An integrated time-space-interaction framework for the analysis of social media content creators’ practices: The case of translocal trajectories of @foodqood

Addressing a gap in extant research on social media content creation, the paper presents a time-space-interaction analytical framework for the investigation of content creators’ development of practices through time and orchestration across the spaces of their online presence, cross-checked through interactions with followers. While the framework is potentially applicable to any research focus, the paper focuses its application on the analysis of translocal trajectories as entextualised in the semiotic practices of social media video-based food content creators. The application takes as a case study @foodqood, a food content creator based in Italy who gained megainfluencer status (with over 23 million followers on TikTok) and analyses the creator’s whole production on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. The framework is structured along four analytical semiotic layers, i.e., the resources of the subject matter (food), the embodied and disembodied resources of the creator’s performance, the video-specific visual and auditory resources, and the resources in the paratext. The semiotic layers are considered by intertwining three dimensions of analysis, i.e., the creator’s trajectories through time, across the different social media platforms of their online presence, and in the interactions with followers. The findings show distinct phases in the creator’s development of practices, from experimentation to institutionalisation, and trace trajectories of the creator’s identity performances marked by distinctive strategies in the combined use of the three layers of semiotic resources; the development of these through time, across spaces and in relation to followers’ prompts reveals the creator’s shifting interests in terms of audience reaches, as well as a nuanced effort to appeal to different audience segments. The conclusions point to the usefulness of a social semiotic framework that includes a languaging perspective to observe transnational phenomena, and of such a time-space-interaction analysis to trace the complex dynamics of influence between practices from below and institutional ones, and between agency in sign-making choices and semiotic regime ideologies.