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. 2019 Dec 6;5(12):e02988. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e02988

Shaping values with "YouTube freedoms": linguistic representation and axiological charge of the popular science IT-discourse

Tatyana Shiryaeva a, Amaliya Arakelova a, Elena Golubovskaya b, Nataliya Mekeko b,c,∗
PMCID: PMC6911952  PMID: 31872136

Abstract

Drawing on the studies of linguistics, axiology and discourse analysis, this paper contributes to the linguistic framework of value-based communication studies by establishing the algorithm of shaping values in popular science IT discourse via the set of linguo-axiological methods. The authors' aims include establishing dominating communicative strategies employed by the authors of the texts; identifying language structures and lexical means responsible for the both explicit and implicit formation and verbalization of certain values represented in the texts about YouTube; organizing the identified values into a system as presented by the authors of the texts. The paper uncovers dominant YouTube text characteristics, focusing on the instrumental role of values this type of discourse represents, and implements a complex methodological set (CDA and linguo-axiological analysis) in order to outline three basic communicative strategies that the authors of the texts employ: the information strategy; the instruction strategy; the evaluation strategy. The conducted research reveals that the texts of mass media about YouTube contain the following values, classified by the authors into three axiological groups: relevance (approval, authenticity, entertainment, fame, influence, popularity); relationship (accessibility, connection, feedback, relatability); profession (career, competitiveness, money, promotion, time). The results of the study include theoretical conclusions about how the modern-day discourse of information technology (IT-discourse) reflects both fundamental and profession-specific human values, thus shaping the way addressees perceive the industry through language. These findings make it possible to form a new type of IT-discourse text architecture, which would take into account the pragmatic-axiological charge necessary to shape and divert the set of addressees’ values.

Keywords: Linguistics, Communicative strategy, Discourse analysis, IT-Discourse, Values, Value system, YouTube

Linguistics; Communicative strategy; Discourse analysis; IT-Discourse; Values; Value system; YouTube.

1. Introduction

The phenomenon of video hosting services and increasingly popular video-streaming platforms has changed the cultural narrative of many countries, making the voices of individuals from various backgrounds heard and listened to. It has also turned the Internet into a powerful tool of audio-visual self-expression, allowing millions of people to entertain, influence and inform each other, as well as create their own agenda.

One of the most influential platforms to interact on and build a community around is YouTube (youtube.com), an American video-sharing website, which allows people to create video channels, upload, view, rate, share and comment on videos. Yet, what it essentially allows its users is, in the website's own words, a number of “freedoms”: freedom of expression, freedom of information, freedom of opportunity and freedom to belong (youtube.com, 2019), which makes YouTube one of the most dynamic spheres of societal creative practice and exchange.

However, it seems that today the image of YouTube is shaped not only through the content and opportunities that it offers, but also through the narrative built around it. YouTube increasingly attracts attention of the media that in turn voice most prominent driving concepts lying behind the success on the platform as well as provide commentary on the issues existing within the sphere of computer mediated communication or brought about through such. This kind of relationship between video services and mass media motivates current research paper, as it seems relevant to establish the role of mass media texts in shaping the public's perception of YouTube, and, furthermore, to look into the linguistic aspects of certain values which are verbalized and spread through the language of the texts about YouTube.

Currently, various forms and functions of numerous online services and platforms motivate extensive scientific research which can be categorized based on the focus of the studies. Research papers cover such aspects of information technology as discursive and sociolinguistic features of the content shared online, for example, videos (Calhoun, 2019), images, hashtags (De Cock and Pizarro Pedraza, 2018); discuss interpersonal and mass communication processes, which influence and shape communication produced by mass media (Lee and Tandoc, 2017) as well as “opinion climates” (Neubaum and Krämer, 2017). There are studies that observe online social behavior and evaluate the effect that social networks have on its users in regards to the factor of connectedness (e.g., decreased or increased feeling of loneliness, online ostracism or heightened sense of connection) (Ryan et al., 2017).

YouTube is primarily studied through the lens of sociolinguistics, while researchers concentrate on the communication features inherent in creators on the platform, e.g. they evaluate the connection between languages, digital products in the form of videos and interaction that accompanies culture and nationality-specific media content (Dlaske, 2017). Along with studying the impact within the platform, researchers turn to outward changes in individual, professional, institutional behavior (Shogan, 2010; Grube, 2017), together with studying users’ emotions and reactions (Dale et al., 2017).

Yet, despite the fact of increased attention of various scholars towards the new media and particularly to the video sharing platform YouTube, to date scholars have not looked into the specifics of intentional and unintentional creation and dissemination of values by professionals, i.e. journalists in the texts that they produce on the topic of YouTube. Yet, these texts form a distinctive opinion of the industry, people involved and the impact YouTube has on the lives of individuals. Moreover, a closer study of axiological characteristics of the modern-day IT-discourse could be a starting point for further interdisciplinary research aimed at establishing the connection between the values of a community, their communicative models and behavioral patterns.

This study is an attempt to fill the gap in the scientific knowledge of axiologically charged communication. For the first time professionally compiled written texts about IT are viewed as a tool for creation and dissemination of a system of values which affects the addressee and shapes certain ways to perceive technology and, ultimately, YouTube. The novelty of the conducted research is also conditioned by the fact that apparently never before have linguists attempted to identify, analyze and structure the most prominent value entities verbalized by professionals and aimed at non-professionals in the texts which popularize this technological platform and constitute the narrative about YouTube. Finally, it is important to mention that within this research, language materials covering YouTube in mass media are regarded as an information and communication phenomenon in its own right. It is, thus, studied as such from the standpoint of several branches of social sciences, and more prominently, linguistics.

