L’autorité des jeunes influenceurs du Web dans le genre de l’« unboxing » : un cas d’étude français/italien

Abstract

Attested since 1970 in the sociology of communication studies, the influencer has been brought back into the spotlight following the advent of digital marketing and social media such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc. The purpose of this study is to observe the authority in the genre of “unboxing” among young Web influencers, which involves the unpacking and presentation of products purchased or received free of charge by the manufacturer for promotional purposes. The bilingual French / Italian corpus is made up of a few dozen video transcriptions hosted on YouTube, aimed at the presentation of games for children. Based on the knowledge of psychosociology of communication, as well as on classical rhetorical studies and political philosophy, my hypothesis is that baby influencers’ rhetorical enterprise relies on three forms of authority: of the parrèsiaste, metalinguistics and loyalty, which correspond to the same amount of enunciative roles in the practice of unboxing: the child, the adult and the community of interest constituted essentially by the young audience of the channel.

Keywords

• authority
• digital discourses
• trust
• unboxing
• youtubers