Video tutorials as an encounter with a “commentator machine”

Drawing on ethnomethodological concepts such as Sacks’ “commentator machine” and Garfinkel’s notion of “instructed action”, this article offers an interactional analysis of DIY tutorials. Based on a study of the openings of these tutorials, it shows how they configure their viewing as a special encounter. The article then highlights two important phenomena to be examined comparatively in these videos: the multiple resources used to establish temporal and procedural segmentation; and the effects produced by the articulation between saying and doing that characterizes these videos, that is, the formulation of practical operations simultaneously with their embodied and observable performance.