75029831 03 01 01 JB John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 JB code P&bns 349 Eb 15 9789027246431 06 10.1075/pbns.349 13 2024033272 DG 002 02 01 P&bns 02 0922-842X Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 349 01 pbns.349 01 https://benjamins.com 02 https://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns.349 1 B01 Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich University of North Carolina at Charlotte 2 B01 Alexandra Georgakopoulou Georgakopoulou, Alexandra Alexandra Georgakopoulou King's College London 01 eng 320 vi 308 + index LAN009030 v.2006 CFG 2 24 JB Subject Scheme COMM.CGEN Communication Studies 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.DISC Discourse studies 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.PRAG Pragmatics 06 01 The rise of influencers, as power-players in the social media landscape, is a defining feature of the digital era, one that has received much attention from a variety of social science disciplines. But despite the key role that language, along with other semiotic modes, plays in the construction and communication of influencer selves, discourse analytic and pragmatic research on the topic is lagging behind. This volume attempts to fill this void, by offering contextually sensitive insights into influencers’ multi-modal communication on a range of platforms. The contributions rework established modes and tools of discourse analysis and pragmatics to shed empirical light on influencer identities and tensions (e.g. doing authenticity vis-à-vis promoting brands). We specifically attend to (a) the interplay between media affordances and communication practices and (b) the co-constructional, interactive nature of influencer selves with networked audiences, ranging from ‘affect’ to ‘hate’.<br />In addition to linguists, we hope that the volume will be of interest to scholars and students of social media communication, from sociological, cultural studies, anthropological and/or social psychological perspectives. 04 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475/pbns.349.png 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_jpg/9789027215994.jpg 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_tif/9789027215994.tif 06 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_front/pbns.349.hb.png 07 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/125/pbns.349.png 25 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_back/pbns.349.hb.png 27 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/3d_web/pbns.349.hb.png 10 01 JB code pbns.349.toc v vi 2 Miscellaneous 1 10 01 JB code pbns.349.int 1 18 18 Chapter 2 1 A01 Alexandra Georgakopoulou Georgakopoulou, Alexandra Alexandra Georgakopoulou King’s College 2 A01 Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 10 01 JB code pbns.349.p1 19 1 Section header 3 10 01 JB code pbns.349.01geo 20 42 23 Chapter 4 1 A01 Alexandra Georgakopoulou Georgakopoulou, Alexandra Alexandra Georgakopoulou King’s College London 20 authenticity 20 formatting 20 imperfect sharing 20 Instagram Stories 20 reconfiguring 20 repurposing 20 sharing-life-in-the-moment 01 In previous work, I have shown the importance of authenticity as a platformed directive for influencers’ self-presentation on Instagram Stories. In this chapter, with data from the same influencers, I focus on if and how the directive of authenticity presents any shifts during the period of covid-19, as a result of physical confinement and social distancing as well as of the public backlash against influencers’ posts with aspirational content. My analysis shows that, rather than abandoning formatted (i.e. normative and recognizable as typical) norms and practices of showing an authentic self on Instagram, influencers reconfigure and repurpose them in two ways: They reconfigure established connections amongst different modes, particularly with regard to amateur aesthetic choices at the visual level, to position the teller affectively in conditions of confinement. They also repurpose the algorithmically preferred format of sharing-life-in-the-moment so as to promote content suited to the new realities of a pandemic. These reconfigurations show the power of the formatting of stories and authenticity on social media. