Los títulos de los clickbait en las redes sociales desde la teoría de los actos de habla

Abstract

The article analyzed the originality of the titles in clickbait videos that appear unexpectedly on the pages of the main virtualized social networks of Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc. The purpose of the study was to analyze clickbait headlines as directive illocutionary acts on clickbait video material that appeared on virtualized social networks. The research methodology was qualitative, discourse analysis, which aimed to identify the meanings of the clickbait headlines as significant elements of the media text, and communicative-pragmatic analysis, which consists of determining the illocutionary force of the directives. The results show that the communicative success of clickbait headlines depends on the recipient’s level of knowledge of the information, which correlates with the perceiver’s degree of curiosity. Research in the media space shows that the recipient avoids excessive cognitive effort so they seek to evade clickbait headlines. The study concluded by stating that clickbait headlines allow them to be classified as a directive illocutionary act, since they deliberately obscure the nominative function itself and advance the advertising function to particularly influence the behavior of the recipient of the information.