This exercise provides a walkthrough of questions that you can use to analyze the following viral video. The purpose of this exercise is to show how nexus analysis identifies nexus by unpacking the actions and discourses clustered in depicted actions and in accompanying images, captions, and comments of viewers on a YouTube page. After viewing the YouTube video A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work.
Locate these mediated actions visible in the video:
• Pressing an app icon on the touchscreen
• Swiping a finger across the touchscreen
• Pinching or spreading thumb and forefinger on the touchscreen
How does each mediated action fit into the toddler’s emerging ability to participate with others in the social environment or to become more experienced at “pulling off” a valued literacy practice?
Which actions interact to create the social practice of online reading? Is there an expected sequence for these actions? a particular or “appropriate” way to behave while producing an action?
Which actions interact to create the social practice of print-based reading? Is there an expected sequence of accompanying behaviors?
How do literacy tools in the digital practice different from those in the print practice?
This depiction of a baby using an iPad happens in a real-time moment and location—a site of engagement where this toddler is swiping a touchscreen sitting at home on a wooden deck. But it is also nested in another site of engagement: YouTube, where millions of viewers watch, share, and comment on the film, intersecting with news cycles, social media, and parenting discourses about “screen time” and “digital natives”.
How are the histories of this small tapping action, this child actor, and these digital materials activated or made relevant through the discourses circulating in this place?
The trajectories of a single mediated action ripple out from a toddler’s tap on a touchscreen at home to connect to millions of viewers tapping like, dislike, and share buttons on YouTube. This finger-tap action is made durable and transportable through filming in a video captured by a parent and uploaded to YouTube, where it incites discourse in an ongoing stream of viewer comments. For the analyst, the challenge of examining a mediated action as one point in the intersection of multiple dynamic trajectories means that one must follow these cycles in and out of the present moment. We examine a mediated action in the context of overlapping cycles to locate opportunities so that we can locate potential actions that can open up access and create far-reaching transformative practices through small changes in ordinary activity.
Try identifying an action and its cycles of expectations by asking the same questions of your data and see where the analysis takes you.