Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

The study contributes to the understanding of the phenomenon of Social Media Challenges (SMCs) by examining how they take shape as structured multimodal formats on social media platforms. While prior research has focused on participation dynamics and social meanings, less attention has been given to the formal characteristics of challenge videos.

Addressing this gap, 147 popular challenge videos on TikTok were analyzed in order to identify recurring patterns of visual, auditory, and textual features that shape participation as a distinct, recognizable, and replicable communicative format.

The findings indicate a stable and repeatable communicative structure characterized by simplicity, repetition, and ease of replication, alongside limited variation in multimodal organization. 

By linking the cultural logic of SMCs with their formal content structure, the study offers new perspectives on digital culture studies and contributes to the understanding of how participatory narrative patterns shape the development of the SMCs phenomenon within platform-based media environments.