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Abstract

The demotic turn of celebrity culture denotes the increasing opportunities for the participation of ordinary people in the media (Turner, 2010). Consequently, there has been an influx of YouTube vloggers who, having millions of subscribers have gained celebrity status from filming their daily lives. These celebrities monetise their videos to gain income from advertisement revenue. The more views a video has, the more money these celebrities earn, thus showing the need for them produce enticing and unique video material to maintain their visibility, fame and income. Consequently, this has led to many academics (e.g. Keen 2007; Pihlaja 2014; Bishop 2019), criticising YouTube celebrity culture for being characterised by antagonism and deception to increase their views. Such behaviour by YouTube celebrity vloggers can be argued to support the notion of Weber’s rationalisation – the organisation of social life according to the principles of efficiency and modes of precise calculation (Giddens and Sutton, 2017) – being present in this field. Therefore, due to limited existing literature, this research aims to investigate how viewers’ interest is maintained by YouTube celebrities and to what extent YouTube celebrity culture is characterised by rationalisation.
Criteria and extreme purposive sampling were used to thematically analyse three vlogs from three celebrity vloggers. The research found YouTube celebrity vloggers to transgress norms, reinforce essentialist notions of sex, community build, produce adventurous content and use deceptive click mechanisms which overall showed the YouTube celebrities to exercise high degrees of attention capital and rebellious self-presentation to maintain interest. Rationalisation heavily resonated with these celebrity YouTube vloggers especially through calculability and profit-seeking behaviour.

Course: Sociology - BSc (Hons) - C0315

Date Deposited: 2020-10-14

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis13573.html