What are vlogs?

4.3.1.1 YouTube and Vlogs

An article in The Observer (Lewis, 7 April 2013) described how YouTube was taking over from traditional television, and ‘YouTuber’ was now a recognised category amongst young people. Readers were informed that if we underestimate YouTube, this is a sure sign we are middle-aged! Arguably, cyberspace is now a significant site for young people’s identities and identity performances. However, while other social networks, e.g. blogs and young people’s activities on bebo and MySpace have been researched, we are only within the last few years beginning to see research on vlogs.

A ‘Vlog’ (video-log) is a short video (usually between 3 and 10 minutes long) uploaded by the maker herself to YouTube. The clips involve the maker, in my selected examples a young woman, talking to a camera about a subject of her choosing. The terminology for people who do this is ‘YouTubers’ or ‘Vloggers’. Vlogs vary considerably in sophistication. While some look ‘professional’ and are of very high technical quality, others are simply a vlogger speaking to a webcam, with minimal editing involved. The medium of the vlog itself is relatively new, and although young people use it

extensively, as viewers and producers, researchers are arguably trailing behind;

Myspace and Bebo are hardly used anymore, while Facebook is viewed by many young people as being a medium for older generations.

4.3.1.2 How researchers have used vlogs

While some researchers (e.g. Young & Burrows (2013)) use YouTube vlog content as data without much discussion of the role of the source of the data, other researchers (e.g. Raun (2014), Simonsen (2012) and Anarbaeva (2011)) analyse the medium of

YouTube, and vlogs in particular, in greater detail and argue that vlogs and vlogging constitute a particular site of identity construction with different possibilities and with additional functions than other sites of self-presentation and talk.

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In his study of identity formation on YouTube, Thomas Mosebo Simonsen (2012) argues that the large amount of videos uploaded to YouTube

“reveals an underlying aspect of modern identity. That is the articulation of the self in public …It is a more direct and much more widespread mode of visibility, where a whole generation of creators are presenting themselves in what can be considered a public performance culture.” (Simonsen, 2012, p. 2).

According to Simonsen the main audience, at the time of his study, 2012, was 18-24 year-olds. While Simonsen specifically studied the construction of mediated identities, that is, how vloggers constructed their identities, his observations of public performance culture and widespread visibility, in his analysis, pertains to modern identity in general.

In this study, the focus is not a comparison of offline vs online themes and ways of talking about them. Rather, vlogs are analysed as a different kind of material from a site that may allow and encourage other kinds of talk than that fostered by semi-structured face-to-face interviews (the other form of data used in the study) and will allow analysis of visual and bodily communicative practices.

4.3.1.3 Conditions of online Possibility

Citing Youngs (1999), Samara Anarbaeva (2011) argues in her study of how Women of Colour use beauty vlogs, that YouTube vlogging can be seen as empowering women by allowing them control over their own representation and creating online communities. She argues that YouTube allows women to express themselves in the way they want to be seen, and to reach out to others with similar circumstances. In addition, YouTube provides women with online networks that help them cope better with their conditions of existence and “provides women on online networks with a certain sense of

empowerment” (Youngs, 1999, in Anarbaeva, 2011, p. 23). While we cannot know whether vlogging and YouTube communities make any women 'cope better', YouTube can arguably be seen as a site that allows women to negotiate 'conditions of possibility'

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as they address particular topics, even as they also operate within the wider society and also the conventions for YouTube vlogging.

Anarbaeva argues that online communities may also be seen as a site of knowledge production where women create meaning, and meanings, and that knowledges produced here now form a significant part of the discursive context of young women’s lives. Even though the present study differs from Anarbaeva’s in that it considers YouTube material a part of wider social contexts (in other words, vlogs are not presumed a priori to be a separate site where alternative discourses are produced), what women talk about and how they present themselves on YouTube forms part of the wider context of constraints and possibilities for young women today.

Analysing the role of vlogs in transgender people’s transitioning, Tobias Raun (2014) argues that

“The vlog seems to serve an important function in the transitioning process, and is an important part of a process of self-invention, serving as a testing ground for experimentations with, and manifestations of (new) identities.” (Raun, 2014, p.3)

It is not only transgendered people who experiment with identities and self-

presentations. For example, Cote and Bynner argue that early adulthood is a time for playing with and experimenting with one’s identity. Raun argues for trans vloggers that

“Making vlogs and watching other people’s vlogs becomes a visual as well as a narrative map for Erica and the other trans vloggers, enabling self-construction and self- reflection as trans.” (Raun, 2014, p9).

This may also be the case for other identifications, where people who watch and produce vlogs become enmeshed in a story-telling community which enables construction of oneself as a particular kind of person, as represented in the vlog.

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Following these sources, I propose that the existence of story-telling formats, and formats for particular activities and topics on YouTube, such as make-up tutorials, diaries and feminist commentary, allows for, and creates, spaces where particular aspects of young women’s identities may be put forward, which might not be told in that way offline, or outside a personal vlog. For example, in face-to-face interviews with me, the young women participants emphasise their resistances to social pressures such as wearing make-up. However, different orientations are perhaps invited by a

community of beauty vloggers who assume their audiences are interested in make-up tutorials. Thus, off-line and on-line settings may encourage different orientations to constraints and possibilities for performing femininity, while possibilities for resistance and the forms this may take may also vary between these locations.

4.3.1.4 A brief note on ‘authenticity’

YouTube, as a site, pinpoints the performance-authenticity question that is also a prominent theme from the interviews. As the emergence first of reality TV and then User Generated Content (UGC) online has blurred any easy distinction between real and fake, how authenticity is performed online becomes very interesting and a relevant point for my research.

In the vlogs I analyse, there appears to be an implicit requirement to perform in ways recognisable as ‘feminine'. In addition, whatever is presented in a vlog is often performed as sincere and authentic. This is achieved by the vlogger self-reflecting on the act of vlogging and performing, and drawing attention to the presence of the camera, and addressing viewers for example by asking questions and inviting comments. In addition, it appears that display of emotion can be used to signal authenticity, but this must be managed carefully, as too much emotion risks being received by audiences as ‘a performance’, and hence labelled fake (as indicated in the comments left by viewers underneath the vlog), which is implicitly understood to be ‘wrong’. Hiding the

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performative aspect or drawing attention to it seems to be among the options for staking an authenticity claim. These points indicate the need for an analytic approach to

appearance and performance as features of the vlog data used in this project.