A cross-cultural analysis of celebrity practice in microblogging

Abstract

This study attempts to explore how celebrities manage rapport with followers through an array of speech acts in microblogging – the essential building blocks of virtual identity on social media. Six months of postings of eight of the most-followed Twitter and Weibo celebrities from USA and China were retrieved and analysed. A taxonomy of nine speech acts for rapport management was identified to give a categorised descriptive snapshot of celebrities’ microblogging discourse. The results revealed that the celebrities from both countries employ self-disclosing speech acts extensively to report events, anecdotes, or initiate small talk with fans for solidarity building. In addition, the attention fostered by the personalised, affective, and eye-catching self-disclosure posts is frequently directed to the posts promoting their professional activities or products to commercialise the solidarity as much needed for maintaining a strong fan base. In general, the celebrity practices in USA and China display a converging trend as the prevalent speech acts are largely overlapping across cultures, while culture-specific microblogging behaviours were also identified from the less frequently performed speech acts.

Communicative functions of emoji sequences in the context of self-presentation: A comparative study of Weibo and Twitter users

“…affection, sympathy, flattery) to claim acts, making their messages more emotionally expressive (Ge and Gretzel, 2018). Moreover, the frequent use of ‘inform’ and ‘manipulate’ acts by all of the sample users aligns with the literature on online self-presentation, suggesting that celebrities often use these acts to disseminate news, convey personal information, and solicit responses from their fans (Ge and Gretzel, 2018; Zhang and Wu, 2018). Drawing on the emoji literature, this study asserts that emoji use can infuse playful and cute elements into these acts, making their tone less forceful but more friendly.…”

“…In attempting to self-present, people from different cultural backgrounds employ speech acts differently. For instance, Twitter users, who are largely from individualistic cultures, tend to make statements about themselves more often than do Weibo users, who hail mainly from collectivistic cultures (Zhang and Wu, 2018). Compared to Americans, Chinese are more likely to perform expressive acts, with a stronger tendency to overtly account for harmonious rapport-maintenance (Tantucci and Wang, 2018).…”

Political ‘advice’ in Chinese public discourse (s)

“…Examining diverse data may also help us to expand research towards a cross-cultural direction: for instance, the question emerges as to which rhetorical devices would utilise political advice in other languages and cultures, and whether it is possible to compare cross-cultural differences resulting from such research with other cross-cultural pragmatic Sino-Western cases (cf. Zhang & Wu 2018). The abundance of future areas of research seems to us to demonstrate that examining politeness and alignment is a key area in the field.…”

Philanthropic Motives of China’s Celebrities in Media Representation: From an Impression Management Perspective

“…In recent years, a growing number of discourse analysis studies have examined a variety of topics related to celebrities, particularly discourse studies on the management of celebrities’ relationships with their fans ( Marwick and Boyd, 2011 ; Wu and Lin, 2017 ; Zhang and Wu, 2018 ). For example, celebrities connect with their fans by creating and sharing content, and they create a sense of intimacy between participants and followers ( Marwick and Boyd, 2011 ).…”