A vlogger's discourse

KU LEUVEN Faculty of Arts Blijde Inkomststraat 21 3000 Leuven, Belgium Anneroos Goosen BA Presented in the fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Cultural Studies Supervisor: prof. dr. Anneleen Masschelein Academic year 2014 – 2015 155.605 characters ABSTRACT A vlog is a personal video diary in which the vlogger addresses an online audience. This master thesis deals with the vlogger’s discourse in order to understand what it means to express an embodied self in an online environment. It presents theoretical frameworks to analyze the act of vlogging and offers case studies to explore these practices. YouTube has a radical democratic potential because it offers space to every single vlog, but its architecture also imposes a number of restrictions and expectations which undermine this potential. Vlogs derive a feeling of authenticity from a set of visual characteristics which can be easily imitated. This challenges the borders between the real and fake. Online self-expression also evokes a paradox between what we see as private and what we see as public, and causes the internet to become an extension of our inner world. The viewer is not a passive spectator anymore but is now actively involved, which exerts an influence on public life narratives and changes the relations between ourselves and others. The disclosure of the vlogger’s physical appearance finally creates the distinction between vlogs and other forms of online self-expression. The practice of vlogging transcends domains that we have traditionally learned to keep apart, such as private and public, real and fake, self and other, body and virtuality. This thesis argues that vlogging is a transboundary practice in which vloggers easily cross the rigid borders between domains that have traditionally been kept apart. It creates new relations between ourselves and the world around us, causing us to rethink our ideas about identity and ourselves. The vlogger’s discourse is a new domain in which hybrid bodies emerge that are able to find new unities within these transboundary practices. For Joy, Brittany, Chris and Kandice and all the new bodies out there This thesis was printed using Ecofont Chapter 1 Acknowledgements 2 Preface 3 YouTube as civic discourse 8 Nipplegate and the Snowman Do it Yourself: YouTube’s delusion Civic discourse Chapter 2 Rules and codes 17 Main principles Visual fallacy Chapter 3 Public diaries: Internet as inner world 24 Personality and character Narrative identity Self as sign Internet as inner world Public but private Chapter 4 Gazing, reading, shaping 32 Guilty eyes The power of the look Mutual desires Reading the vlog Vlog receptions Shaping the vlog Chapter 5 New bodies 40 Identity markers Cyborgs Chapter 6 Case studies 43 LITERALLYTHEJOY OSHITBRITT ITSCHRISCROCKER Vlog interview – questions to frequent vloggers Chapter 7 Conclusion 55 Literature and digital sources 59 Appendix 62 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to my wonderful supervisor Anneleen Masschelein, who has shared my fun in watching vlogs, and who has given me both freedom and encouragement to write this thesis. Also, I would like to thank Julia Watson for taking the time to see me and for her interesting lecture ‘Getting a digital life: autobiography in online environments’ in Leuven on December 16, 2014. Also Heidi Peeters, for her great masterclass on Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture. A big thank you goes to VSB Fonds, Hendrik Muller Fonds and Fundatie van de Vrijvrouwe van Renswoude, who have made it financially possible for me to pursue this masters degree. I have dedicated this thesis to four vloggers who have shaped my ideas about vlogging. I would like to thank them each in their own way. Joy, for sharing her fun and her thoughts with me. Brittany, for her brave attempts to become a feminist. Chris, for capturing my complete attention in the very beginning. And Kandice, for her open and disarming answers to my questions. Thanks go to the wicked Andrew Cartwright for revising my English. My mother, for helping me every single step of the way. Finally, my wonderful love Mathijs Leeuwis. I can't even begin to describe how amazing you’ve been. Thank you. when you lift me up I jump 2 PREFACE The boundaries between the subject, if not the body, and the ‘rest of the world’ are undergoing a radical refiguration, brought about in part through the mediation of technology. […] This means that many of the usual analytical categories have become unreliable for making the useful distinctions between the biological and the technological, the natural and artificial, the human and mechanical, to which we have become accustomed. Allucquère Rosanne Stone Broadcast Yourself YouTube Good morning eh, YouTube. I have to warn you that I'm afraid that today’s video will not be nearly as long or interesting as yesterday’s vlog. […] But I’ll try to make it interesting for you. Loy Lewis-Lasher / LITERALLYTHEJOY A young girl in a red hoodie speaks softly into the camera. The blinds are shut and she rubs her eyes. In the background there is a poster of the animation series Adventure Time. Cut. The light is on and she is in a school building. She shows her breakfast. Cut. She walks through the building. She has just come out of class. As she gets in the elevator she says she has forgotten that it is day without shoes- day. When she gets home, she will take her shoes and socks off for the rest of the day. Several cuts later, she shows her bare feet. The rest of the day she walks around barefoot, filming herself and talking into the camera about her experiences. The video ends with an image saying thank you for watching and please subscribe. ‘A Day Without Shoes (4/16/13 – Day 2)’ is the second video in a long series of daily videoblogs by the 24-year old Joy Lewis-Lasher, or LITERALLYTHEJOY as she calls herself on YouTube. Joy is a videoblogger who started posting videos on YouTube about 8 years ago. In her videos she talks about her experiences or 3 about trivial things in her life such as doing groceries, cleaning the house or doing homework. Sometimes she participates in YouTube memes such as ‘one day without shoes’, initiated by shoe brand TOMS to raise awareness for children’s health and education. Joy is one of many videobloggers who frequently use YouTube to give updates on their lives, share their thoughts and ideas and sometimes even entrust their deepest feelings to the Internet audience. I first came into contact with this phenomenon in 2007, when I was studying film in the Netherlands. While doing some research, I opened YouTube and clicked on one of the recommended videos. It immediately grabbed my attention. I saw a boy, although it was a very feminine one, in a bluish light, with a sheet behind his head and a towel around one shoulder. He had make-up around his eyes and empathically looked into the camera. “If I were ever Miss Universe, what I would grant to the country is 20/20 eye vision. I believe everyone has the right to see my beauty for all that it is.” I could not believe what I was seeing. Was it a serious remark or was I being mocked? I did not really understand what I was looking at and what his motives were. He seemed to have updated many similar videos like ‘If I were Miss Universe..’, in which he alternated between drag caricature and gay rights advocate. One of his videos was entitled ‘LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!’, in which he emotionally cried out for people to stop criticizing Britney Spears’ mediocre music performances, because she was going through a hard time. His passionate defence both intrigued and confused me. I saw no point in his outburst, and his threats (“Leave Britney Spears alone right now! I mean it!”) seemed useless to me. Over the next few years, I watched ITSCHRISCROCKER’s videos every now and then, still startling myself over his strange desire to put himself out on the Internet like that. Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has been a platform that has offered room for many different types of videos. Its first video, ‘Me at the zoo’ which was uploaded on April 23 that year, showed a 18-second-long home video of one of the YouTube founders, Jawed Karim, in front of the elephants of the San Diego Zoo. He mentions that elephants have really, really, really long trunks, “and that’s pretty much all there is to say.” In the summer of 2006, over 65,000 videos were uploaded to YouTube every single day (Reuters). Besides general (or funny) home videos the website showed music videos, commercials and personal video diaries. The first category 4 contained videos like ‘Me at the zoo’, and generally featured videos of families waving at and talking into the camera, so that they could share these images with other friends and families. The second category expanded quickly, starting with simple videos such as OK Go’s ‘A Million Ways’, to the top-viewed videos of all times such as Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’i. The third category, corporate videos and commercials, has thrived since companies discovered that social media are a powerful and simple tool for branding strategies. And the last category of personal video diaries, also known as videoblogs – or shorter: vlogs – are akin to the videos mentioned before. They are personal, intimate diary-like videos, in which users – vloggers – share their doings, thoughts and ideas with the general public. ITSCHRISCROCKER was one of the early vloggers that used YouTube for self- expression and grew quite famous from it. Today, YouTube is filled with these personal confession-like videos in which vloggers share almost everything with the anonymous viewer. Just as is the case with ‘If I were Miss Universe..’, these personal video diaries both intrigue and confuse me. Why would people want to share their private thoughts with an anonymous audience? Why do they want to be in the picture? Do they not attach importance to privacy like I do? Why do they think I am even interested in this? And why do I keep watching? These questions underlie the writing of this thesis. To my surprise, a thorough analysis of the theoretical frameworks surrounding the vlogger’s practices has not yet been written. I do not presume that I will write a definitive work, but I do intend to make an effort to understand the vlogger’s discourse. In this thesis I will go into some theoretical and practical issues that arise when we look at the daily practice of YouTube vloggers. I have applied a few limitations to my analysis. For one, I decided to look at YouTube as the only platform, whilst there are many more platforms to watch and distribute vlogs. Second, because my first vlogging encounter was with an American vlogger – ITSCHRISCROCKER – I have kept my focus on vloggers from the United States instead of Dutch or Belgian vloggers. Third, although there are many interesting vlogging subcultures to write about, I have limited my scope to the theoretical implications of the very act of vlogging. i Which recently ‘broke’ the YouTube interface when it reached the largest value that the YouTube counter could handle, namely 2,147,483,647 views on December 1, 2014. To intercept