platforms’ digital affordances – the video recording and editing techniques, the algorithmic feeds, etc. – on the one hand and the multiplicity of embodied communication patterns as social affordances on the other. We invite contributions dealing with specific genres of short-video content, as well as those that examine particular semiotic resources in a variety of contexts.
Please submit your abstract (up to 500 words) via the conference website (https://ipra2027.exordo.com/) by 15 October 2026. In step 4 (‘Topics’) of the submission process, select the panel ‘Pragmatics of Short Videos’. Further information on submitting abstracts can be found in the IPC20 Call for Papers (https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2027). Please note that an active IPrA membership is required to submit an abstract. If you have any further questions regarding the panel, please feel free to contact us directly (mail@silvaladewig.de, martin.luginbuehl@unibas.ch, simon.meiervieracker@tu-dresden.de).
More infos here.