Welcome to the GCN Show!: Community and Identity on YouTube

Abstract

This chapter explores corporate identity and consumer participation through a consideration of how identities are signaled and evoked on a YouTube cycling channel. The Global Cycling Network (GCN) is currently the most successful among English YouTube cycling channels. It recreates cycling as media entertainment, reaching one million subscribers for the first time in March 2017. This chapter considers the potential of mapping the broad range of video types available on the GCN Channel in accordance with an account of registerial cartography (Matthiessen. Register in the round: registerial cartography. Funct Linguist 2(9). doi:10.1186/s40554-015-0015-8, 2015) and explores how presenter identities and audience positioning, as well as relationships with others who feature in the videos, are managed; it proposes a three-point model of generic features that might be considered as potentially impacting the interpersonal positioning of presenters in relation to their audiences.