this, YouTube had to rewrite its software. (CNN) 5 My definition of a vlog is here ‘the expression of an embodied self in an online environment’. By this I mean that a vlog is a form of online self-expression, characterized by the visibility of the vlogger’s physical appearance. This aspect is in contrast to other forms of online self-expression such as written texts on blogs, Facebook or MySpace, or virtual environments such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, in which it is easier to take on another physical identity. This thesis thus deals with the vlogger’s discourse, in order to understand what it means to express an embodied self in an online environment. To do so, I have distinguished five domains that I would like to research, and divided these over five chapters. In the first chapter, I will look at the politics and potentials of YouTube as a platform for social expression, by contrasting the ideas and experiences of Henry Jenkins and Alexandra Juhasz. Can users freely express themselves or does the practical use of YouTube impose certain limitations on us? In the second chapter, following Aymar Jean Christian, I will analyze the visual characteristics of vlogs and the implications of the vlogs dilettantism: does its visual language guarantee authenticity? The next two chapters will focus on respectively both vlogger and viewer. Chapter three deals with the realization of online identities and explores the self as sign. I will make use of Philippe Lejeune’s analyses of diary practices and their shift towards the Internet, and the idea of narrative identity by Paul Ricoeur, to expose an evolving relationship between the private and the public. Chapter four will look at the side of the audience, by investigating Laura Mulvey’s concept of the gaze and Stuart Hall’s various interpretative readings. It will argue that the viewer is not a passive spectator any longer, but that the eyes of the viewer affect and shape the vlogger’s practice. In these chapters I will introduce theoretical frameworks to substantiate this analysis. However, because most of these frameworks only deal with a part of the aspects of vlogging but never the whole, these chapters are first an abstraction of theories that we can link to vlogging, then apply to the vlogger’s practice. In the fifth chapter I will try to distinguish the vlogger’s discourse from other forms of online self-expression, and carefully position the vlogger within these debates. These chapters together draw a theoretical framework around the core of the vlogger’s discourse, looking at the vloggers’ practices and position within the scope of online communities. In my final chapter I will present case studies of frequent vloggers and look at their online self-manifestations. Also, I will try to 6 actively engage in the community by publishing my own vlog on YouTube in order to get in touch with frequent vloggers. In 2014, YouTube was among the top three of most viewed sites on the Internet (Alexa) and received a total of 1 billion unique visitors every month (YouTube). Its servers host an endless amount of video data, which will only grow bigger as users upload more and more. So many of them use YouTube for genuine and intimate self-expression. I will argue that these practices inevitably raise questions about our understanding of traditional dichotomies like public and private, real and fake, self and other, body and virtuality. This thesis deals with these transboundary practices within the vlogger’s discourse. 7 Chapter 1 YOUTUBE AS CIVIC DISCOURSE In this first chapter, I will make a detailed analysis of YouTube as a platform for civic discourse. To do so, I will focus on Henry Jenkins’ political analysis of YouTube in the afterword of his book Convergence Culture, in which he argues that YouTube expresses how our society functions and can negotiate with politics for new shared meanings. Next to this, I will make use of Alexandra Juhasz’s empirical research on YouTube that she developed during ‘Learning from YouTube’, a teaching course at Pitzer College, California. In her course, students were challenged to investigate YouTube as a platform for sharing information and critique, and to take their critical analysis out of the academic discourse to put it to the test on YouTube. As a result, they created an online video book to which YouTube was “subject, form, method, problem and solution” (Juhasz). Nipplegate and the Snowm an Let us start with a timeline. On February 1st 2004, during the halftime show of the Super Bowl finals, Justin Timberlake ripped off a piece of Janet Jackson’s garment, uncovering her breast. During nine-sixteenths of a second, 90 million Americans saw a boob on live television and collectively went crazy (Cogan). The moral outrage was so huge that they turned the event into a milestone of cultural decline: the nipplegate. Three days later, a couple of Harvard students launched a website through which they could connect with other students online – a follow-up to a controversial website to secretively appraise the looks of Harvard students – with the apt name: Facebook (Tabak). The platform expanded quickly, outgrowing the walls of the university with a million active users at the end of 2004 (The Associated Press). During that year, three PayPal employees in San Mateo, California developed a website that allowed them to share videos online. Two of them, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, claimed the idea came after a dinner party, when they wanted to 8 share some videos that were taken that evening. They wanted to build a webpage through which it would be easier to share video material with the rest of the world. But the third, Jawed Karim, stated that the idea was initially his, and that the main reason he wanted to share video material online was because he was not watching the Super Bowl finals that evening (Hopkins, 12). The keyword in the stories of both Facebook and YouTube is sharing. A zest for social scandals and startling events nourished the technological changes that led to the birth of these social network platforms. Karim also said that the search for the 2004 tsunami videos inspired their ideas. The Internet was developing so rapidly that the expectations of technical possibilities paved the way for its actual implementation. In ‘Wardrobe Malfunction’, an extensive article on the ESPN Magazine website, Marin Cogan analyzes the nipplegate as a cultural milestone that led us towards communities of Internet participation and digital democracy. It was the moment where the conventional media platforms such as TV stations, newspapers and distribution networks were put to the test to prove that they were ready for the digital revolution. According to Cogan, “The halftime show represents ‘the last great moment’ of a TV broadcast becoming a national controversy – the last primal scream of a public marching inexorably toward a new digital existence: […] “The Internet was coming into being, it was intensifying. People wanted one last stand at the wall. It was going to break anyway. I think it broke.”” (Michael Powell cited in Cogan) Of course it is an exaggeration to say that the nipplegate alone provoked such a change in our culture, but it did mark a significant transition in the way we came to our understanding of the world and ourselves in it. This transition challenged conventional media to respond to events with the same speed that the upcoming Internet communities did. As a result, mainstream media drew the shortest straw because of their slow, institutional methods; they just could not keep up with the needs of millions of people, who turned to the internet for information, images and of course, videos. In providing for this themselves – by sharing on social networks – they originated a new type of media: grassroots media. Henry Jenkins describes this transition towards digital democracy and the sharing of information in his book Convergence Culture (2008). His analysis of the rise of new media is a very accurate and thorough description of our mediatized 9 culture and its characteristics. Jenkins sees the digital revolution not as new media replacing the old – as many other theorists before him did – but as a collision of the old and the new, working together and leading towards a participatory culture of collective intelligence. Through sharing information on the Internet, users work together like one organ in the dismantling of big amounts of data. In doing this, they prove to be much more efficient than traditional ‘old’ media. YouTube is one of the great examples of this new participatory culture in which the Internet is used to connect, share and exchange. In his afterword, Jenkins describes how grassroots media (such as YouTube) are powerful enough to influence the ways we see our society, our politics and ourselves. According to Jenkins, YouTube users have grown from passive recipients to active participants in production, selection and distribution (Jenkins, 275). As such, they have obtained for themselves the power to speak their minds, to address problems and to negotiate for solutions (ibid). To illustrate this phenomenon, Jenkins describes the use of YouTube videos in the American political arena: in 2008 CNN collaborated with YouTube to organize an interactive debate for the democratic presidential candidates. Over 3000 people had submitted questions via YouTube for the candidates to answer. Although this seemed like the perfect way to gain attract new constituents, this was not always the case. YouTube turned out to be very thin ice for politicians. Although the topics stayed within the limits of the political debate, its manifestation broke with the traditional and rationalist political discourse, which severely damaged the image and reliability of the politicians that were not prepared for the blunt methodology of the grassroots discourseii. The outcome of the CNN-YouTube debate shows us that although YouTube started as a simple online database for video material, it has become a platform for civic discourse, through which users can not only express their shared meanings, but also affect them. If we consider it this way, it seems as if YouTube has become the manifestation of the ideal democratic values, in which the input ii The best example of this is a video called ‘CNN/YouTube Debate: Global Warming’ by KOTAS: KNIGHTS OF TIME AND SPACE, a claymation of a snowman that addressed the issues of global warming. The animated snowman asked the candidates if they could ensure that his son would live a long and happy life. This parody was a funny video, but the message was serious. Candidate Mitt Romney however, was not amused and claimed the issue showed a lack of dignity in the presidential debate. 