Digital Seriality as Structure and Process

"Digital Seriality as Structure and Process" argues that the contemporary web is experienced largely through a handful of centralized interfaces, such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook, and that these interfaces function as forms of seriality rather than as open, unstructured networks. The authors contend that serial processes of repetition, distribution, and sequencing, long studied in television, have been comparatively neglected in digital media. Their central move is to show that seriality bridges the paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions of media, challenging the view that database and narrative are opposed, as exemplified by search result lists ordered by PageRank.

The analysis focuses on YouTube as a primary case. Metadata-driven recommendation paths and channel subscriptions shift the locus of flow from the image to the interface, requiring active user agency, while recommendation systems tend toward loop-like repetition. Channel-based Let's Play series illustrate how interface affordances shape the production of serialized content. The work also distinguishes memes from viral content through their transformative, intertextual, and inter-serial character, with image macros and Photoshop memes serving as illustrations.

A further strand traces memes, animated GIFs, and photo fads, such as the "VanPersieing" meme from the 2014 World Cup, to late-nineteenth-century motion studies by Marey and Muybridge. Drawing on Agamben and Hagman, the authors argue that serial repetition detaches gestures from narrative context, reducing them to pure medium suited to networked circulation. Television and web media are presented as co-evolving, with supercuts and network narratives revealing a shared serial logic. The scope is largely conceptual and media-theoretic, drawing on scholarship from 2013 and 2014 on viral video, memes, GIFs, and television narrative complexity.