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.02hou 43 74 32 Chapter 5 1 A01 Mingyi Hou Hou, Mingyi Mingyi Hou Tilburg University 20 carnival 20 digital ethnography 20 Douyin 20 influencer 20 mock impoliteness 20 platform content moderation 20 wanghong 01 This study explores the multimodal Chinese language discourses of an emerging type of influencers on the short video platform Douyin, the domestic counterpart of TikTok in Mainland China. Their hilarious performance is scornfully celebrated for vulgarity and absurdity. In public discussions, they are described as “pretending craziness and selling stupidity”. The analysis takes “Teacher Guo” as an example. Her funny, awkward and obscene performance, and audiences’ participation in China’s heavily regulated online space inspire the current study to adopt the theoretical lens of carnival. The study examines how audiences’ affective connections with Teacher Guo manifest through both the influencer’s and the audience’s carnivalesque semiotic practices. Findings show that Teacher Guo performs a vulgar and obscene image through her grotesque body and comic language. Audiences’ negative affective connection with her results from rejecting such social transgression: the vulgarity and obscenity are considered as a bad object in today’s <i>wanghong</i> culture. In contrast, the positive connection with Teacher Guo is manifested through the carnivalesque participation by those who temporarily transgress the norms of being serious, positive and polite online, thus conducting light-hearted cultural resistance with mischievous fun. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.03pag 75 98 24 Chapter 6 1 A01 Ruth Page Page, Ruth Ruth Page University of Birmingham 20 corpus linguistics 20 Instagram 20 lifestyle influencers 20 relatability 01 Relatability is a buzzword in social media marketing associated with influencers. In this chapter, I provide a linguistic analysis of the dimensions of relatability using corpus-linguistic methods to analyse a dataset of English-language comments posted in response to nine lifestyle influencers who maintained accounts in Instagram. The dimensions of relatability focus on the evaluation of identity, where authenticity and emulatable qualities are used as complementary strategies of impression management and where rapport-enhancing strategies of humour and positive affect are used within parasocial interactions. Emulatable and authentic aspects of relatability are performed separately in the posts which are published over time and are interwoven with the advertising content produced by the influencers. This neatly encapsulates the dual purpose of relatability as it is deployed by Instagram influencers, where the rhetoric of relationality and affective connection is coupled with the work of self-promotion and visibility that is used for commercial gain. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.p2 99 1 Section header 7 10 01 JB code pbns.349.04and 100 127 28 Chapter 8 1 A01 Marta Andersson Andersson, Marta Marta Andersson Stockholm University 2 A01 Alberto Greco Greco, Alberto Alberto Greco Stockholm University 20 impoliteness 20 Jeffree Star 20 product reviews 20 prosody 20 social media influencers 20 YouTube 01 This paper investigates the prosodic differentiation between self-deprecation and impoliteness targeting others in YouTube video product reviews by Jeffree Star, a well-known social media (hence SM) influencer. The results show that low pitch values, longer durations, and descending melodic patterns, which are associated with impoliteness, as well as rising pitch and faster speech rates, which are indicative of self-deprecation, distinguish these two functions in Star’s performance. The paper contends that the strategy of phonological distinction between different functions of impoliteness is critical to developing a relatable in-group relationship with the community of viewers. Thus, our findings shed light on the communicative strategies used by internet influencers, as well as the importance of the understudied feature of prosody in SM context. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.05sea 128 147 20 Chapter 9 1 A01 Philip Seargeant Seargeant, Philip Philip Seargeant Open University 2 A01 Korina Giaxoglou Giaxoglou, Korina Korina Giaxoglou Open University 20 chronotopes 20 emoji 20 online antagonism 20 political influencers 20 politics of outrage 20 polystorying 20 rescripting 20 social media influencers 01 In the context of the literature on practices of social media influencers, little attention has been paid, so far, to the emerging category of political influencers. This chapter examines the social media feed of a political influencer as a site of antagonistic political debate generating audience outrage. Drawing on digital ethnography and digital discourse analysis, we focus on a media event centring around a tweet posted by the British journalist Ash Sarkar on the date upon which three people were killed in a terrorist incident in a park in Reading, UK. The tweet unleashed a storm of abuse targeted at Sarkar from people erroneously relating its content to the killings. Our analysis reconstructs how this post and reactions to it created lines of dis/alignment around broad antagonistic and reactionary online discourses as a strategy of weaponizing and communicating outrage against this type of political influencer. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.06bli 148 174 27 Chapter 10 1 A01 Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich University of North Carolina at Charlotte 20 cancel culture 20 cultural appropriation 20 influencer 20 Latino/a 20 lifestyle 20 racialization of Spanish 01 The cancelation of Hilaria Baldwin, amid accusations of deception (regarding claims that she was a Spanish woman and Spanish was her native language) and Cultural Appropriation (CAPP), was a complex case, involving language ideologies, authenticity, and the racialization undergone by the Spanish language and related identities in the US, exacerbated by Cancel Culture (CC). While CC has been widely discussed in non-academic literature, recent academic scholarship on the topic largely takes a macro approach. This chapter provides a less frequent examination of cancelation processes at the micro level, analyzing user-generated posts in related YouTube videos. Drawing on discursive pragmatics and Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies, it argues that Hilaria Baldwin’s case is deeply connected to perceptions of Spanish/Latino/Hispanic identity in the US. Despite dissent on CAPP, Hilaria’s dishonesty about her background triggered her cancelation, reenforcing claims about the fundamental link between perceived immoral behavior and cancelation events as well as the high expectations regarding authenticity in influencers’ self-presentation. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.07sif 175 198 24 Chapter 11 1 A01 Maria Sifianou Sifianou, Maria Maria Sifianou National and Kapodistrian University of Athens 2 A01 Evanthia Kavroulaki Kavroulaki, Evanthia Evanthia Kavroulaki National and Kapodistrian University of Athens 20 (offensive / defensive) responses 20 conflict 20 Greek 20 impoliteness strategies 20 influencers 20 Instagram 20 sarcasm 01 This chapter aims to contribute to the study of Social Media Influencers’ (SMIs) discourse. More specifically, it explores the language practices of five prominent Greek SMIs, based on their responses to (perceived) impoliteness levelled against them on Instagram. After taking a close look at the acts provoking the conflictual reactions, we analysed 107 influencers’ responses to aggressive comments posted under their feed photos. Drawing on models of response options to impoliteness, we argue that the majority of SMIs who choose to respond to aggressive comments (mostly involving accusations and criticism) do so by resorting to offensive rather than defensive or mixed strategies (i.e., a combination of offensive and defensive ones), while the most salient offensive strategy used involves sarcasm. Interestingly, it seems that SMIs do not always avoid aggression to attain their strategic goals. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.p3 199 1 Section header 12 10 01 JB code pbns.349.08cho 200 226 27 Chapter 13 1 A01 Jan Chovanec Chovanec, Jan Jan Chovanec Masaryk University 20 affect 20 emotion economy 20 identity 20 micro-celebrity 20 pragmatics of social media 20 self-branding 20 social media 20 stance 20 YouTube 01 While significant attention has been paid to how social media influencers and content creators use diverse channels for self-presentation and self-promotion, there has been relatively less research into how they employ affective resources in on-screen interactions with their audiences. This article analyses the ways in which online micro-celebrities deploy the resources of affective stance in one specific subgenre of YouTube videos, namely reaction videos. It seeks to identify ways of how such individuals perform affect while otherwise passively watching well-known videos which they allegedly had not seen before (‘first-time watching’). Thus, influencers expose online audiences to their (seemingly) authentic reactions, involving a range of affective responses including surprise, appreciation, amusement etc. The findings reveal that YouTube influencers use affective stance in reaction videos strategically rather than spontaneously, consciously performing affect for their audiences. The article argues that such a form of performed affect is closely linked to self-branding and can be described in two ways: not only as ‘synthetic affect’, which is inauthentic and staged for the benefit of the audience, but also as ‘branded affect’, which is interlinked to the ultimate economic success of social media content creators. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.09ben 227 249 23 Chapter 14 1 A01 Dominika Beneš Kováčová Beneš Kováčová, Dominika Dominika Beneš Kováčová Masaryk University 20 authenticity 20 digital detox 20 influencers 20 Instagram 20 intimacy 20 mental health 20 multimodal discourse analysis 20 relatability 20 self-presentation 01 This paper presents a case study of an anti-stigma mental health campaign called Digital Detox Day, which was first organised in 2020 with the aim of encouraging people not to use social media for one day. Despite foregrounding the positive effects of digital detox, the campaign was paradoxically promoted by social media influencers (SMIs), whose popularity is contingent on an active online presence. To explore how SMIs position themselves in relation to the campaign and digital detox, a multimodal discourse analysis of 100 Instagram posts with the hashtag #DigitalDetoxDay was conducted. Having examined the functions of the multimodal semiotic resources adopted by the SMIs in this data, the paper shows that the #DigitalDetoxDay posts afford the SMIs’ self-presentation authenticity and relatability and thus do not disrupt but corroborate the characteristic image of SMIs. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.10per 250 277 28 Chapter 15 1 A01 Mikka Lene Pers Pers, Mikka Lene Mikka Lene Pers 20 clickbait 20 influencers 20 micro-celebrity 20 mummy vlogging 20 narrative 20 small stories research 20 social media storytelling 20 tellability 20 YouTube vlogging 01 This chapter examines how influencers present YouTube vlogs in their thumbnail picture, caption, and description box. More specifically, it documents how mummy vlogger influencers present vlogs as worth clicking by announcing content that is presented as ‘out of the ordinary’. These announcements are counter-balanced using an authenticating strategy I have called ‘spotlight speech’. This is a clickbait strategy used by vloggers to capitalise on canonical expectations to tellability in mummy vlogging. Mummy vloggers are “entrepreneurial vloggers” (Green and Burgess 2009) who generate an income from commercial practices related to the narration of their experiences of life as a mother in ‘mummy vlogs’ (Pers 2022; Kennedy 2019; Pers 2023c). This chapter is situated within a growing body of small stories research (Georgakopoulou 2007) that examines how narrative discourse practices develop through interplay between social media platform structuration and user agency. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.11dro 278 301 24 Chapter 16 1 A01 Olivia Droz-dit-Busset Droz-dit-Busset, Olivia Olivia Droz-dit-Busset Pedagogical College Bern 2 A01 Tereza Spilioti Spilioti, Tereza Tereza Spilioti Cardiff University 20 (affective) positioning 20 affect 20 authenticity 20 confession 20 content creators 20 intimacy 20 lifestyle and beauty influencers 20 multimodality 20 social media influencers 20 vulnerability 20 YouTube 01 Since the Middle Ages, confession has been one of the ‘most highly valued techniques for producing truth’ (Foucault 1978). While confessional monologues have been researched in reality TV discourse (Lorenzo-Dus 2009; Tolson 2006), the communicative potential of confessional talk for Social Media Influencers has been largely underexplored. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring confession as a distinct genre in the communicative repertoire of lifestyle and beauty YouTubers. In this regard, we first map this genre in terms of its key themes, formal features and media production choices. Drawing on Giaxoglou’s (2021) notion of affective positioning, we also examine how the influencers and their audiences are affectively positioned in the discourse of confessional videos through the deployment of verbal, non-verbal, as well as other material (camera) and graphic (emojis) resources. We conclude this chapter by demonstrating how this type of positioning intersects with the production of an authentic selfhood on YouTube. 