The objectives of this study, thus, include (1) analyzing the language materials on the topic of YouTube and establishing dominating communicative strategies employed by the texts’ authors, (2) identifying values explicitly and implicitly verbalized in the analyzed texts, (3) defining linguistic features of these values and organizing them into a system as they are presented by the authors of the texts, i.e. professionals.

2. Literature review

2.1. Scientific findings on YouTube and current research motivation

Since YouTube today is one of the most effective tools for various kinds of transformations, it is analyzed and researched in regards to its versatile properties. One of the areas of scientific exploration deals with technological aspects of YouTube's functioning, namely with describing algorithms which the platform uses to promote video-content (Bisht et al., 2019), or the ways in which video creators can achieve success via developing branding strategies, including personal branding strategies (see Kuitunen, 2019).

Another way to examine YouTube is in regards to its practical and social use. There are studies that look into how YouTube could contribute to the learning process and education in general. Its advantages are identified in several research papers, covering both on-line learning and real-life classroom activities: Snelson (2009); Snelson et al. (2012); Krauskopf et al. (2012); Bardakcı (2019); Bakar et al. (2019).

Yet, there are certain concerns about YouTube's influence, which are voiced by sociologists. In the book Power, Surveillance, and Culture in YouTube™'s Digital Sphere (2016), M. Crick examines the “imaginative, socioeconomic, and innovative features of the video sharing community of YouTube” and how these areas threaten the digital world along and its users with certain social repercussions (Crick, 2016). A similar worry is expressed by Z. Tufekci, according to whom YouTube's successful employment of the cutting-edge AI leads to more view-time on the website and to the new ways of searching and using the information offered by the videos, particularly by younger generations (Tufekci, 2019). Moreover, social anxiety may be directly or indirectly associated with YouTube addiction (Béraila et al., 2019).

A great deal of studies view YouTube as a communicative system, which allows its users to communicate certain ideas, information, any content, for that matter, in certain ways. These studies concentrate on defining various features of the versatile Internet communication (Morain and Swarts, 2012, p. 6; Wöllmer et al., 2013; Adami, 2009, p. 379; Beck, 2015), its forms and participatory frameworks as well as gender-specific communicative behavior (Dynel, 2014; Amarasekara and Grant, 2019), analyze the ways YouTube creators present themselves and construct an explicit and relatable identity through their content (Taylor, 2006; Strangelove, 2010; Bhatia, 2018).

Ng (2018) integrates Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis to compare news discourse on Facebook and YouTube and as a result identifies such features of news broadcasts as coherence, intertextuality and multimodality, which means that these platforms engage with consumers, trigger discussion, allow personal interpretation and promote ideologies (Ng, 2018).

YouTube is also a subject for research within corpus linguistics where efforts have been made to create a corpus of regional language variation for English based on the study of spoken language used in videos on YouTube (Coats, 2019).

Yet, it seems that there are no substantial attempts to look into how and why IT and YouTube are portrayed in the myriad of texts of different genres, produced by mass media, i.e. professionals. Within linguistics and axiological linguistics, seemingly no studies have been conducted with the aim to explore professionally compiled texts about YouTube as an information and communication system which spreads certain instructions, notions, values, as well as utilizes a number of communication strategies to reach and influence the addresser. This particular study strives to fill this void and aims not only to identify the actual values that the addressers of the texts spread, study the linguistic form and instrumental role of the recurrent values, but also characterize how the narrative around YouTube along with its image are created through mass media texts.

2.2. YouTube text characteristics

Communication facilitated by social media is studied in a variety of ways, among which there is a trend of exploring the ways the narrative is built, how storytelling is achieved and what its features are (participation frameworks, user engagement, interactional dynamics, etc.) (De Fina, 2016). While some scientific works concentrate on YouTube as a medium for communication with its direct and indirect influence on the people engaged in video production or consumption (or both), there is an approach to studying YouTube, according to which this platform is viewed as a type of discourse in its own right, with its processes, content, textually-mediated social interaction and multimodality (Benson, 2016).

We believe that YouTube is definitely a discursive entity, which entails communication happening not only on the platform, but also about the platform. In order to be able to conduct the research, it was critical for the authors of this article to differentiate between professionally generated texts and non-professional communication on the subject of YouTube, as the pragmatics, modality and linguistic means of these types of communication are different.

Computer mediated communication is characterized as asynchronous, i.e. involving an infinite number of participants that can assume different communicative roles (participatory statuses), depending on the interaction model and whether they are at a production or perception end. Furthermore, in Myers, 2003) (Myers, 2003), we see a critical view of how solid the distinction is between expert audience and lay audience (non-professionals). According to the author, people have the status of an expert in a limited number of contexts or spheres and lose it once they step out of their specialism. At the same time, members of the public (i.e. lay audience) when exposed to certain experiences may become aware and knowledgeable to the degree where they have equally much or more information and experience in certain areas than the formal expert audience (Myers, 2003, p. 267).

