http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1675-4478
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ABSTRACT
This paper aims to provide a semiotic analysis of user-generated content on YouTube concerning the song ¿Quién será? ‘Who will it be?’ (1953, music by Pablo Beltran Ruíz and Luis Demetrio Traconis Molina; lyrics by Pablo Beltran Ruíz), making reference to concepts such as bricolage, hypertextuality and microcelebrity to account for the overall nature of the content. Users connect available materials in creative ways to pay tribute to the music/stars they like, while seeking attention and recognition through their content, which might eventually serve their personal interests such as finding a job or earning revenue from the YouTube Partner Program.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
Mine Güven holds the following degrees from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey: B.A. in Translation and Interpreting Studies, M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics. Her current areas of interest include semantics, audio-visual translation and media accessibility.
ORCID
Mine Güven http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1675-4478
Notes
1 YouTube has paid out over $2 billion to partners since 2007 through the copyright management system called Content ID (YouTube statistics, 2016).
2 As Marshall (Citation2010) notes, social media can be construed as a form of presentation of the self-such that the way celebrities produce ‘the celebrity self for a form of public display and consumption’ helps users to construct their own on-line self (42) (e.g. by sharing their own content ‘that are extensions of the self’s identity that are articulated through friends’ (42).
3 Online communication of fans with celebrities is known to increase fan identification with star objects (Click, Lee, and Holladay Citation2013, 377). However, in our case, communication seems to take place amongst users only since many of the stars involved with the song (e.g. Pedro Infante, Dean Martin, etc.) are no longer alive. In an extreme case of fan identification and attention seeking, a user (Carl Citation2012) had uploaded a video of Teresa Teng singing the Chinese version of ¿Quién será? which included photos of the star as well as of her own. Due to a surprising physical similarity, it was difficult for unknowing audiences to determine to whom each of the photos belonged. The link is no longer available due to copyright infringement.