A new authenticity? Communicative practices on YouTube

Abstract

Recent discussion of some user-generated material on the Internet has argued that its ‘freshness’ and ‘spontaneity’ offers a new form of ‘authenticity’ in mediated communication. With a focus on YouTube, particularly where extensive use is made of the facility to post text comments on vlogs, it has been suggested that such activities reproduce the feel of ‘face-to-face communication’. Interestingly such accounts echo previous debates about broadcast talk, although YouTube is defined as a species of ‘post-television’. This article assesses these claims through a case study of one practice of user-generated communication on YouTube, the so-called ‘make-up tutorial’. It takes an approach to spoken discourse analysis previously developed in the study of broadcast talk, but it also makes some observations about the structure of the YouTube site, by comparison with the discursive ‘regime’ of television. This analysis finds that there are indeed some distinctive communicative practices on YouTube, but rather than assessing these in terms of their ‘authenticity’, it is more useful to consider their ‘communicative entitlements’, which throw new light on the constraints of traditional forms of broadcasting.

Keywords:

• authenticity
• communicative entitlement
• conversation
• discourse analysis
• broadcast talk
• television
• viral communication
• vlogging
• YouTube

Notes

A version of this article was presented at the MeCCSA Conference 10 at the London School of Economics in January 2010. I am grateful to my colleague Simon Mills for his advice in its preparation.

This can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ3gr-bFAOs

This can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRO3qFUA5Zq&p

This can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxy-TxCXH6Y