As for communication facilitated between readers of the articles about YouTube and the authors of these articles, we believe it to be dyadic (de Saussure, 1974; Jakobson, 1960), meaning that, despite the infinite number of potential recipients, the communicative roles cannot change, nor are the texts flexible in their modality towards each particular addressee. Although the texts about YouTube are aimed at a particular readership, still they are shaped and linguistically formed to reach the widest audience possible in such a way and to the extent that would allow the sender to convey various meanings and/or influence the recipients.

As other types of mass media and new media, texts about YouTube, among other things, simultaneously “serve to mediate society to itself” (Matheson, 2005, p. 2) and possess the power to influence what meanings they create and why. According to D. Matheson (Matheson, 2005, p. 2), “media professionals in general are able to write or speak in authoritative ways about the world, making claims to know what other people feel or what is really happening which few others in society could get away with. They do so to the extent that they draw on the authoritative discourses of journalism and other media practices.” (Matheson, 2005, p. 2). This is especially true due to the fact that media help to convert specific professional knowledge into an understandable format accessible for general public, which as a result contributes to creation and dissemination of ideologies (Ericson et al., 1987).

At first glance, popular science texts about YouTube are aimed to inform the reader on many aspects of the video hosting platform and raise awareness of the current trends. However, a more thorough linguistic research of the texts allows us to obtain a deeper understanding of the authors’ motives and communicative purposes. While “interactive writing spaces such as blogs and social network sites.

make possible very different forms of social interaction than those found in face-to-face conversation and traditional written texts” (Jones et al., 2015, p. 1), the latter still have to include various linguistic expressive means and belong to traditional genres with their respective features in order to reach the recipient and represent the author's agenda. A great deal of pragmatic and discourse interpretation in such cases has to address and assess not only the overall text features, but also explore the most prominent notions expressed verbally by the creators of the texts, i.e. values.

2.3. Instrumental role of values

For the sake of further discussion and to avoid ambiguous terminology, it is important to note that this research does not touch upon economic value or economic worth of objects or practices, but deals with non-economic value forms, i.e. moral values. Together with social and economic factors, values shape individual and professional action models and choices of a person. One of the primary ideas behind this research is that there are values shared by cultures or nations, by communities or individuals as well as values, shared by the majority of people on the planet.

Along with in-depth studies of values and their functioning, the ways they are imposed upon people and the way values are set up as a system (Findlay, 1977; Fried, 1970), there are research papers that explore the patterns in which moral values influence sharing on social media, e.g. according to S. Valenzuela, a morality frame is a factor that encourages sharing, while a conflict frame leads to decreased sharing activity on some social networks (Valenzuela et al., 2017). Researchers also concentrate on the cognitive biases and value-based interaction models in comment sections, which lead to certain perceptions, judgements and behavior not only on the part of the audience (Spence et al., 2019), but also on the part of journalists that monitor the comments and create content in mass media (Muddiman and Stroud, 2017). Another trend refers to cross-cultural axiological analysis of digital behavior of different social group, e.g. students (Shuter et al., 2018; Fetherston et al., 2018).

While it is obviously impossible to create a generalized system or classification of values shared by all video creators that contribute content to the website (youtube.com) due to their varied personalities and, of course, the number of such users, it seems a fitting aim of social and linguistic research to identify and describe the image of the platform shaped by mass media through texts about YouTube. Since communication through media texts involves people belonging to a certain professional group or society, it reflects the value system of this professional community rather than the individual authors of these texts. Admittedly, there is a connection between how professional communities interpret, categorize and conceptualize the world and the way their knowledge acquires its linguistic form (Dyer and Keller-Kohen, 2000; Holmes and Marra, 2005; Shiryaeva et al., 2018). The use of certain language forms and styles makes it possible to create individual and institutional narratives (Schiffrin, 1996), to convey meanings and construct identity that would signify membership of people belonging to professional communities (Solly, 2015). A careful study of the profession-related or institutional communication allows us to dissect the most prominent value entities, which not only reflect the vision of the producers of texts, but also cater for the diversity of other aims, such as establishing a relationship with the recipients of the texts and shaping their opinions.

According to D. Narvaes, values can be defined as a “perceptual-action feature of our behavior”, which can change depending on the situation, social context, cultural upbringing and personal traits (Narvaez, 2019, p. 346). While some values are acquired by people across generations and inherited through evolutionary processes (the so-called “horizontal” influences), others are shaped throughout a person's lifespan, mostly in childhood, but also further in life (“vertical influences”) (Narvaez, 2019, p. 351). The second set of influences includes culture- and community specific behavioral patterns and moral orientations among other factors.

Furthermore, we agree with H. Frankfurt on the idea that for the majority of people the requirements of ethics and morality are not the only things that define a person's behavior and life choices (Frankfurt, 1988). This leads us to believe that along with moral universal values there are other values, which a person identifies with and is devoted to, such as personal projects, professional aims, other individuals, etc.

2.4. Expansion of professional values

Professional values, being the kind of orientations shaped later in life, are acquired by individuals in the course of their professional activities. However, the opposite is also true: there are cases when professional values enter the realms of everyday life and not only influence the way people perceive their job-related decision making processes and communication, but also penetrate other spheres of human interaction, such as business, social integration, entertainment, etc. According to D. Carr, it is often a case that maintaining standards of good practice within certain professions is not enough: there are additional requirements to meet that are imposed by a society, e.g. ethical regulations, principles and morals, which extend beyond the profession-related activity (Carr, 2000).

