Paranoid viewers and the ‘already knowing’ of YouTube’s coming out genre

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Heggestad

While viewing LGBTQ+ coming out narratives within speech act theory is certainly nothing new, social media platforms (and YouTube, specifically) have created new opportunities for enacting these performances. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s method of paranoid reading, this article highlights the relationship between LGBTQ+ YouTubers, the coming out narratives they produce and their viewers’ engagement. After looking to YouTube as a platform frequently employed for sharing this genre of performative rhetoric, this article analyses individual video uploads alongside the viewer comments they have garnered to illustrate the paranoid phenomenon of ‘already knowing’ – i.e., viewers’ refusal to be surprised by acts of coming out. While this paranoid approach is complicated through reparative readings and a breakdown of the paranoid/reparative binary, recent offerings of coming out videos uploaded to YouTube also suggest diverging trajectories for the genre’s future.

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-102
Author(s):  
Ramasela Semang L. Mathobela ◽  
Shepherd Mpofu ◽  
Samukezi Mrubula-Ngwenya

An emerging global trend of brands advertising their products through LGBTIQ+ individuals and couples indicates growth of gender awareness across the globe. The media, through advertising, deconstructs homophobia and associated cultures through the use of LGBTIQ+s in commercials. This qualitative research paper centres the advancement of debates on human rights and social media as critical in the interaction between corporates and consumers. The Gillette, Chicken Licken‘s Soul Sisters and We the Brave advertisements were used to critically analyse how audiences react to the use of LGBTIQ+ characters and casts through comments posted on the brands‘ social media platforms. Further, the paper explored the role of social media in the mediation of significant gender issues such as homosexuality that are considered taboo to engage in. The paper used a qualitative approach. Using the digital ethnography method to observe comments and interactions from the chosen advertisement‘s online platforms, the paper employed queer and constructionist theories to deconstruct discourses around same-sex relations as used in commercials, especially in quasiconservative. The data used in the paper included thirty comments of the brands customers and audiences obtained from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The paper concludes there are positive development in human rights awareness as seen through advertisements and campaigns that use LGBTIQ+ communities in a positive light across the world.


The essays collected in this book represent recent advances in our understanding of speech acts-actions like asserting, asking, and commanding that speakers perform when producing an utterance. The study of speech acts spans disciplines, and embraces both the theoretical and scientific concerns proper to linguistics and philosophy as well as the normative questions that speech acts raise for our politics, our societies, and our ethical lives generally. It is the goal of this book to reflect the diversity of current thinking on speech acts as well as to bring these conversations together, so that they may better inform one another. Topics explored in this book include the relationship between sentence grammar and speech act potential; the fate of traditional frameworks in speech act theory, such as the content-force distinction and the taxonomy of speech acts; and the ways in which speech act theory can illuminate the dynamics of hostile and harmful speech. The book takes stock of well over a half century of thinking about speech acts, bringing this classicwork in linewith recent developments in semantics and pragmatics, and pointing the way forward to further debate and research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110088
Author(s):  
Benjamin N. Jacobsen ◽  
David Beer

As social media platforms have developed over the past decade, they are no longer simply sites for interactions and networked sociality; they also now facilitate backwards glances to previous times, moments, and events. Users’ past content is turned into definable objects that can be scored, rated, and resurfaced as “memories.” There is, then, a need to understand how metrics have come to shape digital and social media memory practices, and how the relationship between memory, data, and metrics can be further understood. This article seeks to outline some of the relations between social media, metrics, and memory. It examines how metrics shape remembrance of the past within social media. Drawing on qualitative interviews as well as focus group data, the article examines the ways in which metrics are implicated in memory making and memory practices. This article explores the effect of social media “likes” on people’s memory attachments and emotional associations with the past. The article then examines how memory features incentivize users to keep remembering through accumulation. It also examines how numerating engagements leads to a sense of competition in how the digital past is approached and experienced. Finally, the article explores the tensions that arise in quantifying people’s engagements with their memories. This article proposes the notion of quantified nostalgia in order to examine how metrics are variously performative in memory making, and how regimes of ordinary measures can figure in the engagement and reconstruction of the digital past in multiple ways.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (44) ◽  
pp. 22-36
Author(s):  
Busra ERTOGRUL ◽  
Gizem KILICSIZ ◽  
Aysun BOZANTA

Social media platforms have become an inevitable part of our daily lives. Companies that noticed the intense use of social media platforms started to use them as a marketing tool. Even ordinary people have become famous by social media and companies have been sending their products to them to try and advertise. Many people have gained a considerable amount of money in this way and today new jobs are emerged like "Youtuber" and "Instagram Influencer". Therefore, ordinary people realized the power of social media and many people started to strength their digital identity over social media. The question raising in people’s mind is that “What is the difference between the influencers and the ordinary people who have also digital identity over social media?”. This study examined Instagram influencers for five categories namely fashion, makeup, photography, travel, and fitness in Turkey. As an exploratory study, the relationship between the influencers’ average number of posts, the number of likes, the number of views, the number of comments, number of followers, and the number of following were examined. As well as the engagement rates of the followers to the influencers were calculated. In addition, the words they mostly used in the captions of the posts were examined.


