Effects of temporal format of everyday video on narrative engagement and social interactivity

We have entered the era of personal video sharing. Social media and wearable devices now offer new video interfaces, allowing users to record videos of their everyday experiences quite easily. Video-sharing users are mostly interested in creating narratives and promote active social interaction with others. A critical design feature for creating narratives that facilitate social interaction is the temporal format of the everyday experience video. Although the importance of video narratives as a way of representing the human experience has been emphasized, relatively little research has been carried out on the temporal format of video such as the duration of video and the number of scenes (NS) in the video. Therefore, we conducted a pre-study with qualitative research and a main study with experimental research to discover the impact of temporal format of everyday video on narrative engagement (NE) and social interactivity (SI). In the pre-study, we observed users' perceptions of shared videos on social media. In particular, we examined how people feel and become engaged based on the temporal format of narratives. In the main study, we examined the effect of temporal format on the NE and the effect of NE on social interaction. The results indicated that the NE fully mediates the effect of temporal format of video on SI. In other words, the duration of video and the NS in everyday videos do not affect the SI directly, only through the NE. The NS becomes more important, however, when the length of the video gets longer. The NE was not increased in correlation with the NS unless there is long enough overall time for the entire video. Implications and limitations of the study results are discussed in the final section of the paper.