What Makes a Headline go Viral on youtube.com?

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201212.065How to use a DOI?

Keywords

headline semantic and pragmatic complex, attention focus, theme and rheme, media discourse analysis

Abstract

The article presents a descriptive linguistic investigation of communicative features and communication foci, as well as ‘theme and rheme progression’ analysis of rhetoric structures of video headlines on youtube.com video hosting, distinguished with over 15,000 and more ‘likes’ or viewings. Youtube.com videos are viewed as creolized media-messages – semiotic entities, based on verbal headline and the movie content dialectic unity. The research makes an attempt to elicit typical rhetoric tools and strategies, used in video headlines in order to promote viewings, likes, sharing and popularity. One of the most prominent functional components of a ‘headline as utterance’ rhetoric is that of ‘attention-grabber’, focusing on new, relevant, and triggering emotions message for the viewer. The article pays close attention to two-focus rhematic structure of the yootube.com video headlines. As a result, two degrees of topic expression in the videos headlines are distinguished. The article introduces classification of video headlines based on lingua-rhetoric analysis, which includes headlines-messages, headlines-assertions, headlines-citings, and finally – headlines in the form of either a reflexive question or a rhetorical question. Most popular on youtube.com headlines cover the following functional semantic micro-genres: ‘List Posts’(36 per cent), ‘How-to posts’(23 per cent), ‘Resource Posts’ (17 per cent), ‘Heart-to-heart’ posts (10 per cent), ‘Question posts’ (14 per cent).

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - A.A. Bogatyrev
AU  - N.V. Smirnova
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/15
TI  - What Makes a Headline go Viral on youtube.com?
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference Digital Age: Traditions, Modernity and Innovations (ICDATMI 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 329
EP  - 332
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201212.065
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201212.065
ID  - Bogatyrev2020
ER  -