02 JBENJAMINS John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia NL 02 December 2024 20241215 2024 John Benjamins B.V. 02 WORLD 13 15 9789027215994 01 JB 3 John Benjamins e-Platform 03 jbe-platform.com 09 WORLD 10 20241215 01 00 115.00 EUR R 01 00 97.00 GBP Z 01 gen 00 149.00 USD S 147029830 03 01 01 JB John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 JB code P&bns 349 Hb 15 9789027215994 13 2024033271 BB 01 P&bns 02 0922-842X Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 349 01 pbns.349 01 https://benjamins.com 02 https://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns.349 1 B01 Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich University of North Carolina at Charlotte 2 B01 Alexandra Georgakopoulou Georgakopoulou, Alexandra Alexandra Georgakopoulou King's College London 01 eng 320 vi 308 + index LAN009030 v.2006 CFG 2 24 JB Subject Scheme COMM.CGEN Communication Studies 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.DISC Discourse studies 24 JB Subject Scheme LIN.PRAG Pragmatics 06 01 The rise of influencers, as power-players in the social media landscape, is a defining feature of the digital era, one that has received much attention from a variety of social science disciplines. But despite the key role that language, along with other semiotic modes, plays in the construction and communication of influencer selves, discourse analytic and pragmatic research on the topic is lagging behind. This volume attempts to fill this void, by offering contextually sensitive insights into influencers’ multi-modal communication on a range of platforms. The contributions rework established modes and tools of discourse analysis and pragmatics to shed empirical light on influencer identities and tensions (e.g. doing authenticity vis-à-vis promoting brands). We specifically attend to (a) the interplay between media affordances and communication practices and (b) the co-constructional, interactive nature of influencer selves with networked audiences, ranging from ‘affect’ to ‘hate’.<br />In addition to linguists, we hope that the volume will be of interest to scholars and students of social media communication, from sociological, cultural studies, anthropological and/or social psychological perspectives. 04 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475/pbns.349.png 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_jpg/9789027215994.jpg 04 03 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/475_tif/9789027215994.tif 06 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_front/pbns.349.hb.png 07 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/125/pbns.349.png 25 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/1200_back/pbns.349.hb.png 27 09 01 https://benjamins.com/covers/3d_web/pbns.349.hb.png 10 01 JB code pbns.349.toc v vi 2 Miscellaneous 1 10 01 JB code pbns.349.int 1 18 18 Chapter 2 1 A01 Alexandra Georgakopoulou Georgakopoulou, Alexandra Alexandra Georgakopoulou King’s College 2 A01 Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 10 01 JB code pbns.349.p1 19 1 Section header 3 10 01 JB code pbns.349.01geo 20 42 23 Chapter 4 1 A01 Alexandra Georgakopoulou Georgakopoulou, Alexandra Alexandra Georgakopoulou King’s College London 20 authenticity 20 formatting 20 imperfect sharing 20 Instagram Stories 20 reconfiguring 20 repurposing 20 sharing-life-in-the-moment 01 In previous work, I have shown the importance of authenticity as a platformed directive for influencers’ self-presentation on Instagram Stories. In this chapter, with data from the same influencers, I focus on if and how the directive of authenticity presents any shifts during the period of covid-19, as a result of physical confinement and social distancing as well as of the public backlash against influencers’ posts with aspirational content. My analysis shows that, rather than abandoning formatted (i.e. normative and recognizable as typical) norms and practices of showing an authentic self on Instagram, influencers reconfigure and repurpose them in two ways: They reconfigure established connections amongst different modes, particularly with regard to amateur aesthetic choices at the visual level, to position the teller affectively in conditions of confinement. They also repurpose the algorithmically preferred format of sharing-life-in-the-moment so as to promote content suited to the new realities of a pandemic. These reconfigurations show the power of the formatting of stories and authenticity on social media. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.02hou 43 74 32 Chapter 5 1 A01 Mingyi Hou Hou, Mingyi Mingyi Hou Tilburg University 20 carnival 20 digital ethnography 20 Douyin 20 influencer 20 mock impoliteness 20 platform content moderation 20 wanghong 01 This study explores the multimodal Chinese language discourses of an emerging type of influencers on the short video platform Douyin, the domestic counterpart of TikTok in Mainland China. Their hilarious performance is scornfully celebrated for vulgarity and absurdity. In public discussions, they are described as “pretending craziness and selling stupidity”. The analysis takes “Teacher Guo” as an example. Her funny, awkward and obscene performance, and audiences’ participation in China’s heavily regulated online space inspire the current study to adopt the theoretical lens of carnival. The study examines how audiences’ affective connections with Teacher Guo manifest through both the influencer’s and the audience’s carnivalesque semiotic practices. Findings show that Teacher Guo performs a vulgar and obscene image through her grotesque body and comic language. Audiences’ negative affective connection with her results from rejecting such social transgression: the vulgarity and obscenity are considered as a bad object in today’s <i>wanghong</i> culture. In contrast, the positive connection with Teacher Guo is manifested through the carnivalesque participation by those who temporarily transgress the norms of being serious, positive and polite online, thus conducting light-hearted cultural resistance with mischievous fun. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.03pag 75 98 24 Chapter 6 1 A01 Ruth Page Page, Ruth Ruth Page University of Birmingham 20 corpus linguistics 20 Instagram 20 lifestyle influencers 20 relatability 01 Relatability is a buzzword in social media marketing associated with influencers. In this chapter, I provide a linguistic analysis of the dimensions of relatability using corpus-linguistic methods to analyse a dataset of English-language comments posted in response to nine lifestyle influencers who maintained accounts in Instagram. The dimensions of relatability focus on the evaluation of identity, where authenticity and emulatable qualities are used as complementary strategies of impression management and where rapport-enhancing strategies of humour and positive affect are used within parasocial interactions. Emulatable and authentic aspects of relatability are performed separately in the posts which are published over time and are interwoven with the advertising content produced by the influencers. This neatly encapsulates the dual purpose of relatability as it is deployed by Instagram influencers, where the rhetoric of relationality and affective connection is coupled with the work of self-promotion and visibility that is used for commercial gain. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.p2 99 1 Section header 7 10 01 JB code pbns.349.04and 100 127 28 Chapter 8 1 A01 Marta Andersson Andersson, Marta Marta Andersson Stockholm University 2 A01 Alberto Greco Greco, Alberto Alberto Greco Stockholm University 20 impoliteness 20 Jeffree Star 20 product reviews 20 prosody 20 social media influencers 20 YouTube 01 This paper investigates the prosodic differentiation between self-deprecation and impoliteness targeting others in YouTube video product reviews by Jeffree Star, a well-known social media (hence SM) influencer. The results show that low pitch values, longer durations, and descending melodic patterns, which are associated with impoliteness, as well as rising pitch and faster speech rates, which are indicative of self-deprecation, distinguish these two functions in Star’s performance. The paper contends that the strategy of phonological distinction between different functions of impoliteness is critical to developing a relatable in-group relationship with the community of viewers. Thus, our findings shed light on the communicative strategies used by internet influencers, as well as the importance of the understudied feature of prosody in SM context. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.05sea 128 147 20 Chapter 9 1 A01 Philip Seargeant Seargeant, Philip Philip Seargeant Open University 2 A01 Korina Giaxoglou Giaxoglou, Korina Korina Giaxoglou Open University 20 chronotopes 20 emoji 20 online antagonism 20 political influencers 20 politics of outrage 20 polystorying 20 rescripting 20 social media influencers 01 In the context of the literature on practices of social media influencers, little attention has been paid, so far, to the emerging category of political influencers. This chapter examines the social media feed of a political influencer as a site of antagonistic political debate generating audience outrage. Drawing on digital ethnography and digital discourse analysis, we focus on a media event centring around a tweet posted by the British journalist Ash Sarkar on the date upon which three people were killed in a terrorist incident in a park in Reading, UK. The tweet unleashed a storm of abuse targeted at Sarkar from people erroneously relating its content to the killings. Our analysis reconstructs how this post and reactions to it created lines of dis/alignment around broad antagonistic and reactionary online discourses as a strategy of weaponizing and communicating outrage against this type of political influencer. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.06bli 148 174 27 Chapter 10 1 A01 Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich University of North Carolina at Charlotte 20 cancel culture 20 cultural appropriation 20 influencer 20 Latino/a 20 lifestyle 20 racialization of Spanish 01 The cancelation of Hilaria Baldwin, amid accusations of deception (regarding claims that she was a Spanish woman and Spanish was her native language) and Cultural Appropriation (CAPP), was a complex case, involving language ideologies, authenticity, and the racialization undergone by the Spanish language and related identities in the US, exacerbated by Cancel Culture (CC). While CC has been widely discussed in non-academic literature, recent academic scholarship on the topic largely takes a macro approach. This chapter provides a less frequent examination of cancelation processes at the micro level, analyzing user-generated posts in related YouTube videos. Drawing on discursive pragmatics and Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies, it argues that Hilaria Baldwin’s case is deeply connected to perceptions of Spanish/Latino/Hispanic identity in the US. Despite dissent on CAPP, Hilaria’s dishonesty about her background triggered her cancelation, reenforcing claims about the fundamental link between perceived immoral behavior and cancelation events as well as the high expectations regarding authenticity in influencers’ self-presentation. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.07sif 175 198 24 Chapter 11 1 A01 Maria Sifianou Sifianou, Maria Maria Sifianou National and Kapodistrian University of Athens 2 A01 Evanthia Kavroulaki Kavroulaki, Evanthia Evanthia Kavroulaki National and Kapodistrian University of Athens 20 (offensive / defensive) responses 20 conflict 20 Greek 20 impoliteness strategies 20 influencers 20 Instagram 20 sarcasm 01 This chapter aims to contribute to the study of Social Media Influencers’ (SMIs) discourse. More specifically, it explores the language practices of five prominent Greek SMIs, based on their responses to (perceived) impoliteness levelled against them on Instagram. After taking a close look at the acts provoking the conflictual reactions, we analysed 107 influencers’ responses to aggressive comments posted under their feed photos. Drawing on models of response options to impoliteness, we argue that the majority of SMIs who choose to respond to aggressive comments (mostly involving accusations and criticism) do so by resorting to offensive rather than defensive or mixed strategies (i.e., a combination of offensive and defensive ones), while the most salient offensive strategy used involves sarcasm. Interestingly, it seems that SMIs do not always avoid aggression to attain their strategic goals. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.p3 199 1 Section header 12 10 01 JB code pbns.349.08cho 200 226 27 Chapter 13 1 A01 Jan Chovanec Chovanec, Jan Jan Chovanec Masaryk University 20 affect 20 emotion economy 20 identity 20 micro-celebrity 20 pragmatics of social media 20 self-branding 20 social media 20 stance 20 YouTube 01 While significant attention has been paid to how social media influencers and content creators use diverse channels for self-presentation and self-promotion, there has been relatively less research into how they employ affective resources in on-screen interactions with their audiences. This article analyses the ways in which online micro-celebrities deploy the resources of affective stance in one specific subgenre of YouTube videos, namely reaction videos. It seeks to identify ways of how such individuals perform affect while otherwise passively watching well-known videos which they allegedly had not seen before (‘first-time watching’). Thus, influencers expose online audiences to their (seemingly) authentic reactions, involving a range of affective responses including surprise, appreciation, amusement etc. The findings reveal that YouTube influencers use affective stance in reaction videos strategically rather than spontaneously, consciously performing affect for their audiences. The article argues that such a form of performed affect is closely linked to self-branding and can be described in two ways: not only as ‘synthetic affect’, which is inauthentic and staged for the benefit of the audience, but also as ‘branded affect’, which is interlinked to the ultimate economic success of social media content creators. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.09ben 227 249 23 Chapter 14 1 A01 Dominika Beneš Kováčová Beneš Kováčová, Dominika Dominika Beneš Kováčová Masaryk University 20 authenticity 20 digital detox 20 influencers 20 Instagram 20 intimacy 20 mental health 20 multimodal discourse analysis 20 relatability 20 self-presentation 01 This paper presents a case study of an anti-stigma mental health campaign called Digital Detox Day, which was first organised in 2020 with the aim of encouraging people not to use social media for one day. Despite foregrounding the positive effects of digital detox, the campaign was paradoxically promoted by social media influencers (SMIs), whose popularity is contingent on an active online presence. To explore how SMIs position themselves in relation to the campaign and digital detox, a multimodal discourse analysis of 100 Instagram posts with the hashtag #DigitalDetoxDay was conducted. Having examined the functions of the multimodal semiotic resources adopted by the SMIs in this data, the paper shows that the #DigitalDetoxDay posts afford the SMIs’ self-presentation authenticity and relatability and thus do not disrupt but corroborate the characteristic image of SMIs. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.10per 250 277 28 Chapter 15 1 A01 Mikka Lene Pers Pers, Mikka Lene Mikka Lene Pers 20 clickbait 20 influencers 20 micro-celebrity 20 mummy vlogging 20 narrative 20 small stories research 20 social media storytelling 20 tellability 20 YouTube vlogging 01 This chapter examines how influencers present YouTube vlogs in their thumbnail picture, caption, and description box. More specifically, it documents how mummy vlogger influencers present vlogs as worth clicking by announcing content that is presented as ‘out of the ordinary’. These announcements are counter-balanced using an authenticating strategy I have called ‘spotlight speech’. This is a clickbait strategy used by vloggers to capitalise on canonical expectations to tellability in mummy vlogging. Mummy vloggers are “entrepreneurial vloggers” (Green and Burgess 2009) who generate an income from commercial practices related to the narration of their experiences of life as a mother in ‘mummy vlogs’ (Pers 2022; Kennedy 2019; Pers 2023c). This chapter is situated within a growing body of small stories research (Georgakopoulou 2007) that examines how narrative discourse practices develop through interplay between social media platform structuration and user agency. 10 01 JB code pbns.349.11dro 278 301 24 Chapter 16 1 A01 Olivia Droz-dit-Busset Droz-dit-Busset, Olivia Olivia Droz-dit-Busset Pedagogical College Bern 2 A01 Tereza Spilioti Spilioti, Tereza Tereza Spilioti Cardiff University 20 (affective) positioning 20 affect 20 authenticity 20 confession 20 content creators 20 intimacy 20 lifestyle and beauty influencers 20 multimodality 20 social media influencers 20 vulnerability 20 YouTube 01 Since the Middle Ages, confession has been one of the ‘most highly valued techniques for producing truth’ (Foucault 1978). While confessional monologues have been researched in reality TV discourse (Lorenzo-Dus 2009; Tolson 2006), the communicative potential of confessional talk for Social Media Influencers has been largely underexplored. This chapter aims to fill this gap by exploring confession as a distinct genre in the communicative repertoire of lifestyle and beauty YouTubers. In this regard, we first map this genre in terms of its key themes, formal features and media production choices. Drawing on Giaxoglou’s (2021) notion of affective positioning, we also examine how the influencers and their audiences are affectively positioned in the discourse of confessional videos through the deployment of verbal, non-verbal, as well as other material (camera) and graphic (emojis) resources. We conclude this chapter by demonstrating how this type of positioning intersects with the production of an authentic selfhood on YouTube. 02 JBENJAMINS John Benjamins Publishing Company 01 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia NL 02 December 2024 20241215 2024 John Benjamins B.V. 02 WORLD 01 JB 1 John Benjamins Publishing Company +31 20 6304747 +31 20 6739773 bookorder@benjamins.nl 01 https://benjamins.com 01 WORLD US CA MX 10 20241215 01 02 JB 1 00 115.00 EUR R 02 02 JB 1 00 121.90 EUR R 01 JB 10 bebc +44 1202 712 934 +44 1202 712 913 sales@bebc.co.uk 03 GB 10 20241215 02 02 JB 1 00 97.00 GBP Z 01 JB 2 John Benjamins North America +1 800 562-5666 +1 703 661-1501 benjamins@presswarehouse.com 01 https://benjamins.com 01 US CA MX 10 20241215 01 gen 02 JB 1 00 149.00 USD