2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-40
Author(s):  
Tatiana A. Yanson ◽  

The article deals with the problem of the relationship between two linguistic theories: a speech genre theory and a speech act theory. The research is based on the genre of a contact excursion. From the point of view of genre studies a contact excursion is a speech genre and it can be described using the “speech genre questionnaire” proposed by T. V. Shmeleva, which includes the communicative goal of the genre, the concept of the author, the concept of the addressee, the dictum content, the image of the communicative past, the image of the communicative future, and the language embodiment. From the point of view of functional and structural classification, a contact excursion is a complex genre or a hypergenre, consisting of a number of simple genres. Within the framework of the actional or the activity approach, which is based on the speech act theory, a contact excursion can be considered as a communicative event and described using speech strategies and tactics which represent one or more speech actions, which traces to the concept of a speech act. The notion of the communicative style serves as the basis to reconcile and combine both theories.


Author(s):  
Jörn Seemann

Place-related data from social media platforms are still awaiting further exploration in mapping and map-making and are useful to stimulate a debate on how to visualize cartographically this type of subjective and unstructured information. The example of a Facebook group on local history from a town in the American Midwest is used to discuss potentials and limitations of visually capturing historical events and processes. Variations of online story maps are presented as cartographic exercises of deep mapping, in order to point out the relationship between the digital humanities, historical GIS, and historical cartography. The text makes a plea for a narrative cartography of everyday life based on the experiences and values of ordinary people.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-306
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Schneider

Pogonotrophy refers to beard cultivation including growth and grooming practices. This exploratory study contributes to the little understood role of beard culture on YouTube. Scholarship examining the relationship between social media platforms such as YouTube and beard culture is almost nonexistent. This gap in the research allows us to ask the following: What sorts of content do users circulate about beards on YouTube? And, how does this content contribute to how users interact and learn about beards? A total of 62,061 user-generated comments across 310 videos featured on the Beardbrand YouTube channel were collected and examined using qualitative media analysis. Three themes emerged from an analysis of these data: the yeard quest, the ideal type, and how to beard. The findings illustrate the important role that YouTube plays in fostering contemporary beard culture. Suggestions for future research are noted.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630512096520
Author(s):  
Brent J. Hale ◽  
Ryan Collins ◽  
Danielle K. Kilgo

People who are affected by cancer can benefit greatly from social support and digital social networks, though our understanding of online support is primarily founded in dominant platforms like Facebook. In addition, while previous scholarship indicates that social support is available online, little research has examined predictors of support provision. A content analysis was performed to examine the relationship between narrative features in Imgur posts and social support in comments. Imgur ( Imgur.com ) is a social media site and image-hosting platform, amassing over 250 million monthly visitors. Six post features were hypothesized to predict support, including explanations of the diagnosis experience, evidence of agentive problem solving, indications of positive reappraisal, pleads for the audience to get a checkup, references to mortality, and inclusion of humor. The results of this study indicate a relationship between narrative construction and social support, finding that the inclusion of narrative features in cancer-related posts influenced the provision of support in comments. Findings of this study could have implications for a multitude of stakeholders interested in social support provision, including healthcare professionals and researchers interested in the use of social media platforms for support, and organizations interested in designing supportive online platforms for individuals coping with cancer.


2022 ◽  
pp. 264-292
Author(s):  
Mansour Alraja ◽  
Mohamed Hamdoun

This study aims to explore the ways in which targeted consumers engage with corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities on social media platforms, specifically when discussing their opinions and experiences regarding the CSR activities of their favorite brands. Therefore, the variable moral norms were integrated in the theory of reasoned action. The study data about consumers' engagement (CE) in corporate social responsibility communication (CSRC) over social media (SM) platforms—electronic word of mouth, or e-WoM—was collected from 290 actual engaged consumers in online ordering and involved in social media groups. The findings confirmed that the antecedent factors (consumers' attitudes, subjective norms, and moral norms) have a positive influence on consumers' intention to use e-WoM, while no effect was found on CE in CSRC in SM. Furthermore, e-WoM was found to have direct significant impact on CE in CSRC in SM as it mediates the relationship between the antecedent factors and CE in CSRC in SM.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 501-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Vannucci ◽  
Christine McCauley Ohannessian ◽  
Sonja Gagnon

The current study examined relationships between different types of social media platforms used and psychological functioning in a diverse, national U.S. sample of emerging adults (18–22 years). Participants completed surveys online in the spring of 2014. Findings from a path analysis model suggested that individuals who used a higher number of different social media platforms reported more anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, total alcohol consumption, and drug use. Facebook use was associated uniquely with depressive symptoms and Snapchat use with substance use. Neither Instagram use nor Twitter use was associated with any measures of psychological functioning. Gender differences also were not observed. Findings highlight the importance of considering the number of different social media platforms used, as well as the specific platform itself, when conceptualizing the relationship between social media use and psychological functioning in emerging adults.


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