10 of every single user is equal. Sociologist Stephen Duncombe prefers these bottom-up strategies over old-fashioned top-down processes and claims that it is no longer up to media experts to shape our spectacles, dreams and ideals. According to Duncombe, it is now the public that chooses what is on the agenda: “[O]ur spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open ended: setting stage to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.” (Duncombe in Jenkins, 284) The founders of YouTube may never have thought of this outcome, but instead of building just a platform for audiovisual material, they created a cultural instrument that not only expresses a zeitgeist, but also forms it. And although Janet Jackson’s breast only seemed like an unfortunate mistakeiii, in retrospect we can see it as an accelerator in a huge cultural shift towards the age of grassroots media. Do it yourself: YouTube’s delusion In this analysis of YouTube as a platform for civic discourse, we have looked at the big picture: the way it functions as a whole in a growing digital society. But if we look more closely at the way YouTube itself is structured and the means by which it is formed, we will be able to construct some serious critique as well. In 2007, media professor Alexandra Juhasz started an unusual course at Pitzer College, California. In ‘Learning from YouTube’, students were challenged to look at YouTube as a platform for activism and to explore its revolutionary potentials. Not only was YouTube their subject of investigation, but it was also their method to share their results. They created an online and public video-book, in which their arguments were laid out in YouTube videos. The video-book focused on topics such as real/parody, public/private, punk/DIY, corporation/user and isolation/ iii It is still not clear if the ‘unfortunate mistake’ was accidental or on purpose. Both Jackson and Timberlake claimed that it was a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ and never commented on it again. But the media speculated heavily about a probable preconceived plan: Jackson’s choreographer had promised ‘shocking moments’ and the MTV producers were also suspected to have known of the action on forehand (Cogan). 11 connection. Two years later, Juhasz started making up the balance, and in her article ‘Learning the five lessons of YouTube’ (2009), she explains why she does not believe in its revolutionary potential any longer. A first and general thought is that YouTube appears to be a democratic platform in which every user gets equal attention. But according to Juhasz, this is a myth: YouTube’s architecture only supports the popular, and is surely capable of censorship. Although it is very accessible for users to participate in processes of production, selection and distribution, speaking their minds will not matter if nobody listens. YouTube promotes popular and most-viewed videos; when opening the webpage, a number of videos are immediately offered to you, based on their popularity and your search history. But a paradox arises, because the most viewed videos are those that we already know we like: “These special videos, well, they look like television, featuring the faces, formats, and feelings we are already familiar with, or at least aspiring to them.” (Juhasz, 146) The popular videos show us the things we would like to see, giving the majority of viewers what they want and ignoring the rest. Basically, this means that only the popular grows to become more popular, and the unpopular gets left behind. This phenomenon is also described as beehive intelligence, which serves as a metaphor for decentralized group behavior (Návrat, 1). Because there is no hierarchical division in the YouTube architecture, the metadata of popular videos is compounded of the number of views, which is in its own turn fueled by its popularity. More views means more search hits; more hits means more views. This turns into an upwards spiral, making it impossible for niche videos to keep up with popular videos. If you type in a search on YouTube, you are more likely to be showed popular and well viewed videos than from the unviewed niche. That does not mean the niche cannot be popular, but only that it has not popped up on the radar yet. It makes it much harder for critical and original videos to get the same attention as the dogmatic and conventional ones. This shows for example in one of Juhasz’s student research groups on YouTube & race: “As we learned through my students’ research project on race on YouTube, the most popular videos about black people reflect and reinforce the standard views of our society (about black hypersexuality, low intelligence, and gonzo violence), while only on NicheTube can you find videos that support black self-love or analysis.” (Juhasz, 146-7) 12 Second, Juhasz claims that YouTube is not just about expressing yourself, but expressing yourself in a corporate format. It limits the form and the content of its videos, thereby restricting its democratic promises (Juhasz, 147). The YouTube signature is easy to understand, recognize and reproduce. It is web entertainment that is characterized by expressions of humor, spectacle and self-referentiality (ibid). These forms prove to be not only very popular but also successful on YouTube, expressed through parody, funny home videos and vlogs. Other forms rarely escape the corners of the so-called NicheTubeiv. A third and last critique by Juhasz I wish to discuss here is the problem that YouTube does not dissolve the boundaries between amateur and professional producers, but that it actually affirms these distinctions. Juhasz underpins this by looking at the two dominant forms of YouTube videos, being the vlog – the highly personal, self-produced, poor quality videos – and its opposite: the corporate video – high quality use of television and movie formats. But to say that a vlog is a ‘poor quality’ video, is not really a negative judgment, because its low-profile form is at the same time the mark of its veracity and authenticity (Juhasz, 148). The corporate video, on the other hand, derives its authenticity from the exact opposite. It uses the newest techniques for brand management and it has to keep up to date with the latest hypes in mainstream media: “They express ideas about the products of mainstream culture, in the music-driven, quickly edited, glossy, slogan-like vernacular of music videos, commercials, and comix [sic]. They consolidate ideas into icons; meaning is lost to feeling. Vlogs depend upon the intimate communication of the spoken word. Corporate videos are driven by strong images, sounds, and sentiments.” (Juhasz, 148) Alexandra Juhasz shows a different side to YouTube’s revolutionary potential, and raises questions on the level of the practical effects of its democratic promises. Seen from this perspective, we might want to rethink our ideas and definitions of YouTube, and now that we have taken its corporate use into account, YouTube’s motto – Broadcast Yourself – seems only relevant to a part of its users. iv NicheTube is not an actual parallel website, but a mere metaphor for the darkest corners of YouTube: the unviewed and the unknown. 13 Civic discourse To make an analysis of YouTube as a site for civic discourse, I have used Henry Jenkins’ ideas of convergence culture and collective intelligence, applied to YouTube and politics in the afterword of his book Convergence Culture. I have also used Alexandra Juhasz’s more empirical analysis as a result of the course ‘Learning from YouTube’, in which she raises questions about its democratic possibilities and its revolutionary potential. If we are to believe Jenkins, then YouTube is a powerful instrument to capture and reshape societies, not by top-down legislation or conduct, but by bottom-up negotiation for new values and ideals. Considered this way, it functions as the flagship of participatory culture, in which every civilian is able to share their thoughts and ideals, and thus become active participants in forming our ideas of ourselves and our society. YouTube users have the power to speak their minds, address problems and negotiate for solutions. Participatory culture has become a considerably more powerful instrument than old-fashioned media, whose methods are now outdated and slow. But does Jenkins’ analysis correspond to the actual reality of YouTube? In his afterword, he describes the powerful potential and its realization in the context of a political debate, set up by CNN. But in reality, much of YouTube’s video content consists of music videos, entertainment and domestic material – like one of the best viewed videos ever: ‘Charlie bit my finger – again!’ Jenkins must realize that much of his statements will not be able to stand against all the cinnamon challenges, harlem shakes and Gangnam Style parodiesv, and that a real civic discourse can only flourish if its users actively participate in it. In his concluding words, Jenkins does prove himself aware of this: “Convergence culture is the future, but it is taking shape now. Consumers will be more powerful within v “‘The Cinnamon Challenge’ is a popular dare game that involves attempting to swallow a tablespoon of cinnamon without vomiting or inhaling the powder. Since the early 2000s, the game has become well known for its extreme difficulty and thousands of videos with people attempting the challenge have been uploaded onto YouTube. ‘The Harlem Shake’ […] is the title of a 2012 heavy bass instrumental track produced by Baauer. In February 2013, the song spawned a series of dance videos that begin with a masked individual dancing alone in a group before suddenly cutting to a wild dance party featuring the entire group. ‘Gangnam Style’ is a 2012 dance pop single written and performed by Korean pop singer Park Jae Sung, better known by his stage name PSY. Since its release in mid-July 2012, the highly entertaining music video has spawned hundreds of parodies and copycat dance .” (Knowyourmeme.com) 14 convergence culture – but only if they recognize and use that power as both consumers and citizens, as full participants in our culture.” (270) So YouTube’s revolutionary potential only realizes itself by virtue of its users. And that is exactly where Juhasz comes in, exploring the actual manifestation of all of YouTube’s democratic promises. The result is clear: YouTube can be powerful, but in reality, it is a mere confirmation of old values, patterns and social relations. Not every video has equal chances and many are pushed to the background due to the so-called beehive effect. Also, complete freedom of expression is a myth, because all content is adjusted to a corporate format. The uploaded videos adapt themselves to existing formats that prove to be accepted and popular, like parody, funny home videos and vlogs. Moreover, YouTube affirms the already existing difference between amateur and professional content, which polarizes to prove its authenticity; amateur producers persist in producing poor quality video and editing because it confirms the video’s veracity, and professional producers try their very best to keep up with recent developments in pop culture and technology. Juhasz recognizes the democratic and revolutionary potential of YouTube. Since she is a researcher in the field of activist media, this was exactly why she was interested in YouTube in the first place. But after a few years and three courses, she concludes that it is not the revolutionary medium it promised to be. Both Henry Jenkins and Alexandra Juhasz address YouTube at a different level and draw different conclusions. Jenkins looks at the possibilities on an abstract level, whereas Juhasz looks at the outcome at a more empirical level. Both of them can be united in the following conclusion: YouTube has great potential to serve as a platform for civic discourse, in which people express their meanings and respond to each other in a large context. As such, it functions as a catalyst for public opinion that shapes and reshapes itself. Grassroots media has opened up a whole new way of understanding today’s culture. However, it is important to understand that it can only function by virtue of the critical attitude of its users, and that this attitude cannot flourish completely inside the boundaries of YouTube. Although it appears to be a platform for everyone to truly speak their minds, this is always done within a corporate template that proves to be successful; if you do otherwise, you will most probably end up on NicheTube. Maybe it is safe to say that the revolutionary potential was present in the first few years of YouTube’s existence, when its function and meaning had to 15 crystallize and find its way into society. On the brink of emergence, facing endless possibilities, YouTube could have taken the revolutionary road. Every time a new use was found – personal, political, commercial – the true power for civic discourse was revealed. But when the banality of sharing the daily joys takes over, it is easy to lose sight of revolutionary ideals. If we go on in our analysis of YouTube and every manifestation of it, we must keep in mind not only YouTube’s potentiality for civic discourse, but also the practical limitations which jeopardize its democratic ideals. 