Digital pragmatics on YouTube : Self-presentation and performance of stylized affect
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Requested lectures |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The talk addresses the discursive construction of authenticity in reaction videos produced by micro-celebrities on their YouTube video-channels. Adopting a digital pragmatic perspective, the talk concentrates on the key multimodal features of self-presentation and the construction of identity in this innovative genre of communication in order to track how users perform affect for their followers. The YouTubers’ identity construction is analysed in terms of their apparent ‘authenticity’, and interpreted in the context of a contrasting underlying aim – their self-promotion stemming from the ‘attention economy’ that has come to define many of the forms of the current monetised identity performances in digital contexts. In this talk, the strategic performance of digitised emotions is interpreted as a form of ‘synthetic affect’, i.e. a simulated form of interaction with the anonymous, mass audiences. As indicated by viewers’ comments, the YouTubers’ performances of emotions, particularly where they include features of hyperstylization, can be perceived negatively as inauthentic, with the result that the viewers can actually disaffiliate from such content producers. |
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