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Launched in 2013, Vine is a popular microblogging service that allows users to record, edit, and share six-second videos that loop ad libitum, until another video is selected. At this time, the communicative, expressive, and semiotic affordances of Vine and similar services have still to be fully explored by users and scholars alike. Through a multimodal analysis approach drawing on New London Group’s (1996) work, this paper investigates how people construct humour on Vine by artfully arranging different modes of expression. The analysis focused on user-enacted humour, as opposed to captured comical scenes or bare samples taken from TV shows or movies. The study hypothesises the social construction of a novel humorous language that draws on extant forms of humour and a variety of modes and techniques derived from audio-visual media and computer-mediated communication, as users inventively exploit the framework provided by the Vine platform. Findings show that users create instant characters to amplify the impact of their solo video recordings, use Vine as a “humorous confessional”, explore the potential of hand-held media by relying on “one hand and face” expressivity (the other hand holding the device for the video “selfie”), and use technology, internet slang, internet acronyms, emoticons/emojis, and hashtags to convey humour and complement the messages of the videos they post on Vine. The goal of this study is an exploratory analysis of humour and its discursive functions in an emergent social medium by considering its affordances, as users find new and creative ways to harness its expressive potential.

The widespread access to wireless and mobile connectivity, the increasing popularity of social media, and the pervasiveness of portable devices such as smartphones and tablets are offering unprecedented opportunities for expressing and sharing personal understandings and representations of the world. This technology-mediated and hyper-connected milieu offers a fertile ground for representing, enacting, and counteracting antisocial outlooks and behaviours such as prejudice, discrimination, and bullying. In the introduction, we propose a unified theoretical model to comprehend the idiosyncrasies of prejudice, discrimination, and bullying, in function of the analysis of user-generated Vines related to prejudice, which is presented in the second part of the article. In this study, we posit prejudice as one of the primary seeds of discrimination and bullying, and we then examine its multimodal representations on Vine, a social medium that offers a short-form apparatus for constructing and communicating meaning. This study contributes to the understanding of how prejudice is represented and interpreted on mobile social platforms and opens the field to research on how people depict and perceive sensitive issues through “condensed” forms of computer-mediated communication.

This article examines the uses and functions of humour in an online community of gamers and nonprofessional game designers who present and critique user-generated artefacts created with the popular game series LittleBigPlanet. Findings show that participants use humour and “good humour” to achieve a variety of social goals: to veil statements of ability and effort, alleviate negative comments, present user-generated content, attract new players, support other participants, and overall engender a smiling atmosphere that incentives collaboration, peer feedback, and social cohesion. Far from being a trivial ornament, humour emerges as a community building “cushioning glue” that connects, seals, and buffers different gears of computer-mediated interaction, contributing to defining the boundaries and the identity of the analysed online space.

In recent years, playful design environments and digital games have been offering increasingly accessible programming tools and integrated editors, significantly expanding opportunities for the creation and sharing of user-generated content. These practices have engendered the diffusion of participatory online environments in which users present, discuss, and critique their creations. This study analyzes one of these design-driven environments dedicated to game levels created with the popular series LittleBigPlanet. Findings suggest that participants interact guided by their desire to become skilled designers and be recognized as such by their peers. To do so, they enact situated discursive functions that entail a pervasive use of specialist language, the formation of shared design references, and the valorization of new forms of originality based on remixing and intertextuality. By engaging in multimodal practices in a competent community of peer designers, participants create a safe “discursive studio” that offers a multiplicity of trajectories for learning and creativity.

Creating, sharing, and critiquing user-generated content are increasingly common practices in online environments, as users become active producers, reviewers, and promoters, not just consumers, of content. This paper investigates the functions of the opening posts in an online discussion forum dedicated to user-generated game levels (i.e., mini-games) designed with the LittleBigPlanet digital game series. In the analyzed community, the first post of each thread plays a crucial role, as authors introduce themselves, present their work, and set the stage for discussion. Findings show that the opening post carries a variety of discursive functions: it serves as a creative presentation of content, a self-reflective disclosure of practices, and a passionate call to participation. Moreover, by artfully using these themes, participants construct the opening post as a “request for absolution.” Through an ethnographic discourse analysis approach that draws on politeness theory, this study furthers the understanding of how users discursively construct and seek to increase opportunities for interaction, peer feedback, and social learning in a creative online space.