16 Chapter 2 RULES AND CODES When speaking of YouTube as a platform for civic discourse, we intend this statement to cover YouTube as a whole, including every type of video that it offers. But the diversity in type, style and execution is enormous. This thesis focuses on vlogs, an embodied form of online self-expression, in the context of YouTube. In this chapter I will outline the rules and codes of YouTube vlogs, and their ambivalent nature. The visual language of a vlog is easy to adapt if you are creating a fake vlog. This raises questions about veracity on the Internet and stirs debates about the importance of the truth behind our experienced world. Accordingly, I will describe a visual fallacy and elaborate on videoblogs as a simulacrum. Main principles One of the most important and interesting dichotomies that is exemplary for the debates around YouTube vlogs is the real/fake opposition. Even though we might be aware that film as a medium is everything but real, yet somehow we still expect it to show us reality in its purest form – according to some critics it is able to show us the deepest truths. Since YouTube purports to be about broadcasting yourself, we might immediately associate it with the expression of a real person. But this is not as obvious as it may seem. Throughout the (relatively) short history of vlogs, many of them have proven to be fake and numerous of debates have arisen about the importance of the ‘realness’ of internetvlogs. When speaking of a medium that invites us to ‘broadcast ourselves’, it is not that strange to expect truth and sincerity. The self is something that can only be attributed to a person in the real world. Phenomenologically speaking, the self is the subjective agent that is able to experience sensory inputs. So even if a vlogger is performing a made-up character, the self is always the person behind the character, i.e. the actor. With its encouraging motto, YouTube helps create 17 the appearance that we are actually dealing with the real stuff. But as we might have learned from the 1999 ‘found footage film’ The Blair Witch Project, we should not always trust a video based on its appearance. In ‘Real vlogs: the rules and meanings of online personal videos’ (2009), Aymar Jean Christian makes a detailed empirical analysis of vlogs, discussing their objective distinctions and deceitful nature. Christian joins Alexandra Juhasz in the assertion that YouTube is not much of the “idyllic venue for self-representation” that it is supposed to be. According to him, it has become a platform that requires specific rules and codes, much like television (Christian, 2009). To show how easy these rules and codes can be internalized to fake realness and authenticity, Christian points out the 2006 case of LONELYGIRL15, the 16-year old vlogger Bree, who lived with her parents and did not leave her room because of her mysteriously unidentified religion. While the vlog became very popular on YouTube, some viewers suggested that the vlog was a hoax: Bree was too attractive to be real and the quality of both image and sound were suspiciously flawless. In September 2006 it was revealed that Bree was indeed a fictional character and that the series was created by three friends: Miles Beckett, Mesh Flinders and Greg Goodfried, who explained that they wanted to explore short videos as a new type of storytelling (The Associated Press). YouTube was the perfect environment for this, and in order to make Bree as credible as possible, they cleverly anticipated the internal rules of vlogging. It seems that by simply following the rules of vlogging it is easy to raise a veil of truthfulness. But what are these codes? Elaborating on Christian’s article and looking at a number of vlogs, I will try to discern some main vlogging principles. Following Christian’s methodology, I will look at ‘first vlogs’, thereby focusing on what vloggers think are the basic features and limiting my analysis to the very clear and basic codes of vlogging. Looking at the audience The simplest rule of vlogging is that almost every vlogger addresses his or her audience by looking directly into the camera, which, most of the time, seems to be a webcam or a normal videocam. Only few vloggers use their smartphones to record their messages, and only few look onto the computer screen when recording via webcam. The insinuation of eye contact appears to be the most important feature to attract and hold the attention of viewers. In his tutorial video about making a first vlog, THEJONUSVLOG stresses the 18 importance of this: “one of the key components of any video is going to be eye contact. You need to make eye contact with the camera.” Medium close-up and right angle The popular vlogchannel VLOGBROTHERS (2 brothers vlogging) also hosts a vlog about vlogging. Brother Hank explains the rule of thirds when talking about how to frame your head for the video and sarcastically adds: “I think that says something fundamental about human nature – I’m not sure what it is.” Most vloggers choose a medium close-up shot showing their face and torso, sitting at a right angle from the camera. This set-up directly reveals the homemade quality of the video, as only few vloggers actually use a tripod or semi-professional tools. It is safe to assume that the choice for this set-up is not mainly led by aesthetic considerations but by practical conditions such as the arrangement of the computer and the quality and angle of the (web)camera. Glitch and im perfection It is quite typical that the relatively good quality of the LONELYGIRL15 videos raised suspicion about her truthfulness. Vlogs are understood to be home productions, made by dilettantes who do not have knowledge or resources to produce perfect quality. So in contrast to semi-professional productions, vloggers use one camera with an appurtenant audio input. This leads to the typical home quality videos, showing pixelation and an occasional glitch – although the newest video cameras are of such good quality that can be hard to tell the difference between these productions and professional quality equipment. Editing and duration Editing your video ANDYMOOSEMAN is a debated subject among vloggers. Vlogger states that editing bends the truth so it cannot show the real person. According to Aymar Christian, this statement connects the lack of editing with “self and community expression, implying editing is anti– community, disingenuous, or […] even market–oriented.” (Christian) Nevertheless, a lot of vlogs are edited to submit to popular visual language. Probably for the same reason a lot of vlogs are short of duration, fluctuating 19 between 30 seconds and 10 minutes. In niches like weight loss support communities you will find longer videos, running up to 30 minutes or more. Self-expression Moving on to the more substantive criteria, every vlog is a form of selfexpression. As said earlier, in this context the self is generally the true identity of the vlogger, although this is not always the case. Almost every vlogger starts their first video with a short introduction about themselves, for example by making a statement about themselves or society. EQUALITY AMERICA starts his vlog – about ‘his journey to sharing his life’ – by telling us he is gay and will use his blog to promote equal marriage rights, while teenager OSHITBRITT positions herself as a feminist and cautiously tries out a statement of her own: “I like to think that women are… are the same amount of human as men.” The personal approach is essential for vlogging and makes all the difference when compared to other YouTube videos: a lot of popular YouTube users have a special account for personal vlogging next to their ‘popular account’. Audience Some vloggers express themselves as individuals looking to share their video diary with whoever is interested, for example LITERALLYTHEJOY, whom I mentioned before, and who has been vlogging as a diary on a daily basis for 6 years. A remarkable vlog is that of Casey Anthony (CASEYANTHONYVLOGSS) who was accused of killing her 2-year old daughter Caylee in 2008, but was acquitted in 2011. Heavy media coverage turned Casey into a public enemy. Nevertheless, she published a one-off vlog in 2012 to talk about her life as it is after the trial. Other vloggers clearly position themselves within one of YouTube's many communities. For example, vlogs labeled with TTC are made for a community of women who struggle trying to get pregnant – trying to conceive. VONIVLOG starts her first vlog with a simple greeting: “Hi, it’s Tuesday night, 24th of September and I’m on cycle date 38.” Or MASTERMUSIC480, who starts his vlog to keep updates on his weight loss and his gastric bypass surgery. When watching his video, the list of recommended videos on the right side of the screen fills with updates from other WLS videos – featuring weight-loss surgery updates. So the last two examples clearly label themselves as videos made for a specific YouTube 20 community, stating the function of the vlog and implying a timeline. However, the first two do not address a particular audience but present their stories to whoever wants to watch. Self-prom otion Christian describes a vlog as ‘an expression of a self’ (2009). When we look at the vlogs by LITERALLYTHEJOY or EQUALITY AMERICA, this is definitely the case: they share thoughts and experiences as in a diary, only now with an audience. Not every vlog is solely about expression though, and not every vlog is equally personal. I would like to refer again to ITSCHRISCROCKER. Although Crocker’s videos are beyond any doubt the expression of a self, they provide the opportunity for a