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Part of
Influencer Discourse: Affective relations and identities
Edited by Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Alexandra Georgakopoulou
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 349] 2024
► pp. 250–277

Chapter 10
The construction of tellability in YouTube vlogging

The case of mummy vlogger influencers

| King’s College London
This chapter examines how influencers present YouTube vlogs in their thumbnail picture, caption, and description box. More specifically, it documents how mummy vlogger influencers present vlogs as worth clicking by announcing content that is presented as ‘out of the ordinary’. These announcements are counter-balanced using an authenticating strategy I have called ‘spotlight speech’. This is a clickbait strategy used by vloggers to capitalise on canonical expectations to tellability in mummy vlogging. Mummy vloggers are “entrepreneurial vloggers” (Green and Burgess 2009) who generate an income from commercial practices related to the narration of their experiences of life as a mother in ‘mummy vlogs’ (Pers 2022; Kennedy 2019; Pers 2023c). This chapter is situated within a growing body of small stories research (Georgakopoulou 2007) that examines how narrative discourse practices develop through interplay between social media platform structuration and user agency.
Keywords: mummy vlogging, influencers, YouTube vlogging, clickbait, micro-celebrity, tellability, small stories research, narrative, social media storytelling
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methods
    • 2.1Data
    • 2.2Theoretical framework
    • 2.3Procedure of analysis
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Announcements of out of the ordinary content in vlog prefaces
    • 3.2Evaluations in vlog prefaces
    • 3.3‘Spotlight speech’ as an internal evaluation device
    • 3.4Construction of spotlight speech through combination of incongruous elements of vlogs
    • 3.5Spotlight speech as a clickbait strategy
  • 4.Conclusion
  • References
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