Communicative strategies and tactics used in the celebrity content on YouTube

INTRODUCTION. Despite the fact that media materials devoted to the private lives of celebrities have been the subject of close attention by specialists in the humanities for quite a long time, onscreen celebrity content remains a little-studied phenomenon. The purpose is to study the features of the speech behavior of gossip columnists on the YouTube media platform and identify the most common communication strategies and tactics.
MATERIALS AND METHODS. The empirical basis of the study is 100 videos in the “review” genre of show business and blogosphere news, posted on the online video hosting YouTube in the period from January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2021. The work uses discourse analysis, comparative and contextual methods.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. The specificity of video blogging, which consists in online interaction with a mass audience, the author’s presence in the frame and the dissemination of “new sincerity” concept, determines the set of speech tools used in the framework of new audiovisual media. Unlike their television counterparts, in the celebrity content on YouTube, the communicative behavior of its creators is extremely expressive and personalized, and the speech utterances themselves often carry a denotative or connotative assessment.
CONCLUSION. The most frequently used strategies and tactics on YouTube channels with a “star theme” have been identified, the addressee of which can be both the Internet audience and the subject of discussion, that is, celebrities. If cooperative strategies are used to implement speech effects in relation to the audience, then confrontational ones are addressed in most cases to celebrities.