This is mind-blowing! : Introducing Showbiz Vlog News
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Newspaper, radio and television are no longer our sole sources of information and entertainment. The use of the Internet has significantly increased since the beginning of the new millennium and we embraced, possibly quite unconsciously, a new broadcast medium called YouTube. The popularity of YouTube and other video-sharing websites stems from the fact that they not only enable their users to watch various videos in a user-friendly platform, but they also provide them with the opportunity to upload their own videos and share them with other users. YouTubers thus turn into amateur journalists, show hosts and entertainers in the videos that are uploaded on their channels. Such user-generated content takes the form of video blogs (vlogs) and there are practically no limitations on the format and the topic of the video. Since videoblogging is a fairly recent phenomenon, its genres, unlike genres of traditional media, are still being formed and ‘fossilized’. In my research, I focus on those vlogs that are devoted to the presentation of show business news. Because of the fact that they strongly resemble each other in terms of format, style and content, I regard them as belonging to the same genre of videoblogging that I propose to call ‘showbiz vlog news’. The aim of my research is to identify distinctive characteristics of the genre and to determine the extent to which it resembles traditional broadcast news. By employing Conversation Analysis, I was able to examine specific features of interaction via vlogs. Consequently, five domains of interactional phenomena were explored, namely turn-taking, fragmentations and repairs, lexical choice, paralanguage and intertextuality. Since the analysis demonstrated that the genre of showbiz vlog news has adopted a number of features typical of ordinary conversation (e.g. evaluations, newsmarks, fragmentations, slang, quotative be like), I account for the possible motivation for its conversation-like character. |
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