Vidding and its Media Territories: A Practice-centred Approach to User-generated Content Production

“Vidding” is the practice of synchronizing a song with excerpts of one or more visual texts (usually a TV series or a cult movie), so to confer new meanings to the video materials. This form of user-generated content usually explores some peculiar aspects of the original materials (the evolution of character or of a relationship), or to confer them new meanings. Originated within the media fandom ecosystem, the vidding phenomenon has been so far mainly analysed from the points of view of audience reception within fan cultures and of gender and feminist studies. The present preliminary study focuses on the Italian context and aims to explore vidding as a media related production practice. Such perspective brings to the forefront questions concerning the role of digital technologies in the production process, in the distribution of user-generated content, in the emergence of shared aesthetic and stylistic quality criteria, as well as in the circulation of the specific competences required by the practice.