There are also professional activities, which have a social goal to them, as a number of professions is set in a social context. Through creation of written texts, professional communities transmit disciplinary values not only within themselves, but also to the general public. Hence, language is a vehicle that manages to educate, shape responses and interpretations (Orna-Montesinos, 2012).

We believe that transition of values into every day life is characteristic of the discourse of IT generated by the professionals. An example of such transition may be the concept of “content quality” on social media, such as YouTube or Instagram. The emergence of these services meant a great deal of experimentation for their users with only a select few focusing on high-quality content from the start, i.e. people professionally involved in video-making, photography, marketing, promotion. For this category of people content quality is a professional value without which success and other profession-related milestones could not be achieved. Yet, with the development of interaction on these platforms and a new-discovered opportunity for creation and reinvention of the image of self as well as the prospect of financial gain, more users have evolved their accounts, turning them into more sophisticated versions with a thought-out content and coherence, both visual and verbal, which often (but not always so) reflect their personality, their interests and orientations in real life.

3. Materials and methods

3.1. Materials

In order to contribute to the study of professional communication on the topic of YouTube and explore its linguistic and axiological features, it was important for the authors of this article to (1) build the corpus of texts and (2) decide on the methods that would accommodate for the outlined research objectives.

Several criteria have been employed while choosing the language materials for the study. All of the selected articles had to be published in known mass media publications operating for the period of at least 10 years: the most recent of the selected sources is the digital version of NBC News – launched in 1996 (Stelter, 2010), while the oldest source is The Washington Post – established in 1877 (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998). The selected text sources had to be fully or partially devoted to covering the topic of information technology. As a result, we have selected a corpus of 30 articles (201,722 characters), reporting about the video hosting service YouTube, which were published in the following technology magazines and newspapers in 2016–2019: www.computerworld.com, www.wired.com, www.theguardian.com, www.forbes.com, www.nbcnews.com, www.washingtonpost.com. Hence, this article reflects the main conclusions of a systematic content analysis of the professionally compiled texts published in notable editorial press and on-line sources devoted to reviews of information technology and aimed at non-professional readers.

4. Methods

To meet the aims of the study, we turned to a combination of methods and approaches to language study. Since this research was aimed at analyzing a certain type of discourse (the IT-discourse), we viewed the texts from the standpoint of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which examines language use within a certain context, i.e. in regards to social practice, ideology and social power, all of which influence communication (Fairclough, 1995). Following Wodak and Meyer's principles of CDA (Wodak and Meyer, 2008), we investigated linguistic units alongside other phenomena, employing a multidisciplinary and multi-methodical approach in order to perceive and study the complex social, technological and language phenomenon of YouTube.

Among central ideas of Critical Discourse Analysis are the conceptions of power, discourse, control: CDA operates under the assumption that institutions possess discursive resources and power to bring about and maintain inequality or exercise certain control over social groups, to order and influence what people talk about and the way they do it (Hidalgo Tenorio, 2011; Wodak and Meyer, 2008). In a similar way to discourse analysis, CDA focuses on the means and results of language integration into social and psychological phenomena, but the role of language within this framework is that of a power tool (Willig, 2014). In Djik (Van Dijk, 1993), more control over more properties of text and context is argued to have direct impact on knowledge, beliefs, understandings, ideologies, norms, values (Van Dijk, 1993: 257), and in this case the aim of an analyst is to unveil hidden meanings and establish power acts of those in the position of dominance.

According to N. Fairclough (2001), “discourses include representations of how things are and have been, as well as imaginaries – representations of how things might or could or should be” (Fairclough, 2001, p. 457). Possible articulations of social practices may include imagined activities, social subjects, social relations, instruments, objects, values (Fairclough, 2001). In this sense, we presume, the texts about YouTube are to viewed as potentially capable of not only defining the actual reality, but also shaping a possible one.

N. Fairclough also offers a Three-Dimensional Approach to CDA, according to which the three dimensions of a discourse are the text, discursive practice and social practice: the process of producing a text includes such steps as production, distribution and consumption of the text, all of which are predetermined by social practice (Fairclough, 1995). Thus, to facilitate research procedures, CDA employs social theory, semiotics, text linguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, while its methods are generally interpretive (Wodak, 2009).

The analysis within the CDA framework can be carried out top-down: “analysts begin with their understanding of the content; or bottom-up, where the starting point is the linguistic detail” (Hidalgo Tenorio, 2011), or as a combination of both – as was the case with this study. Decoding the meanings integrated into sentences and texts and viewing the ways these meanings played out in particular contexts was an analytical procedure that required a more conscious approach of the authors of this paper towards language and content analysis.

Furthermore, we took into consideration the idea of a twofold nature of power: on the one hand, there is the power of discourse, on the other hand, there is the power over discourse (Jäger and Maier, 2009). It is fair to say that as a phenomenon, YouTube influences the English language and is influenced by how it is talked about. Journalists contributing to the discourse of information technology have institutional power over their readers which is provided by the medium they use to spread meanings as well as the long-standing tradition of being the voice heard and listened to by the many.

Due to the fact that YouTube and the narrative that surrounds it define and influence the lives of both creators and users of the platform in a certain way, the scope of this study could not be limited to the analysis of the discourse-specific values outside a wider cultural and social context. Hence, extra-linguistic factors had to be taken into consideration and combined with what the language analysis contributed to the research, especially since many of the analyzed articles provided commentary on the social, political and economic aspects of the modern-day life in the USA.

