„Ich freu mich ja SO übelst“ – Praktiken explizit performativer Beziehungsgestaltung in Fancalls

Abstract

Fancalls are telephone conversations filmed and posted on YouTube that influencers hold with selected fans. It is a type of conversation that utilises the affordances of the digital public sphere and enables a specific form of relationship building between influencers and fans. The following considerations are based on the assumption that the public sphere is always part of social practices. This suggests an interactionist understanding of the public sphere for the following observations and their categorisation. A number of communicative patterns can be observed in fan calls, which will be discussed in this contribution with regard to their specificity for digital-public communication. The extent to which the specific interaction constellation and the genre-related characteristics of this type of conversation are an expression of a (changing) digital public sphere will be discussed in this article.