Social Interaction in YouTube Text-Based Polylogues: A Study of Coherence

Since YouTube was launched, its emblematic video-sharing facility has attracted considerable attention as a social networking system of cultural production. In addition to vlogging, YouTube offers a text facility through which YouTubers share and negotiate opinions. However, research into the latter is scarce, especially within language-based disciplines (Androutsopoulos & Beiβwenger 2009; Zelenkauskaite & Herring 2008). This article contributes to addressing this imbalance by focusing on YouTube text-based ‘conversation’ (Herring 2010a). Specifically, it examines coherence in a corpus of YouTube postings in Spanish. Although coherence has been the object of much academic debate in other forms of computer-mediated communication, no empirical analysis of coherence in YouTube text has been undertaken to date. Results underline the conversational potential of this facility.