Overall analysis of the texts and a closer look at the authors’ modality enabled us to pinpoint the main communicative strategies (Enkvist, 1987) that the authors of the texts use as they strive to reach the readers and bring forward certain meanings and ideas. Within this area of study we concentrated on the various features of the written reader-oriented communication (content specifics, communicative intention of the author, linguistic means of conveying modality, style, structure of the texts), which is designed in such a way that would enable addressers to achieve their goals in the process of discourse creation.

Linguistics and axiology played a crucial role in studying the values verbalized in the texts of the corpus. These two branches of social sciences are aimed at exploring the ways in which values are shaped and spread with the help of language, starting with the level of morphology and lexis and ending with establishing syntagmatic bonds that words verbalizing values create.

Although lexical means are not the only ways in which value entities are embodied in the texts, they are the most actively employed ones. In order to identify values in the context we paid attention to the words with the so-called prescriptive meaning, which, according to R.M. Hare, serve to single out and recommend a nominated object among other such-like objects and influence people's opinions, attitudes, beliefs (Hare, 1967). Furthermore, it was important to look at the frequency of certain notions, ideas or phenomena expressed verbally in the texts. The most recurrent entities, in some cases accompanied with the positive assessment lexemes, were given a thorough research and identified as values.

The algorithm for defining the name of a value consisted of two steps: (1) identifying the most frequent lexeme used for an idea or notion in the texts, (2) conducting the semantic analysis to establish similarities and differences between synonymous lexemes. The latter included consulting monolingual dictionaries of the English language, identifying semantic features prevalent in all lexemes through which values could be verbalized in the texts, and choosing the lexeme which represented the essence of the value entity most clearly and fully. As a result, each value verbalized in the texts has been given a name, i.e. identified through the dominant lexeme. It is important to mention, though, that besides the dominant lexeme, there is a group of other words that denote the same value entity in the texts, i.e. the so-called lexical-semantic group of a value. Together with a dominant lexeme, this group of words comprises the verbal form of a value, its lexical-semantic set, which allows authors of the texts to express and promote certain ideas, communication and behavior patterns and opinions.

4.1. Procedure

The procedure for the current research reflects the study goals and implied starting with a broader analysis of the IT-discourse and moving to more specific value-oriented analytical procedures, which dealt both with meaning and form of the language phenomena that were under study. In order to answer the research questions, the authors of the article took a number of steps in the following order:

  • 1

    Deciding on the sources of language materials and selecting them: these had to meet the criteria mentioned above (be professional publications, partially or fully devoted to IT)

  • 2

    Selecting texts for the corpus with special regard to the authors of the texts (professionals) as well as thematic and genre features of the articles

  • 3

    Conducting content analysis of the selected texts with the purpose of establishing (a) communicative strategies employed by the addressers, and (b) recurrent central ideas, axiologically-charged notions or phenomena

  • 4

    Carrying out the definition analysis of the most relevant lexemes used to verbalize the recurring axiologically marked phenomena or ideas, i.e. values

  • 5

    Compilation of the lexical-semantic set of the values verbalized in the texts with regard to both the dominant lexeme and the additional lexical set through which the value acquires the linguistic form

  • 6

    Categorizing and systematizing the identified values into a system based on their semantics

  • 7

    Analyzing the ways in which the use of the identified values is an attempt to shape the image of YouTube and influence the addressee.

Identification of communicative strategies involved conducting content analysis along with the linguistic analysis of the language items used for their implementation. In the cases when more than one strategy was used by the author of the text, we used the following methods to be able to define the dominating strategy: a) the assessment of the pragmatics of the text fragment, i.e. the interpretation of the general aim of the author (“Why write about this?“, “Why write about this in this way?“) b) the quantitative analysis of the number of lexical means used for the verbalization of each strategy.

5. Results and discussion

Despite the fact of increased attention paid by scholars, and linguists in particular, to the phenomenon of YouTube, all the data gathered in the course of this research, as well as the conclusions made by the authors are unique in terms of their novelty – to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this scientific endeavor has not been undertaken before. The analysis of the selected texts on the topic of YouTube enabled us to establish the main linguistic and discourse features of this type of written communication as well as discover a series of values, which create a concept of what YouTube is or what it should be. The results of this study conducted at the interface of linguistics, axiology, discourse analysis and social science also include theoretical conclusions concerning not only the verbal means of value representation, but also the role of the identified values in the discourse of information technology.

The first important point to mention based on the gathered research results is that the producers of the texts build their narrative around their professional knowledge and experience concerning the video-hosting platform YouTube. They voice and spread certain guidelines, recommendations, attitudes, advice and assessments. The pragmatics of mass media texts about YouTube varies, but it has been possible to outline three basic communicative strategies that the authors of the texts employ, namely (1) the information strategy: the sender describes or explains the latest trends of YouTube and the events around it; (2) the instruction strategy: the addresser gives instructions on how to use the platform in order to be successful; (3) the evaluation strategy: the primary aim of the addresser is to give a person, a trend, a technology, etc. his/her evaluation or assessment. However, we do not exclude the possibility of this list of strategies to be broadened if a bigger number of texts is analyzed. Let us examine the way the instruction strategy is realized via certain language means in the following fragment:

Is YouTube stardom in your future? Could be, but the platform just made it a little bit harder to make money off of your videos.

