Multimodal analysis of storytelling in YouTube content

The fact that humanity has been in communication and interaction since its existence requires storytelling even in the transfer of daily events of life. However, the differentiation and diversification of media environments throughout history has transformed the storytelling. In today's world, which is digitized by technological developments, messages that can be produced in multiple layers continue to preserve some of their structural features while changing and transforming storytelling in new media environments. By going beyond these traditional structures, which are protected by the use of different techniques in digital storytelling, the ways of expression have been diversified and shaped within acceptable limits in order to be more followed. Within the scope of this study, the content produced on YouTube, one of the new media environments, is discussed from a multimodal perspective in order to reveal the change in storytelling, how multi-layered texts are created in terms of storytelling. On this platform, the first video, the most watched video, and the last uploaded video on the Barış Özcan channel, which was determined to contain the elements of storytelling, were selected as the sample and included in the research. It was found that all of the videos determined as samples in the study included storytelling components. In this case, it has been concluded that a YouTuber can also be described as a representation of a typical storyteller. According to the findings of the study, it was concluded that the core modes of storytelling diversified with submodes over time, and the videos included an increasingly complex montage and storytelling. It can be thought that this situation is due to the fact that the experiences provided as the content is produced cause professionalization.