certain amount of self-promotion. Keeping his vlog less personal and more on the performance of dramatic personae, Crocker knows very well how to increase his views by creating a controversy. More vloggers have found their way to a big audience, like American family man SHAYTARDS or Dutch teenager ENZO KNOL. It is noteworthy that they both focus on funny things and pranks, like dirty diapers or the Mentos-Coke experiment, and that they do not actually share much subjective information about their experiences or how they feel about them. The main goal of their vlogs is to have as much fun and attract as many viewers as possible. I would call this type of vlogging a form of self-expression with a heavy dose of self-promotion. Of course, every personal vlog can serve as a platform for some type of self-promotion: LITERALLYTHEJOY asks her viewers to subscribe to her channel after every video and we can only speculate about Casey Anthony’s reasons. Both motives can be found in vlogs and both of them – though not always equally – contribute to the realization of videoblogs. Visual fallacy Looking at these rules and codes, it is not hard to believe that the creators of LONELYGIRL15 were able to fool their audience for such a long time. Bree’s videos had all the characteristics of a personal and authentic video journal and although it was staged and scripted, the use of the amateurish visual language contributed to her credibility. Looking LONELYGIRL15 as an example, it can help us unravel the underlying visual fallacy: that dilettantism guarantees authenticity. When we see 21 a professional quality video we immediately realize that it was scripted, but we never expect a home video to trick us into believing it is genuine while it is not. It seems that a vlog is the perfect simulacrum; its visual language creates a false appearance that simulates sincerity. It feigns authenticity although we cannot know for sure. The concept of the simulacrum was created by Plato to distinguish the true philosopher from the sophist in ancient Athens. The Greek democracy gave rise to rivalry between the Athenians, since every one with rhetorical skills could claim to tell the truth. Plato’s dialogues were tasked to distinguish between the true claimant and its false rivals (Smith, 91). Looking at videoblogs, it is very hard to tell the difference between sincere vlogging and make-belief, but the hope for truth and sincerity on the Internet is a much debated quest. Since young people started documenting their daily lives on the Internet in many different ways (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter), the Internet has become a passageway for reality. As Christian describes it: “the desire for truth is perhaps an attempt to work through the screen – to reconcile the camera with the aliveness of what is behind it.” (Christian) It is a simple fact that truth is an ambivalent term in the context of the Internet. The presumed anonymity that Internet users have puts them in a situation where they can say almost everything without consequences. Sexual predators present themselves as teenage girls to establish a bond of trust with their victims; avatars are created not according to the likeness of their user but according to his or her ideal appearance; Harry Potter fans co-write complete novels of fanfiction in online communities. The question is: does it matter? Needless to say, in the first case the absence of truth is extremely harmful to a human being, so yes, it matters. But in the latter two examples, is it really that important to distinguish the truth from the lie? There is one significant difference to stress here, and that is the presence of a physical body in the act of vlogging. Chatting, blogging, and forum writing are all done in environments of invisibility. Even if people show pictures of themselves, it is always a potential ‘cut ‘n paste’ job and it takes effort and proof to confirm someone’s identity. That said, it would be common sense not to trust every Internet persona: “on the nets, where warranting or grounding, a persona in a physical body, is meaningless, men routinely use female personae whenever they choose, and vice versa. This wholesale appropriation of the other has spawned 22 new modes of interaction. Ethics, trust, and risk still continue, but in different ways.” (Stone, 2) Videoblogs, introducing a physical and visible body, break with appropriation as common practice, because it is much harder to fake a persona. This is also where the visual fallacy steps in; seeing a person in a homemade video immediately evokes a veil of truthfulness. But the question is whether it matters. With regard to the debates that surrounded the ‘coming-out’ of LONELYGIRL15, her revelation did upset a lot of people who believed they were looking at a real girl. But nonetheless, the series continued and ran until 2008 with a continuously growing audience (Christian). After the hoax was exposed, a lot of vloggers said they did not care if it was real or fake, but that more importantly it was enjoyable. The truth behind the video was not as important as the truth of the experience. If fake is the new standard, is it possible to still find genuine intentions? According to Christian, the questionable nature of videoblogs exposes the nature of everyday life, being equally constructed and fake to a certain degree. “This does not mean performers are lying. As long as a vlog or video manages to capture the imagination and relate emotionally, its actual truth may be irrelevant. If there is a new stage in the development of personal videos online, this may be the direction it takes.” (2009) The visual fallacy that surrounds vlogging is important to keep in mind when analyzing the vlogging debate, because it contributes to the diffuse nature of videoblogs and how they are perceived. In the next chapter I will look at the constructed nature of the self that Christian suggests, focusing on the ideas of Philippe Lejeune, Paul Ricoeur and Roland Barthes. 23 Chapter 3 PUBLIC DIARIES: INTERNET AS INNER WORLD As I explained in the previous chapter, one of the interesting aspects of analyzing vlogs is the real/false dichotomy. The visual fallacy I described can easily mislead us as to the vlogger’s intentions. But to further explore the vlog as an expression of a self, it is necessary to put these doubts aside and focus on the main principal of vlogging: sharing one’s life through a video diary. In this chapter I will investigate the vlog as a public diary in reference to Philip Lejeune’s research on diaries. I will go into the notion of narrative identity and the exteriorisation of personal narratives in an online environment. Finally, I will make a semiotic analysis of the vlog, using Roland Barthes’ model of the myth, to expose the paradox behind vlogging, namely that the private becomes public. Personality and character According to Lejeune, a diary is a piece of lacework, a sport, an art of improvisation (I, 181), it is a series of dated traces (I, 179). For Lejeune, a diary is the purest expression of a self because it attempts to map the time lived. Here it is important to mention the word ‘attempt’, because a diary is everything but a successful map of experienced time. A diary is fragmental, incoherent and selective; it traces and retraces itself. It may be useful to think of Gilles Deleuze’s account of identity and meaning as described in Logic du Sense, in which he explains how identity is never solid or fixed, but always changing chaotically towards something. Being is always in movement, and is therefore performative. Lejeune too mentions the writing of a diary not as a fixed product but as an act (I, 181) through which the traces of time are kept. Putting a date on every diary entry is essential according to Lejeune, and without it, it would not be a diary, but merely a note or a memorial. A diary is a collection of lived experiences, but that does not necessarily mean that it takes a certain form or structure. In fact, Lejeune emphasizes that there is 24 no set of distinguishable features that marks a diary. A diary is whatever the diarist wants it to be, and is therefore completely free in form or frequency. The only thing that matters is the date on top – or anywhere; the diarist decides. But despite Lejeune’s notion of the diarist’s freedom in form and structure, his analysis does limit itself to a particular manifestation of the diary, that is the written diary (French: journal intime). This is first and foremost a physical medium, meaning pieces of paper or a notebook, in which diarists write down their thoughts in their own, unique handwriting. But Lejeune also investigates new expressions, powered by the development of ICT and the rise of personal computers: screen diaries, written in a text editor and saved on a computer. Comparing these new diaries to the old-fashioned, physical ones, he makes an important distinction: “The computer is credited with a sort of therapeutic listening quality that adds clarity to everything you have to say, and thanks to the neutrality of typeface, allows you to see yourself objectively, to step outside yourself and gain some distance.” (I, 288) The computer seems to have a different impact on us than the notebook. This is not only a matter of handwriting vs. typeface, but also has to do with the physical placing of the medium: the notebook is subjected (vertically) to the diarist while the screen opposes the diarist (horizontally). This slight difference in emplacement does provoke a different attitude towards the blank pages. But even though the screen diary relates differently to the diarist than the notebook diary, it is still private businessvi. This is different in the case of Internet diaries or blogs – a genre that Lejeune starts to study in 1999. And for a researcher who spent his career studying other people’s diaries and feeling comfortable knowing other people’s intimacies, Lejeune’s initial reaction seems quite out of tune: “When you’ve been working on real personal diaries, everything in blogs feels like a caricature or prostitution: it all seems to ring hollow.” (I, 299) Lejeune’s use of language suggests a prejudice against blogs, since he makes a distinction between ‘real personal diaries’ and blogs, suggesting that the latter would, in fact, not be real nor personal. His biased views remain noticeable throughout his findings, revealing his discomfort with the blogging community, triggered by feeling as if he were ‘a double agent’, ‘a parasite’ (I, 302). But vi Although Lejeune mentions a difference in privacy: peaking on a notebook diarist would mean to lean over one’s shoulder, while the luminous and upright screen of the screen diarist immediately conduces loss of privacy (I, 282). 