At least initially. The company is instituting a change where new creators won't start making money right away – and perhaps not everyone will be accepted into its Partner Program. But don't worry yet, because the threshold to enter the program is still relatively low. So what do you need to know?

Dave Smith shares some background:

“YouTube… said… creators would no longer be able to monetize their channels until they received 10,000 lifetime views.

Once a channel reaches that threshold, YouTube will review it against its policies to see if the channel is OK to begin making money…this is...to help discourage scam artists and content creators that violate YouTube's policy from making money on the platform”.

OK, but can we get some more info? Allen Cone adds some details:

“YouTube...announced changes after several big companies pulled their advertising from...YouTube after their ads appeared in extremist hate-speech videos”. (Linke, 2017 (a))

Drawing on the experience of the tech correspondent (Dave Smith) and the journalists who write about social media and personal technology, the author of the text, herself being not only a journalist, but also an assisting manager of Computerworld's Facebook and Google + pages, provides a news analysis of the tech industry. However, the outcome of such summary is more than just an overall account of a situation with YouTube partner program and valuable insights into the topic: in a way, it is also a handbook for those who are starting out in the field of video creation and get involved in the financially rewarding activities on YouTube. Rhetorical questions that the author asks in her article (Is YouTube stardom in your future? So what do you need to know?) address the reader in a way that allows the author both to engage and acknowledge the reader's particular presence as a participant of the “conversation”. Intersubjectivity here is realized via the construction of the reader-in-the-text: the use of pronouns you/your helps the author to shape a reader-character, who represents a singular individual (as opposed to a generalized mass audience) with whom a reader can relate (Pilkington, 2018; Thompson, 2012), and thus to reach the recipient on a personalized level (Fairclough, 1989).

At the same time, there is a question in the text which serves the purpose of creating the sense of affiliation between the reader and the author: OK, but can we get some more info? Via inclusive language – the interactant pronoun we – the reader or is included into a group of the unaware together with the author of the text.

Moreover, the instruction strategy implemented in the article is characterized by the use of imperatives: But don't worry yet, because… This kind of modality means that the author of the article is actually in the position of knowledge and superiority towards the recipient, since the latter, despite the authoritative tone of the addresser, is going to benefit from the advice given in the text.

It is important to note, however, that there are texts that include more than one strategy, in which case one of the strategies is a dominating one, while the other(s) is supplementary. In the example above, it is possible to say that along with instructing the recipients, the addresser also informs them about the ever-changing YouTube policy providing them with the necessary numbers and facts (creators would no longer be able to monetize their channels until they received 10,000 lifetime views).

A more vivid example of the information strategy is presented in the following fragment:

British vlogger Zoella has just reached the milestone of 10m subscribers to her main YouTube channel, but she has a long way to go to catch its most popular creator PewDiePie, who is about to pass 42m.

They're just two of the most prominent YouTube stars. In October 2015, online-video tracking firm Tubular Labs reported that there were more than 17,000 YouTube channels with more than 100,000 subscribers, and nearly 1,500 with more than 1m.

How have these YouTubers become so popular? It can seem baffling to people outside their main viewing demographic: smartphone-toting “millennials” who spend as much time (if not more) watching shortform video online as they do traditional TV shows.

Yet the top YouTube stars aren't just popular: they are genuinely influential figures for their young fans. A fact that entertainment industry magazine Variety has been confronting its readers with since 2014 (Dredge, 2016).

Generally, in order to be able to follow trends and stay up-to-date, readers expect to be informed about the latest developments in the IT industry. Presumably, it is the interest towards this particular sphere that constitutes the motivation (at least partially) for reading such articles in the first place, so the criteria for choosing the information source may be the ability of a publication to cater for the information needs of its readers. In the case of YouTube, the information may get outdated the moment it is out or even before it has been published, so providing readers with relevant and timely reports is both a challenge and a competitive advantage of a news source. In the text fragment above, the information technology is realized via certain grammatical structures which have temporal reference: has just reached the milestone (the Present Perfect tense form + just indicate the immediacy of the event/achievement), who is about to pass 42m (the expression about to do prepares the reader for the result in the nearest future), Variety has been confronting its readers … since 2014 (Present Perfect Continuous used to illustrate the length of the period during which the readers may not have been paying attention to some facts). Furthermore, a large number of comparatives and superlatives serves the aim of putting across the idea of how dynamic and influential YouTube is as a business outlet and how increasingly competitive the platform is becoming: its most popular creator, two of the most prominent YouTube stars, more than 17,000 YouTube channels, more than 100,000 subscribers, nearly 1,500, more than 1m, spend as much time (if not more). Hence, via rich detail in the form of factual information and certain grammar, this text raises awareness of its readers, provides them with statistics that may be hard to put together and reveals the current and upcoming trends both within the video platform and the society.

