Unveiling the Art of Food Vlogging: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Food Review Vlogs

Abstract

Vlogs are among the videos with the biggest viewership on different social media sites, which led to academic interest and analyses. This study aims to identify the speech acts used by popular food vloggers in their food vlogs and investigate how the various modalities they used create a perlocutionary effect on the audience in the form of reactions. Furthermore, the study looked into how the modalities observed shape the discourse of food vlogging. This descriptive study explored the genre’s apparent unique discourse community through the food vlogs by Mikey Chen, Mark Wiens and Luke Martin in Binondo, Philippines. The corpora which were specific videos and vloggers were chosen through purposive sampling. The linguistic aspect of the data was analyzed by categorizing the utterances into different speech acts, whereas the types of multimodalities present in each of the vlogs were also examined. Results of the study revealed that food vlogs share a common goal of describing food and enticing curiosity of viewers. It was also found that food vlogs thrive in modes and languages that are exclusive to the food vlogging community. Food vloggers encourage interaction via the comment section. Moreover, food vlogging has a unique genre with specific lexis that includes food, culinary and complimentary terms. Most importantly, food vloggers and viewers in specific food vlogs contribute to the expanding food vlogging community that has its unique discourse that is shaped by its distinctive modalities and structure.