Audience design in monologues: How vloggers involve their viewers

Abstract

This paper investigates audience design in monologues. The study uses video blogs, a spoken, asynchronous form of computer-mediated communication, to illustrate how talk reflects the lack of an immediately present audience. It is based on a corpus of English language vlogs collected from the video hosting site YouTube. The study demonstrates how speakers adapt to a mediated speech situation where there is not even minimal feedback and the speaker has to address absent viewers. Clark and Carlson's audience design (1992) and Bell's audience design (1984), introducing the notion of participant roles, are central constructs in the present study. It is argued that when vloggers (re)assign participant roles, the audience is actively involved, as they have to recognize their new status. The phenomena examined in this paper include multimodal, syntactical, and lexical features. The particular context of the medium and the monologic nature of the data will be given special consideration in the analysis of genre specific features. These include terms of address (e.g. YouTubers, YouTube, vlog fans), directives/directed language (e.g. comment, rate, and subscribe, leave me a comment). Other features under discussion include questions (how are you guys doing), voicing the audience, constructed dialogue, whispering, gestures, categorization etc.