25 counterexamples arise, and the longer he studies Internet diaries, the more it becomes clear what triggered him to be so resistant in the beginning. While reading blogs, Lejeune notices new styles and aims that are different from traditional, personal diary writing. The start of a personal diary usually begins with an explanation of the decision to start writing and expresses an aim for the writer. This aim is not only for oneself, but mostly to oneself: a personal promise. Blogs are public, so the blogger’s aims are not just personal, but they take their audience into account: their aims are outwards. They search for the right kind of ‘tone’ to address their readers, carefully selecting the stories to include in or exclude from their blog. They make an effort to write towards their audience, creating a composition that comes closest to how they see themselves. They map their lives. This composition – albeit consciously or unconsciously – would mean an essential difference between the personal and the public diary. Instead of being a trace, it becomes an image: a recognizable whole. The personal diary, which is supposed to be a patchwork, an assembly of fragments, becomes fixed once the diarist starts searching for ways to address the audience. In order to write a public diary, they “develop a recognizable voice, a more or less distinctive style, turn [their] personality into a character.” (Lejeune I, 306) In this context, a character does not refer to someone’s moral capacities, but to the combination of properties into a role. While selecting elements from their personal lives to share with readers, a real personality (fluid, chaotic and incoherent) becomes a composed character (clear, fixed and recognizable). The Internet is a free zone for creating identities, a virtual space in which users can experiment with playing someone else. But “unlike players in MUDs and MOOsvii, who take on the identities and characteristics of characters in a larger game, diarists play ‘themselves,’ but in a venue that seems disconnected from, if based on, their offline lives.” (McNeill, 39) Narrative identity Playing yourself seems like quite a paradox: we are ourselves, but playing ourselves would suggest that we are actually something else and have to make vii Multi user domains, or real-time virtual worlds in which users interact with each other, usually text- based. 26 an effort to become ourselves. Adding the aspect of narrative identity allows a more nuanced look at this paradox. The narrative identity theory was developed by Paul Ricoeur, who suggests that our identity is not a predetermined fact but an “internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose.” (McAdams and McLean, 233) Every time we articulate our life story, our self becomes structured and identity takes shape. But the stories we tell do not stand on their own. According to Ricoeur, the development of narrative is a dialectical correlation of three stages of mimesis, concerning the construction of different narrative elements in relation to the self: the recognition of narrative elements, the ability to form a plot and the involvement of the self within that plot (Atkins). The basis of our narrative identity, therefore, lies outside ourselves and is constructed out of different elements when we internalize the stories we tell. This means that our identities are compositions by definition, and that the writing of a personal diary, which might be the purest form of life storytelling, is as much a composition as the public blog. Then why does it only feel like playing a part when the private becomes public? For Lejeune, the Internet fundamentally changes the immediacy with which our life stories are constructed and the distance between the self and the outside: “On est avec Internet devant le paradoxe d'une écriture sans «différance», qui rejoint presque l'instantané de la parole, et d'une intimité sans dedans, puisque apparemment tout est immédiatement dehors. Le moi individuel, qui s'est créé par intériorisation des structures sociales (le «for intérieur»), semble faire ici le trajet inverse.” [Internet confronts us with the paradox of a writing that is almost without ‘différance’, that is almost as instantaneous as speech, and of an intimacy without inside, since apparently everything is immediately outside. The individual self, which was created by the interiorization of social structures (the ‘innermost self’) seems to follow the opposite path here.] (II, 193-4) According to Ricoeur, even though the narrative we live by might be imitated from an exterior order, the internalization is most crucial. But on the Internet, the immediacy with which narratives are publicly constructed is fundamentally different from personal storytelling like in a diary. The internalization of the narrative happens en plein public with an audience as witness. Being an observer to this kind of identity-forming could easily make one feel uncomfortable, a voyeur, or, like Lejeune mentions, a parasite. 27 Self as sign It is not only the public internalization of a narrative that could be unsettling for some. The type of narrative also plays a role. As mentioned before, Lejeune notices new styles in Internet diaries that have changed since the introduction of an (anonymous) audience. Diarists search for a style, a certain tone for their trademark. They look to entice their audience into reading their stories and tempt them to come back for more. They adjust their narrative to their readers’ needs. But Internet audiences are tough to please, and if they do not like it, they will have no trouble moving on. If we think back to Alexandra Juhasz’s conclusions in the first chapter, YouTube users tend to be much more interested in familiar formats than in new and unconventional styles and in the end, the large public will want narratives that are easy and recognizable. So keeping a public diary on the Internet would mean expressing narratives that are much more generic and understandable than one would maybe do in a personal and private diary. If no one else is reading, then there is no need to find a public-friendly narrative. But if the goal is to connect with others and have them come back and follow your stories, then it is sensible to present a coherent and efficient narrative that will engage an audience. The Internet accommodates self-expression, causing the narratives used to render the self to be outside, and, because they are outside, mediated towards an audience. The result is a personal testimonial in which the self is played, promoted, or even staged: personality is fit into character. The self is familiarized to be a readable and recognizable whole: the self becomes sign. If the self is constructed as a coherent narrative to level with the audience, this could again raise some questions about the reality of the online identities. Does a vlogger count as less authentic as a private diarist? As was stated in the previous chapter, the importance of truth is up for debate and more importantly, this question cannot be answered with certainty. If there is a gap between our inner self and our outside appearance (‘playing ourselves’) than how do we respond to this? Maybe Christian’s remark about the reality of the experience is applicable here as well. Richard Dyer, who has written about the construction of movie stars, underscribes this attitude: “How we appear is no less real than how we have manufactured that appearance […]. Appearances are a kind of reality, just as manufacture and individual persons are.” (Dyer, 1) 28 The phenomenological truth is more important than the ontological truth, both Christian and Dyer claim. This statement sharply contrasts the common (Platonic) attitude that the truth behind appearances is crucial, and that, if we can only rely on appearance, we feel robbed of the truth when things turn out to be different. The debate surrounding the LONELYGIRL15-comeout shows exactly this discord and can teach us how to adapt to the rapidly changing ideas of truth and falsehood on the Internet. Internet as inner world Not only the vlogging self is a sign, but the image of the diarist, composited through the choice of words, tone or stories, is also a semiotic text that can be analysed. Because the previous pages have all dealt with the concepts and mechanisms involved in public diary keeping, I would now like to provide a more concentrated semiotic analysis of visual diaries, not written but filmed with the diarist in the picture. The image of the vlogger – the diarist in this analysis – is a highly personal one due to the fact that they themselves are exposed to an audience: we can see their face, but they cannot see us. It is a one-way perspective, and it takes guts to put yourself in an open and vulnerable spot like that. In the previous chapter I analysed the rules and codes for YouTube vlogs, and the first three criteria are the visual characteristics of a vlog: looking in the camera, medium close-up, front angle and amateur quality. These are the visual signifiers that point to the signified, which is the vlogger. This unity is, following Roland Barthes’ model of the sign, the denotation which is the obvious and commonsense meaning that we attribute to the sign (Chandler). Barthes’ model of semiotic analysis focuses on denotation, connotation and the myths that inevitably arise once the sign enters the public realm. Instead of being in itself or the Hegelian an sich, everything is subjected to dominant ideologies that form and bend the meanings we attach to things. In the case of the vlogger, the connotation – the paradigmatic dimension that the denotation points to – stretches out to the domain of the Internet, which becomes as a public sphere for private diaries. The myth here constructed closely approaches the public/private debate that Juhasz researched in her YouTube classes. This myth suggests that the public realm of the Internet is a place where every individual can express 29 themselves freely, just as they are, and that the Internet is thereby an extension of our inner world. The image of the vlogger here points to a much bigger, cultural construction about how we see ourselves and others in a technologically mediated society, and how the boundaries between our inner and outer life are formed and blurred. Public but private To analyse the vlog as a public diary, I have tried to look at the origin of this expression, that is the personal, private diary as Lejeune has been studying. Although some important aspects of vlogging are not applicable to personal diary writing, – i.e. speech instead of writing, the presence of a visible body – the analysis of the diary as a form of personal expression and establishment of the self, can assist us in exploring the vlog as a medium of public self-realization. Lejeune however, does forego in the analysis of the diary in the public sphere of the Internet, expressing his discomfort with the intimacies that are shared with a (generally) anonymous audience. In this analysis, he illustrates the alienation of personality becoming character through the public diary. According to Ricoeur, the use of narrative in the establishing of the self is very natural and obvious. The internalization of these narratives is most important, but online, this is an immediate externalization: the online diary is ‘writing without différance’ which causes immediate intimacy. But when these narratives are adapted to level with an anonymous Internet audience, they change: they are composed around familiar narratives that can interest and allure the viewers. The compositional or manufactured nature of these public identities does not necessarily mean that they are deceptive or fake: appearances are a reality of their own and do not have to be inferior to the nominal truth. 