"Fight cancer with a smile": A case study of advice-giving strategies in Iskandar's youTube vlogs in Saudi Arabia

Nada Abdulmajeed Lashkar, Maha Abdulghafar Alayyash

Abstract


Vlog is a term that emerged in social media which is used for many purposes, one of which is advice-giving via sharing self-experience. YouTube is considered the most famous video-sharing platform for vloggers as it encourages its users to share their thoughts, stories, feelings and experiences with illness as an open community (Pauwels, & Hellriegel, 2009; Sanchez-Cortes et al., 2015). The current research investigates the strategies of advice-giving in online monologues. Seven online vlogs were collected from YouTube platform in which the main speaker is the Saudi cancer fighter Hamza Iskandar who died in 2017. Conversation analysis of the data demonstrates three main patterns of advice-giving strategies: (1) unsolicited direct advice; (2) advice-implicative actions; and (3) entitlement by repetition. The results suggest that using advice-giving strategies in monologues could encourage cancer patients to have hope by listening to other cancer patients’ stories with illness. It is hoped that the findings of this research will help the Saudi patients to overcome their illness with full positiveness as Hamza did. Further, it is hoped that all social media influencers get inspired by Hamza and his way of engaging with the audience by giving advice and telling his real experience with cancer in order to provide patients with chronic illness with hope and positivity in their lives.


Keywords


Conversation analysis; advice-giving; cancer; monologues; patients

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References


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