Analysis of the data also reveals that the image of YouTube is vastly shaped through a series of important concepts verbalized by the addressers. The role of (professional) values in the text is paramount as they both reflect the author's vision and influence that of the recipients' creating a conception of how YouTube is organized, where it is headed and how it expects its users to act on the platform and even outside of it. The conducted research revealed the following values verbalized in the texts of mass media about YouTube: accessibility, approval, authenticity, career, competitiveness, connection, entertainment, fame, feedback, influence, money, popularity, promotion, relatability, time. The identified values reflect most prominent aspirations of YouTube video-creators as portrayed by the tech journalists who rely on their experience with the service and professionally gathered knowledge. It appears that semantically, these values could be classified into three axiological groups, which we named after the uniting idea behind each group of values: RELEVANCE, RELATIONSHIP, PROFESSION (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Axiological groups of the values verbalized in the texts of mass media about YouTube.

RELEVANCE approval
authenticity
entertainment
fame
influence
popularity
RELATIONSHIP accessibility
connection
feedback
relatability
PROFESSION career
competitiveness
money
promotion
time
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Having analyzed the semantic and linguistic features of the verbalized values in the value groups Relevance and Relationship, we established that these two groups are to a greater extent viewer-oriented, i.e. they reflect complex connections that video creators establish with their audience, while the group Profession is more creator-oriented and includes values connected with career development, financial success and competitiveness, which comprise one of the most common human aspirations across industries and nations.

All of the identified values reflect the addressers' axiological worldview and often capture the most important information of the texts. In the example below the author of the fragment analyzes successful video-creators’ activities on YouTube, drawing the reader's attention to one particular tool/value that helped these users to achieve considerable results – the value of connection:

The key thing to understand about YouTube stars is that the content of their videos – whether it's Let's Play game commentaries, makeup tutorials or personal vlogs – is only one half of their appeal.

The connection to their audience is the other: they have grown up with the tools to forge and strengthen that connection, and many will use that as their anchor to keep feet on the ground (Dredge, 2016).

Here, the addresser suggests taking connection into consideration if one is striving for fame and popularity enabled by the medium of YouTube (The key thing to understand about YouTube stars is that the content of their videos… is only one half of their appeal). Moreover, it does not matter what kind of content one creates in terms of its topicality and thematic orientation, as long as there is a connection with the people consuming that content: the value of that connection is explicitly verbalized through the phrase The key thing to understand…, namely the lexeme key. However, the connection to the audience is portrayed as not only an aspect that successful YouTubers have to work on, but also as a way to stay real and true to themselves and their fans (many will use that as their anchor to keep feet on the ground).

Another aspect of staying connected is via the technological and social network that YouTube encourages and allows its users to have across many social platforms. In the following text fragment, the value of connection is verbalized by means of the lexical-semantic set that embodies the idea of ultimate interconnectedness:

Any video you upload to YouTube has the potential to be shared across your social channels as well. If you engage with your social media followers regularly, they'll probably start following you on your other platforms. If you have existing social followers on platforms like Facebook or Twitter, it won't take much convincing them to subscribe to your YouTube channel (DeMers, 2018).

To share across social channels, to engage with followers, to get the following on other platforms like Facebook or Twitter, to have the followers subscribe to the YouTube channel means not only staying in touch, but also increasing the reach in terms of digital omnipresence.

Thus, the communicative intention of the authors of the texts which verbalize the value of connection is to illustrate the importance of staying in touch with the addressees of their videos or streams as well as to draw on the various forms, ways and purposes of establishing and maintaining connection on and outside the platform. The value itself represents the idea of constant ever-growing connection as the only way to function and develop as a professional.

Let us now turn to the pragmatics and semantics of another value entity belonging to a different axiological group (RELEVANCE) – the value of influence. The extent to which visual, verbal and audio information has the ability to impact the lives of people and contribute to overall social and communication practices of YouTubers is reflected in the term “influencer”, which today is primarily applied to describing successful creators with mass following on social networks. Influencers shape certain behavioral stereotypes, encourage certain beliefs, thus dissolving the boundaries between the platforms (Morreale, 2014: 114): such line of action often leads to a different social interaction model – that of a commercial relationship between the producers of the media content and its consumers.

However, the reasons behind video-creators’ intent to influence the audience are not limited to the financial aspect of business. For many, the form of a public video is a way to share vision, spread their own ideas or values. There are also cases when influencers earn this title without communicating, setting or implementing such goal through their content: it is attributed to them by their viewers and communicated through praise and gratitude:

A girl with blue hair is already crying as she waits. She put her feelings in a note, which she gives to him. “I'm so excited to read this,” he tells her. “I read one last night, and it made me cry.” He signs her shoe.

The line continues.

“You helped me so much.”

“You mean the world to me.”

“You inspire me.” (Ohlheiser, 2018)

The interaction described in the text fragment above takes place at VidCon, a social event organized for media creators of such popular platforms as Vine, YouTube, Instagram, etc., and their fans. Admittedly, the aim of the author of the text is to inform the readers about the major personalities at VidCon, demonstrate the evolution of creators who started with zero following and ended up being on-line celebrities with prospects of a career on Television or in the music industry. Yet, throughout the whole article, including the fragment presented earlier, there is an implicit assessment of the event as well as the personalities present, with such values as connection and influence being among the most prominent verbalized value entities in the text. To draw attention to the fact of extreme popularity and power over the viewers that this particular creator has, the addresser quotes the words of the fans. Moreover, the author of the text intentionally does not provide any commentary here, stressing the importance of what is being said by the followers themselves and thus shows that their confessions are enough and stronger than any additional explanatory comments: “You helped me so much.“, “You mean the world to me.“,“You inspire me.” This is particularly effective from the linguistic point of view due to the fact that the whole article finishes with these quotes of the fans' opinions and no conclusion is provided by the author. Thus, the value influence here is not only verbalized through such lexemes as helped, mean the world, inspire, but also through what is implicitly stressed by the author, what is not actually said, i.e. that following creators on YouTube may mean being deeply invested in the creator's personality and as a result being affected on more than just one level.

