Chapter 10
The construction of tellability in YouTube vlogging
The case of mummy vlogger influencers
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.
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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