From the information theory viewpoint, visual content has greater bandwidth than audio content. You can run experiments with true visual content and simultaneous false audio content, and then reverse and then quiz both male and female viewer-listeners. My feeling is that video content will prevail for all viewer-listeners.

Angelina Raisa There are many dynamics here, and you will need to decide which to explore. Audio quality is an important but often underappreciated part of video production. If music is inappropriate, if reduces the effectiveness of the video. If a voice is "off mic" or the audio quality is otherwise marginal, it lowers the viewing experience considerably. That is why almost everything you watch on television (except live programming) is ADRed, i.e. the voice is rerecorded in an audio studio to match the movement of the lips and provide top audio quality.

But some social media videos are created so that the audio is optional. The entire story may be told in the video. Sometimes the words of the people speaking are added as open captions, because people often have their device audio turned off so as to not disturb the people around them (or to not get caught using their devices at work/school).

Remember that most people do not watch more than a few seconds of any given social media video. After 30 seconds, half of the audience is gone. Very few people watch a social media video until the end.

So you need to decide the CONTEXT in which you will explore the consumption of social media video. Marketing video? Animated GIFs? Memes? DYI video? Long or short format video? I do not think you can explore one specific context and then generalize it to all social media videos.

As Michael W. Marek suggests, once you have a clear taxonomy of the corpus of analysis and after setting specific topics for analysis, you can try to do a multimodal analysis of the content. In this way you can observe and analyze how the two types of semiotic resources (audio and visual content) are combined to build meaning.

Ian Kennedy Would you say there would be previous experiments conducted alike this? I am working on a social media content analysis project based on a particular piece and won't have the additional resources to conduct such experiments. I more intend to suggest that the visual content and audio content joined still has a different absorption reading. The content as a whole is controversial and the audio has a powerful message that could have had a different reaction in not paired with the particular visual aspects. There is some moving music but a voice over poem read with powerful words. I want to propose the words meaning change as we view the visuals.

Michael W. Marek and Nicolae-Sorin Drăgan Thank you. I would say this understanding opens my research even further I had not thought to apply the idea of Semiotics with audio though I was looking into the study on semiotics for the visual. I in fact should have always considered this for audio too. The visual can not be understood via the short social media audience usual watch without sound as the whole meaning without sound loses all direction.

Michael the content is an instagram post. It was originally on a website but intended creating is for instagram IGTV. It has 3.3m views and 17.3k comments. The positive and negative comments will be counted towards qualitative research in my method and results. My literature review and discussion will indicate the idea of the bias positive and negative responses due to the audio and visual absorption could propose possibly different meaning by gender.

Please excuse my lack of clarity. There is still a lot unknown into my direction and a very distracting household environment interrupting my clear stream of thought. I hope others a coping better with restrictions. Thank you all for your knowledge and time.

Angelina Raisa A picture speaks a thousand words and yes audio can also play an important role but more often than not the visual medium is much stronger and more powerful especially because of its potential and ability to communicate greater emotive value.

Regarding the second part of your question, it is not only your gender but also a host of other factors such as race, class, sexuality, geographical location perhaps that may significantly mediate the way in which you absorb content on social media.

Hope this helps!

Angelina Raisa Yes. Search Google Scholar. You can recruit your virtual classmates to be the guinea pigs. Play the piece and quiz them afterwards. At least you then know age etc.

There was an article about Emotional and Informational Content of Commercials: Visual and Auditory Circumplex Spaces, Product Information and Their Effects on Audience Evaluation, you might want to start there and look for similar content. There are several factors to consider but it is indeed an interesting question.

I am so incredibly grateful to you all for your expert knowledge, bringing me new perspectives and sharing great sources or direction. I can now continue this short Social media content and behaviour reaction research for my studies. I will do my best to create this research content for you all to see how you contributed and I will most likely share this research here.

On a personal level I am also thankful for the validation in the comments for this research as I intend to bring to light a new perspective.

Jaspreet Kaur, Juan Antonio Aguilera Ian Kennedy Shailendra Kumar Singh Nicolae-Sorin Drăgan Michael W. Marek

I don't know why, but Individuals usually prefer visual forms of the social media accompanied by some kind of audio narration.

Most of people including me are attracted by visual and voice in the social media. Video gets more attention than voice if these two things are coexisted. But in some circumstances we only could listen like driving, voice influence more.

visual

Audio and visual are both two types of input.This data from socil media be it text video or audio could be added in a softwrae called nvivo and sentiment anslsyis could be done