Youtube musicians and self-perceived multimedia, hypermedia, intertextual and transmedia competencies

ABSTRACT

YouTube has grown into an unprecedented music industry where informal learning practices converge among young musicians now considered authentic internet (micro)celebrities. Due to the rise of music video trends on the platform and the educative demands to explore youth interaction on the internet, this study analyses the self-perception of youtubers in terms of multimedia, hypermedia, intertextual and transmedia competencies. For this purpose, we developed a questionnaire on musical competencies (TransMuQ), in which 603 young youtubers from Spanish and English-speaking countries participated. We found that YouTube’s performers consider themselves proficient in the aesthetics, participation and interaction, multimodal languages, technology, content creation and risk and individual management dimensions. After an extensive theory on the experimental analysis of these competencies in citizenship, we propose a new approach towards interactive codes of young YouTube musicians. The research provides a clarifying positivism about what youtubers themselves believe they are learning in the era of ephemeral digital content.

KEYWORDS:

• Transmedia competence
• hypermedia
• multimedia
• youtuber
• music

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by 'Alfamed' (Euro-American Research Network), under Grant R+D+I Project (2019-2021), entitled “Youtubers and Intagrammers: Media competition in emerging prosumers”, with code RTI2018-093303-B-I00, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and the R+D-i Project (2020-2022), entitled “Instagrammers and youtubers for the transmedia empowerment of Andalusian citizens. The media competence of instatubers”, with code P18-RT-756, financed by the Andalusian Regional Government in the 2018 call (Andalusian Research, Development and Innovation Plan, 2020) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Notes on contributors

Arantxa Vizcaíno-Verdú

Arantxa Vizcaíno-Verdú is Predoctoral Fellow (FPU) at the University of Huelva (Spain), Communication PhD and researcher in transmedia literacy and participatory culture in social media environments. Academically she holds a M.A. in Communication and Audiovisual Education and a Bachelor Degree in Advertising and Public Relations. Professionally, she is member of the Comunicar Group, a veteran collective in Spain in Media Literacy, and Associate Editor of the leading scientific journal in the Media Education field, ‘Comunicar' (indexed in JCR-Scopus Q1). She is also member of the Research Group of Excellence ‘Agora’ (Andalusian Research Plan: HUM-648), where she has participated in different projects from Spain National R+D Plan, from the European Union (Interreg-III, E-learning…) and Latin American projects.

Paloma Contreras-Pulido

Paloma Contreras-Pulido Professor of Educational Technology at the International University of La Rioja (Spain). She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Huelva and is also a journalist and social educator. She is a member of the Agora Research Group (HU-M648) and is a member of the Alfamed Network (Euro-American inter-university network for research on media competences). Her line of research focuses on the media skills of citizens, educommunication, and media literacy in areas of social exclusion, ICT applied to education and media for social change.

María-Dolores Guzmán-Franco

María-Dolores Guzmán-Franco PhD in Psychopedagogy and Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Huelva. She has almost two decades of teaching experience in subjects related to Didactics and Organization in the areas of Teacher Degrees, Psychopedagogy, Social Education, Postgraduate and Doctorate. Her teaching and research lines are linked to the integration of Information and Communication Technologies in the educational context, the training of teachers in virtual educational spaces, the didactic design of digital contents and studies in media competence. She belongs to the“Agora” Research Group (HUM-648), a reference in the aforementioned thematic areas.