Charlie is so ‘English’-like: nationality and the branded celebrity person in the age of YouTube

Abstract

The YouTube celebrity is a novel social phenomenon. YouTube celebrities have implications for the social and cultural study of celebrity more generally, but in order to illustrate the features of vlogging celebrity and its wider dimensions this article focuses upon one case study – Charlie McDonnell and his video ‘How to be English’. The premise of YouTube – ‘Broadcast yourself’ – begs the question ‘but what self?’. The article argues that the YouTube celebrity is able to construct a celebrity persona by appealing to aspects of identity, such as nationality, and using them as a mask(s) to perform with. By situating Charlie’s ‘How to be English’ in the context of establishing celebrity, the article argues that the processes of celebrification and ‘self-branding’ utilise the power of identity myths to help assist the construction of a celebrity persona. Use of masks and myths allows for one to develop various aspects of their persona into personas. One such persona for Charlie is his ‘Englishness’. As the social experience of ‘Broadcasting yourself’ necessarily asks one to turn ordinary aspects of their person into extra-ordinary qualities, Charlie’s use of Englishness allows ‘being English’ to become a mythological device to overcome the problem of ‘self-promotion’.

Keywords:

• YouTube
• Charlie McDonnell
• branding
• mythology
• Englishness

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Matthias Varul and Dana Wilson-Kovacs for their advice and comments as well as two anonymous peer-reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Special thanks go to Su Holmes and Sean Redmond for helpful comments on improving the article.

Notes

^1. See www.charliemcdonnell.com [Accessed 5 June 2011].

^2. See ‘What YouTube isn’t | Becoming YouTube | Video #9’ for interviews from vlogging celebrities about the difference between television and YouTube, especially 09:30: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 4FDgT-elh60 [uploaded 31 May 2013]. The engaged mode of watching is in line with scholarship on Web 2.0 products (YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc.). YouTube promotes active engagement because users are ‘prosumers’, producers and consumers (see Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010, Beer and Burrows 2013).

^3. For the purposes of my argument, a culture of parody does not undermine national identity myths. See note 7.

^4. Among YouTubers, ‘the F word’ is Fake.

^5. As Matthias Varul (2006, p. 115, n. 1) points out: ‘It is an irony of the “expressivist turn” (Taylor 1989, 368ff.) in modern culture that the growing importance of the inner life of the self at the same time opens it up to social scrutiny.’

^6. This was a scandal that occurred in 2006 when the assumed-to-be reality video-blog of ‘LonelyGirl15’ was discovered to be a fictionalised online soap in a video-blog format (see Wesch 2008).

^7. As Lévi-Strauss observes, the value of the myth ‘does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells’ (1963, p. 210; original emphasis). Charlie’s use of the upper-class persona is a story; its parody makes it no less powerful because it still articulates Englishness in the process of retelling.

^8. See www.youtube.com/charlie.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Smith

Daniel R. Smith is Lecturer in Sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University. His major research interests include British identity, brands, celebrity, value and YouTube.