Department of English and American Studies Advice-Giving on Twitter 2018
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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies Teaching English Language and Literature for Secondary Schools Petra Seidlová Advice-giving on Twitter Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Doc. Mgr. Jan Chovanec, PhD. 2018 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature I would like to thank my supervisor, Doc. Mgr. Jan Chovanec, PhD., for his valuable advice and support. Table of conents 1. Introduction ................................................................................................. 6 1.1. Social Media ............................................................................................ 8 1.1.1. General characteristics ...................................................................... 9 1.1.2. Twitter ............................................................................................... 9 1.1.3. Twitter facilities .............................................................................. 11 1.1.4. Privacy ............................................................................................ 13 1.2. YouTubers ............................................................................................. 14 2. Advice-giving ........................................................................................... 16 2.1. Definition .............................................................................................. 17 2.2. Phatic function ...................................................................................... 18 2.3. Speech Acts ........................................................................................... 20 2.4. Previous research in advice-giving ....................................................... 21 3. Data ........................................................................................................... 26 3.1. Methodology ......................................................................................... 27 3.2. YouTubers ............................................................................................. 29 3.2.1. Dan and Phil .................................................................................... 30 3.2.2. PewDiePie ....................................................................................... 33 3.2.3. Zoella .............................................................................................. 35 4. Analysis .................................................................................................... 38 4.1. Structural aspects of advice-giving ....................................................... 38 4.1.1. Unsolicited advice-giving ............................................................... 39 4.1.2. Solicited advice-giving ................................................................... 51 4.1.3. Meta advice ..................................................................................... 71 4.1.4. Follow-up ........................................................................................ 72 5. Conclusion ................................................................................................ 76 1. Introduction Advice-giving is a part of language present in our everyday lives. We give and receive advice both in private settings and in public spaces – at home, at schools, in workplace. As a future teacher, I consider the process of advice-giving to teenagers and young adults especially important and delicate at the same time. Moreover, I am also interested in social media and the communication occurring there, that is why I decided to combine these two areas in the present thesis. It is generally known that social media have been a part of our lives. People share there almost everything – from their work profiles to the photos from their holiday and notes about everyday struggles. And many users have found a way how to make their living exclusively by using and taking advantage of the possibilities social media offer. A concrete group of young people which is gaining more and more attention, money and influence are Youtubers. They have become the new celebrities and idols of millions of teenagers and young people based on the content and activities they create on their own YouTube channels. YouTubers are, however, not only enjoying popularity and creating fun videos. They should be considered as one of the strongest influencers nowadays. Their videos have millions of views, the speed at which their videos and ideas are shared is immense and with the growing number of people who have internet access it has never been easier to address such amount of people. Due to the feeling of closeness and understanding they are slowly replacing authorities such as teachers, actors or any advisors the young generation may look up to and seek for advice. That is why I consider it beneficiary to observe how the psychologically complex process of 6 advice-giving occurs, what are the strategies they use and whether they realize the role of an authority and behave accordingly. Therefore, the aim of the present thesis is to observe and analyse the way in which they use another social platform, Twitter, as a place where the communicative channel between the celebrities and audience is open. Concretely, the present research focuses on the process of advice-giving within the context of phatic function. It is considered a strategy of establishing the relationship and looks into the structure of advice-giving that takes place on Twitter. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter outlines the background of social media, the specifics of Twitter and other describes the way Twitter works (both on the level of its policies and on the interactional level), looks into the phenomenon of YouTubers and provides an analysis of a set of chosen Tweets depicting communication between YouTubers and their followers. The second chapter presents advice-giving from the linguistic point of view. Furthermore, it connects advice-giving with phatic function and presents the idea that it is related to establishing a relationship with the audience. In this chapter, findings from previous research in advice-giving are presented and the strategies that are relevant to the present research are emphasised. In the third chapter the collected data (i.e. the relevant tweets) are described. Moreover, the chapter also contains a brief introduction of the four YouTubers, on whose profiles I collected the relevant data. The fourth chapter presents the analytical part, where I observe the structural aspects of advice-giving on Twitter. It is further subdivided depending on whether the advice was unsolicited (4.1.1.) or solicited (4.1.2.). Each of these is further subdivided again to implicit and explicit advice-giving. Each of theses 7 then contains subchapters that outlines the respective structural aspects of advice giving and also identifies mitigating strategies used there. The following research questions are to be answered: 1. Are there any crucial differences in the behaviour of the YouTubers as far as the structure and content of advice-giving is concerned? 2. What are the typical content structures in advice-giving? (Locher, 2007, p.52) 3. What are the typical “syntactic realizations” (Locher, 2007, p. 52) of advice-giving on Twitter? 4. What mitigating strategies are applied when YouTubers give advice to their audience (and vice versa)? 5. What is the typical content structure of follow-up? 1.1. Social Media This chapter is dedicated to short introduction of the two social platforms that are connected to the present research – Twitter and YouTube. I outline some general characteristics of social media and then summarize some of the most important features of Twitter, its facilities, terminology and the discrepancy between private and public space. Moreover, I also introduce the phenomenon of YouTubers who are the main protagonists and authors of significant part of the primary material. I consider such introduction relevant to the topic since each of the existing platforms has a different scope of freedom, has different approach to privacy and thus users act differently on each. 8 1.1.1. General characteristics It is without a doubt that the change in communication that was caused by the rise of new social media was immense. It all begin with the introduction of computers and new technologies in general. From what we can observe in various fictional books and movies, it was believed that the biggest technological advance would appear in the transport industry or artificial intelligence, whereas the progress that occurred on the level of communication was something quite unexpected. It all began with the invention of the World Wide Web in 1991 which “gave a new impetuous to the liaison between geek culture and counterculture. As the WWW consortium began to build global standardized infrastructure, communities of enthusiastic users began to churn out applications for the Web” (Van Dijck, p. 10, 2013). As Van Dijck (2013) further points out, their instant growth was not (as sometimes mistakenly supposed) based on their technological design, but rather on the “capacity for two-way communication” (p. 10), it gave the users the possibility to react, get involved and communicate with each other. The inclusion of the readers and audience to the process was most probably an attractive and new way of social interaction, and therefore