“I felt like I was really talking to you!”: intimacy and trust among teen vloggers and followers in Portugal and Brazil

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes how female teen YouTubers manage intimacy and trust in the narration of their personal lives and the ways in which this is perceived by followers. The analysis of two case studies of popular teen YouTubers from Portugal and Brazil – SofiaBBeauty and Manoela Antelo, respectively – revealed that their presentation is anchored in discourses about whom they are with and where they are, what they are doing, and their personal tastes and styles. Through their comments on the videos, followers express trust connections with the vloggers, based on a sense of proximity, a desire for exclusivity in their relationship, relatability with banal aspects, and recognition as cultural intermediaries. These case studies have demonstrated strong similarities in the vloggers’ practices of constructing intimacy and consequent trust with peer audiences, bearing great resemblance with older YouTubers from central cultures. Although Sofia and Manoela put forward different class performances, the trust they inspire in their followers is a fundamental form of capital for both.

KEYWORDS:

• Micro-celebrity
• youth
• vlogger
• intimacy
• trust
• influencer
• YouTube
• YouTuber
• teenagers
• girlhood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We retrieved the comments on these YouTube videos using YouTube Comment Scraper (http://ytcomments.klostermann.ca), exporting them into a spreadsheet, also including comment threads (replies to comments). We considered all the comments on the videos (at 9/2/2018), except for SofiaBBeauty’s February video, which had over 12,000 comments because it featured a giveaway/prize; in this case we considered the first, i.e. oldest 200 comments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lidia Marôpo

Lidia Marôpo (PhD, University NOVA of Lisbon) is Assistant Professor at Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal and researcher at CICS.NOVA. [email protected]

Ana Jorge

Ana Jorge (PhD, University NOVA of Lisbon) is a Guest Assistant Professor of Media and Communications at Catholic University of Portugal and at University NOVA of Lisbon. [email protected]

Renata Tomaz

Renata Tomaz (PhD, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) is a Postdoctoral researcher of the Postgraduate Program in Media and Daily Life, at Fluminense Federal University, Brazil. [email protected]