The language analysis conducted within this research has allowed to gather data about the lexical means of value verbalization in the texts about YouTube. As it has been established, the identified values got their language representation through the dominant lexeme and the lexical-semantic set which included synonymous lexemes or lexemes that were contextually relevant for the actualization of the value.

Table 2 below introduces the dominant lexemes and the lexical-semantic groups of the verbalized values connection and influence.

Table 2.

Lexical-semantic set of the values connection and influence.

Dominant lexeme Lexical-semantic group
CONNECTION To engage with the audience, to be shared, to share, to start following, to subscribe, to gain new followers; sense of connection; sense of intimacy; strengthen that connection; to connect with someone; to stay connected to audiences; to respond to every comment; the potential to be shared across other social channels.
INFLUENCE Genuinely influential figures; more influential than; online influencers; representing “influence”; emotional attachment; to help; to inspire; to change; to mean the world; to transform; to mold your community as you see fit; to influence; YouTube stars are influencing generation Z's buying habits and career ambitions; a powerful medium.
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It was also of interest to gather data on the lexical verbalization of values depending on the parts of speech used most frequently to create special meanings. Morphologically, the most prominent way of realizing value entities in the texts of mass media about YouTube was through free word combinations and fixed word phrases, which serve as language markers of the values. These collocations when split into separate semantic components do not (fully) express the idea of the value, however when used and analyzed as a unit, they present certain meanings necessary for the correct interpretation of the message behind the words and decoding the information. Examples of such value markers are such expressions as to start following (connection), to respond to every comment (connection), build episodic excitement (promotion), etc. Lexical markers of values constitute 66% of all means of verbalization of values, as established through the conducted research. Other most common ways of realizing values via language are by means of nouns – 21% (incentive, business, ecommerce, policy, job – career), verbs – 7% (to sell, to pay, to reward, to work – career), and adjectives – 6% (authentic, intimate, real, candid – authenticity) (see Table 3).

Table 3.

Morphological ways of value representation in the text.

5.

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Thus, based on the conducted research, we have been able to confirm the hypothesis that mass media texts are a means of creating certain axiological meanings targeted at wide audiences. Presumably, the texts’ addressers reiterate a number of value entities, on the one hand, to reflect the industry-specific phenomena and developments, and on the other, to contribute to a particular image that YouTube has or will have. It is also clear that this video hosting platform is extremely business oriented, with such values as career, money and popularity being among the most verbalized notions throughout the analyzed corpus. What readers gather from the mass media texts about YouTube is that this service is no longer just a way to share videos, but rather a platform to build a network on, to start and grow a community or join one, as well as influence the world or be influenced and guided.

However, this research has limitations in establishing the extent to which the verbalized values are integrated into the lives of the readers or motivate them to register, grow and increase activity on the platform, which could be the next step of the research. This would involve conducting an anthropological, sociological or psychological study along with a linguistic one.

6. Conclusion

This paper contributed to the study of one of the most influential types of communication mediated through mass media (newspapers, online news and information agencies) on the topic of technology (YouTube). The conducted research revealed that the image of the increasingly popular and socially relevant platform YouTube is constructed with the help of language via texts created by professionals, such as journalists, tech and media analysts.

This research paper helped to gain a deeper understanding of the professionally created written communication on the topic of YouTube and reach the initial research aims, which included discovering what the values dominating the texts are and how they reveal themselves through language means, determining the strategies that allow addressers to manage the communication and its outcome, establishing whether the combination of certain communicative behavior and language structures of the authors has the potential to shape the addressees’ opinions and expectations about the platform. The gathered data broadens the linguistic studies on value-based communication and may be utilized for further research of the topic within social sciences, such as linguistics, axiology, sociology and, possibly, anthropology and psycholinguistics.

The research led us to the conclusion that, pragmatically, the most common strategies of the authors are to inform, to instruct and to evaluate. Each strategy has a number of linguistic features that are instrumental for the achievement of communicative aims set by the texts creators. Each text also realizes certain industry-specific values that may or may not be shared by the YouTubers but are aimed to reflect personal or professional experience of the authors with the platform. The identified values are spread via various linguistic means, which, when analyzed, can be classified into semantic groups.

Critical discourse analysis methods allow to establish the connection between how the addressers transform entities of mental and moral nature into language and the way these verbalized entities are meant to be perceived by the addressees of the texts. Verbal means of value representation are carefully chosen by the creators of the texts as they possess the potential not only to influence the way non-professionals understand certain phenomena, events, personalities, but also speak about them. Thus, encoding and decoding values in the popular science discourse of information technology means promoting industry-specific jargon, spreading communication and behavior models and contributing to the overall narrative built around modern technologies, and YouTube in particular.

Declarations

Author contribution statement

T. Shiryaeva, A. Arakelova: Conceived and designed the experiments; Wrote the paper.

N. Mekeko, E. Golubovskaya: Analyzed and interpreted the data; Performed the experiments.

Funding statement

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Additional information

No additional information is available for this paper.

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