Pragmatic Language & YouTube Reaction Videos

Could YouTube reaction videos be used to teach pragmatic language skills?

 

I'm not a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP), so I'm not pretending to be an expert in the field of language processing. However, I rely on data from SLPs to inform my understanding of the communicative aspects of individual learners' respective abilities to process information and put it to constructive use.

 

I'm familiar enough with the concepts of language processing to have some informed questions about things I see in the world, every now and again. One of those things that just dawned on me most recently is the question of the relationship between pragmatic language processing and the popularity of reaction videos on YouTube.

 

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with reaction videos, they are videos made by YouTubers in which they react to videos that have become popular on YouTube, as evidenced by their respective number of views. So, to be clear, it's videos of people watching videos, usually for the first time, so that other people can watch their reactions.

 

The pay-off of watching reaction videos is to connect with the reactor's emotions through the reactor's body language, facial expression, word choice, and tone of voice. Of those four elements of language watched for by the audience in a reactor during a reaction video, three of them are pragmatic language.

 

Here is my hypothesis, but I need the SLPs in our audience to weigh in on this, too: You know how when you see something cool, your first impulse is to share it with somebody else and see how they react to it? It's like we only get one first time of experiencing something, but we want to relive it and the only way we can is to watch someone else experiencing it for the first time.

 

We ride the emotional roller coaster with each new first-timer we expose to the cool thing, relating to that other person's emotional response based on our own memories of enjoying our first time with whatever the cool thing is. It sounds like a weaker version of the behavior we otherwise refer to as addiction. The first time is always the best time and the experience can never be fully recaptured, but it can be approximated. It goes to show that all behaviors occur on a spectrum, including those we typically regard as extreme.

 

Art is the manipulation of media in order to convey emotion. It is often non-linguistic. Light, color, sound, shape, space, and a host of other things can be manipulated according to the laws of physics to evoke feelings and tell stories without words. Other forms are art use words as one more medium to enrich their creations, whether written, spoken, and/or sung.

 

One of the most popular forms of reaction videos on YouTube is devoted to music, specifically individual music videos. This involves the manipulation of visual and auditory information, only, as the other three senses cannot be actively engaged. The exception could be bone conduction of vibrations from the music in reactors wearing headphones or near loud speakers, creating proprioceptive input that goes to the sense of touch.

 

There are dozens of reaction videos apiece to a great many songs on YouTube. The number of people reacting times the number of songs to which reactions can be given creates exponential exposure for the artist of each original performance video. Reactors increase their own exposure on YouTube by riding on the coattails of artists who have millions of views of their content because of the quality of their art.

 

When people search YouTube for an original artist's work, all of the videos of people reacting to that artist's work will also come up in the search results. It's only natural that once one has viewed the original video to want to see it again through the eyes of someone else who has not seen it before and determine if they reached similar conclusions. People are not just looking to relive the experience, but also to be emotionally validated for feeling the ways they felt experiencing the original video for the first time.

 

Which then begs the questions, “Why do people get so sucked into these videos that are so heavily based on pragmatic language?” and “What are the implications of those facts for individuals who struggle with pragmatic language disorder or autism spectrum disorders that compromise their abilities to accurately read the facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice of others, and express themselves appropriately that way, themselves?”

 

This boils down to the research question of, “Can reaction videos be used to teach pragmatic language skills through video modeling to individuals who struggle with pragmatic language?” Only scientific research can tell. I'm all about