Internet Celebrities
With the spread of digital affordance, the mini videos by internet celebrities, also known as social media influencers, web celebrities, microcelebrities, etc., attracted students’ attention. In China alone, the number of internet celebrity short videos on social media reached more than 873 million by the end of 2020 (Tan, Han, & Zhong, 2022). One of the factors that contribute to their popularity is the humorous descriptions of certain aspects of their lives that echo the audience’s own lives (Delbaere et al., 2021).
Internet celebrities use digital technology and social media to circulate personal stories (Rojek, 2016). As their reputation and their interaction with the audience go up, internet celebrities gradually transform content production into semi-professional production, which in turn provides the impetus for follow-up development. Their specific ability is to make good use of words to attract attention on the internet within the vast ecology of internet users (Xu & Zhang, 2020). The social media influencer value model by Lou and Yuan (2019) suggests that various input components in persuasive communication, such as messenger features (e.g., popularity) and message characteristics (e.g., advertising message value), determine effectiveness. Internet celebrities’ videos offer a combination of input modes including auditory (i.e., spoken input) and visual input, and visual input consists of dynamic imagery and can also include written on-screen text. What is in common for internet celebrities is the good use of language – humous, precise and engaging. Their videos uploaded to popular digital platforms such as YouTube enable them to encounter audiences from a variety of lingua-cultural backgrounds and interact with them through multimodal and multilingual repertoires. During the interaction, there are ample opportunities where people from different cultural backgrounds can make spontaneous communication (Ho, 2022). Internet celebrities’ influence has been used for marketing (Tan, Han, & Zhong, 2022), industry (Lu, Xie, Zhang, & Li, 2022), linguistic style (Lee, Liu, and Tseng, 2021), etc., but no studies have been conducted for language skills and intercultural communication, and this gap warrants investigation.