30 In a semiotic analysis of the vlog, the vlogger appears to be a commixture of public and private domain, and the sign of a cultural context in which the Internet has played a big role in our life environment. This development has become so widespread that we now even see it as a commonplace for personal expression and as an extension of our inner world. This is a strong and distinctive symptom of a society that is more and more dominated by Internet technologies. In this perspective, vlogging leads us to a myth of the Internet as inner world in which public and private, self and self-sign, intimacy and exteriority, gradually but surely intertwine. 31 Chapter 4 GAZING, READING, SHAPING In the previous chapter I have tried to expose the mechanisms which are at work in self-realization through diaries on the Internet. This perspective focuses on the vlogger, the person initiating the narrative and expressing it. But there is another important perspective that cannot be excluded from an analysis of the vlogging community: that is the perspective of the viewer. As I have argued before, the eyes of the audience are of influence on the vlogger’s narrative. But the appropriation and adjusting of these narratives still happens on the side of the vlogger, and it could almost seem like the other side of the spectrum, which is the side of the viewer, is quite passive. In this chapter I would like to investigate the active role of the audience, explaining this position on the basis of the theory of the gaze and its objectification, but also on the basis of how the audience reads the vlog and shapes it with its wishes. Guilty eyes According to Sigmund Freud, the Freudian subject is driven by scopophilia, or the pleasure of looking (Pisters, 140). This tendency means looking at things that we should not be looking at and experiencing voyeuristic feelings of excitement and satisfaction. Of course, for Freud, this is reducible to the Unconscious and the associated drives for both life and death, but the idea of the viewer has also found its way into the theory of the lens-based media. The camera, a piece of technology which we would expect to be completely objective, might not be as neutral as we think. The camera functions as a viewer as well, and can indeed be biased. Susan Sontag explained the active role of the lens in her book On Photography: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power.” (2) The relation between the camera and the depicted is a relationship of 32 power, of subjection. When photography was still in its early years, people could be afraid of having their picture taken, as if a piece of their soul would be taken away. These power dynamics have been described in philosophy, media and film studies, and post-feminism, in which the emphasis lies on the domination of the male perspective on the female subjection. I will try to map the politics of the YouTube viewer who navigates the web through a forest of personal stories, in search for a connection with a video: a person on screen, talking to them as if they are actually there. The power of the look It is not just the eyes of the spectator that are doing the looking. In every situation there are multiple levels of looking in operation. For example, James Elkins analyzes ten different looks which take place when viewing a figurative painting in a gallery or museum: ranging from you (looking at the picture), the figures in the painting (looking at you, each other or away), the museum guard (looking at your back) to even the people who have never seen the painting itself, but just the reproductions. (Chandler) What directions of looking take place in the act of vlogging? I would like to distinguish the following: 1. the viewer, watching the image of the vlogger from a computer 2. the vlogger, looking at the webcam, and 3. the vlogger, looking at the image of him/herself 4. other people in the room of the vlogger 5. other people in the room of the viewer 6. other viewers, who have watched the video before (indirect) 7. the vlogger, who might have seen the viewer’s videos (indirect) These directions all suggest a relationship of power between the one looking and the person or object looked at. But there are no direct or mutual looks: no one is looking back. All the looking is mediated through the computer, the Internet and YouTube as platform. The vlogger is aware of the fact that people will be watching, but cannot know who. Of course the vlogging community is very responsive and vloggers do address and respond directly to other videos – so they know a part of their audience. But they can never know every one else who is watching, because 33 they cannot see. The viewers’ presence is limited to a single number per video: the view count. Beyond that, the viewer is completely anonymous. These directions of the look strongly echo Michel Foucault’s panopticon, a method of surveillance in which the power relations are arranged by regulating the look. Through the panopticon, the subject is disciplined to join the social order and submit to the dominant ideologies. The look becomes an instrument of power, a way to regulate bodies and shape behaviour. In several theories, this power nuance leads to the distinction between the look and the gaze, in which the look remains quite neutral and impersonal, and the gaze is associated with power and scopophilia. The gaze is a psychological construction that extends beyond just looking: “to gaze implies more than to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze.” (Schroeder cited in Chandler) According to Daniel Chandler, the key element of the gaze is the indirectness, which means that even though the objects of the gaze are aware that strangers might gaze at them, they are not aware of their current viewers. This basically means that viewing any form of film or photography explicitly means to gaze, as Sontag described. Mutual desires The concept of the gaze has been contextualized in gender studies and has been used to describe the power relations at work in the cinematic discourse. Laura Mulvey described cinematic relations as a dichotomy of the sexes, in which the woman functions as image, whereas the man is the ‘bearer of the look’ (19). According to Mulvey, looking has been divided into two categories: active/male and passive/female, causing the male gaze to project his desires and fantasies onto the women on screen. Cinema displays women and ‘offers’ them to the male eye to be used in accordance to the male needs. In this perspective, traditional cinema is a patriarchal construct that indiscreetly objectifies women and subdues them to the purpose of male pleasure. But Mulvey’s analysis has also been widely criticized by film theorists, who have claimed that the dichotomy was too essentialist (Chandler), too focussed on heterosexual norms (Pisters, 159) and that the position of the female spectator was ignored (ibid, 148). But even though the gaze might not be as dichotomous as Mulvey describes, her gender perspective on the gaze is still a useful guideline 34 to analyse the act of looking because it includes the process of objectification. The voyeur’s gaze objectifies the spectated body at the other side of the lens, turning it into an image to be enjoyed, using it as means to an end instead of an end in itself. In the case of vlogging, not only does personality turn into character, but the private body turns into a public body seeking the voyeur’s eye: it becomes to- be-looked-at-ness. This terminology derives from Mulvey’s essay, but I would like to leave the gendered framework behind and place the discussion in a more neutral zone. Vloggers – female, male or LGTB – not only share their personal story with an anonymous online community, they share their bodies as well. They give more detailed and intimate experiences of their lives than, for example, bloggers do. And, more important and distinctive for vlogs, they directly address their viewers. They offer themselves as a character to the audience, asking them ‘look at me’. Here, the gaze is a mutual exchange of desires, a power relationship that works both ways. Online audiences are anonymous and safe from a distance, satisfying their voyeuristic desires by searching the vlogs. Vloggers are consciously public, not only with their minds, but even with their bodies, offering their image for the public to look at. The gaze is asked and the gaze is given, like a mutual agreement. In the next chapter I will go further into the implications of the online public sphere for the body, but now I would like to stay focussed on the position of the spectator, the anonymous audience that gets drawn to a vlog, deriving information, experience and even pleasure from it. Not only is their gaze constitutive for the vlog, but also the way they interpret the message, how they perceive the vlogger and what interpretation they give. A look at Stuart Hall’s influential essay ‘Encoding, decoding’ might be helpful to understand the viewers’ side of the spectrum. Reading the vlog According to Stuart Hall, every message produces a set of meanings through different distinctive moments. These moments of articulation – production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction – are linked together and are all essential for the formation of the message, but they do not fully guarantee how it will be articulated next (Hall, 508). The process of transmission happens within a framework of meanings and ideas, and these all are of influence on how 35 the message evolves through the different processes of communication. An encoded message carries meaning and intentions, but these do not necessarily correspond to their decoding: their syntagmatic relationship offers space for mutation and adaptation. The televisual sign in particular – in which aural and visual discourses meet – is a complex one, because it is a sign that does not entirely transfer its message: it represents real life qualities but can never be what it signifies. Therefore the televisual sign is iconic, because it points to its origin and expresses a similarity between the sign itself and its meaning. It has a resemblance to its object, but is not the object itself. This means that a meaningful and discursive coding precedes the televisual sign, and that it has to be read to be understood. But in these readings, different forms of interpretation are possible. Hall distinguished three possible readings for the televisual text: dominanthegemonic, negotiated and oppositional. According to Hall, these hypothetical positions show how encoding and decoding are not identical, and that the correct correspondence of a message is not evident but merely one of the possibilities. The hegemonic reading is the most preferable and correct reading of the message, meaning that encoding and decoding are similar. In this case, both the sender and receiver of the message are operating within the same set of codes and meanings. Meaning, as intended and encoded by the maker, is perfectly unpacked by the viewer, who not only understands but also endorses the message. In the case of history writing, the dominant reading is carried out by the political and military elites (Hall, 515), who benefit from upholding their truths and thus their power. The negotiated reading is a ‘yes, but’ attitude (Pisters, 240) and means that the legitimacy of the dominant perspective is acknowledged, but that it is substantiated to ones own social experiences which might contrast with the dominant reading: “It accords the privileged position to the dominant definitions of events while reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to 'local conditions', to its own more corporate positions.” (Hall, 516) Last, the oppositional reading is aware of the dominant perspective and understands its discourse, but does not agree or accept its reading because the reader is operating within a different set of codes and meanings. John Fiske uses the example of Madonna and shows that the dominant perspective is a patriarchal reading that judges Madonna for the sexual exploitation of her own body and 36 encourages young girls to do the same. More negotiated and oppositional readings see her as a sign for feminine resistance and claim that she actually empowers young girls to take control over their own bodies, instead of submitting them to the dominant structures of society (Fiske, 305). Although Stuart Hall emphasizes the fact that the classification of these readings is hypothetical and not empirically tested or refined, the different attitudes towards cultural texts help us to understand the reception of vlogs. It might not all be classifiable into three categories, but if we see it as a spectrum rather than as separate positions, it will help us understand the active role of the audience in understanding the vlogging community. Vlog receptions In the second chapter I wrote about different vlogging communities that vloggers can address, such as the TTC-community (trying to conceive) or WLS-journals (weight loss surgery). It is easy to understand that vloggers from the first community will read weight loss videos differently than the vloggers from the second community – and vice versa. The importance and meaning attributed to the targets that are set in the communities (resp. conceiving a child and losing weight by surgery) are not evident outside of that community. If we look at the bigger picture, that is, every YouTube viewer that decides to watch a vlog, the three general perspectives as characterized by Stuart Hall are very much applicable to the vlogger’s discourse. But first, a point must be made about the analysis of the dominant reading. It is troublesome, to say the least, to reveal the dominant perspective, or to decide what is hegemonic: we can use our gut feeling but there is no objective benchmark that points to the hegemonic framework. My analysis is influenced by my own ideas and ideals, so it is important to take a look at the possible angles to start this analysis. In the case of this vlogging analysis there are two possible starting points to be taken: either the traditional viewpoint on audio visual media, which might be more sceptical towards the vloggers’ messages because they reason from the conventional ‘top down’ attitude. Or it is possible to start from a more hybrid ‘bottom up’ view on the use of media, which reasons from the obviousness of the commixture of Internet and media in young people’s lives. Because I am trying, in this analysis, to understand the world of the vlogger and their experiences, the ‘default’ or preferred reading of the vlog will be the latter. 37 The hegemonic reading will acknowledge and encourage the new forms of personal expression through online networks such as YouTube, and will also judge vlogs according to the popular standards in the vlogging community, such as camera quality, use of narrative or amusement value. This reading will embrace and endorse the vlogging myth I described in the previous chapter, that the internet is indeed a refuge for personal expression and an extension of our inner world. And according to this reading, this is ok because it is a feature of our changing society, adapting itself to the standards of the 21st century. A more negotiated reading, which I subscribe to, accepts the developments of online identities and self-exposure via YouTube vlogs, but also poses questions about, for example, the authenticity of the online self, or about the implications of these expressions for our self-image. This perspective sees vlogs as an interesting phenomenon of our modern times and will ascribe meaningful qualities to the act of vlogging. Finally, the oppositional reading can be mockery or scepticism. For example, viewers might not accept the sincerity of the vlogger and see it as camp or parody. Or they might be sceptical about the naturalness with which vloggers expose themselves to an anonymous audience. This reading will criticise the loss of privacy and will see the concrescence of online media in our daily lives as a dangerous and harmful development for the self. As I mentioned before, this is a reading which upholds the traditional role of media production and prefers mainstream channels that have a long history of entertaining us, because they know what we want. These different perspectives all have their own influence on vlogs. The oppositional reading challenges the vlog to prove its veracity and its positive forces on our digital society. The hegemonic reading reinforces the vlogging communities’ efforts to explore relations between ourselves and others via online channels such as YouTube, and the negotiated reading will help this exploration by diving into the vlogger’s framework and questioning from within. Shaping the vlog In the previous chapters, I have analysed the vlogger’s discourse by looking closely at the medium, the vlog and the vlogger. It is important to involve the viewer’s perspective in this analysis as well. No matter what we might think of it, it is clear that our relationships with (online) media has drastically changed over 38 the past ten years and that our everyday media practices are moving ever closer to those of the media producer. In October 2003 – four months before the CBS nippelgate – BBC New Media & Technology director Ashley Highfield predicted the shift towards more interactive media use in a speech: “[…] audiences will want to create these streams of video themselves from scratch, with or without our help. At this end of the spectrum, the traditional ‘monologue broadcaster’ to ‘grateful viewer’ relationship will break down.” (cited in Jenkins, 253) Viewers push their influence on different levels and are everything but passive spectators. First, the viewer is a voyeur who searches the YouTube database for vlogs to connect with. Viewers aim to appease a desire for looking, to identify with the vlogger or to be entertained. But not only the viewer has desires to be satisfied by vlogging, also the vlogger expresses a lust to be seen, a to-be-looked- at-ness, and the desires at work are mutual. Second, and this is an extension of the previous chapter, the viewer’s gaze is a powerful instrument that shapes the attitude of the vlogger. The gaze of the viewer objectifies; it reads a two dimensional message that is a representation of the three dimensional, layered and complex personality that is the vlogger. To come across, the vlogger shapes a character that is recognizable for the public. This message turns into an icon and can be read as one. Third, within the vlogging community, the vlog is read as a sign of a positive and advanced involvement of technology and online media in our social lives, but there are also more critical perspectives that will question the naturalness of the vlogger and the desirability of this interference of media in our lives. 39 Chapter 5 NEW BODIES In the past four chapters I have tried to create an accurate analysis of the vlogger’s discourse by looking at four different levels: YouTube as platform (macro), vlog, vlogger and viewer (micro). These levels work together and intertwine in the daily practice of the vlogger. But I would like to briefly go into another topic that clearly distinguishes vlogs from other forms of online selfexpression, which is the presence of the body, and the implications this presence has on how we see ourselves. This short chapter will thus deal with the broader debate of the self in an online environment, identity markers, automediality and cyborgism. Identity m arkers In the debates surrounding online self-representation, the variables of expressing oneself seem endless. Through avatars, MUDs or MOOs, written blogs or online profiles we can experiment with who we are and experience what it feels like to be something totally different from ourselves. We can erase identity markers like race or ethnicity, gender or age, and safely engage in what Lisa Nakamura calls ‘identity tourism’ (Smith and Watson I, 78). Some online games such as Second Life or World of Warcraft even expand the possibilities of our online identities to qualities of nonhuman entities such as animals, fantasy creatures, superheroes and hybrids (ibid). But YouTube leaves no space for avatars, unless created as a homemade animation and uploaded to the platform. YouTube as platform and vlogs in particular coerce a bodily self-expression in which the vlogger is fully visible. This means that variations of identity markers have a limited scope. For example, if I were to make a fake vlog, I could easily change my name and life story, but there would be limits to my supposed age; I could probably go for 23 – 32 (my real age 40 is 27), but not any older or younger. I could change my sexual preferences but I would not be able to credibly alter my sexuality or the color of my skin. In contrast to many other forms of online self-expression, the very precondition for vlogging is the exposure of the embodied self. As I have mentioned before, it is a quite vulnerable position to display yourself like that when you cannot see your audience, and many people would not even consider showing themselves in such a way on the world wide web. In the reality of vlogging, the embodied self is present but can never be fully transmitted – that would be teleportation. The image of the vlogger is a representation of a singular body that stays in the realm of the vlogger. In the virtual domain, bodies are dematerialized in virtual representation (Smith and Watson I, 78). They are deconstructed and reconstructed – either in the reception of the viewer or in the creation of an avatar. This leads us to the concept of automediality, a term that refers to the relation between the choice of medium and the subjectivity it renders. According to Smith and Watson, the medium is not just a tool to express the self; rather it is constitutive for its rendering (II, 168). The medium does not stand in the way of self-expression; it becomes an intrinsic part of it. This leads us to a new approach towards the relation between vloggers and their choice of platform. YouTube, just as any other medium for self-expression, “[does] not simplify or undermine the interiority of the subject but, on the contrary, [expands] the field of selfrepresentation beyond the literary to cultural and media practices.” (ibid) Cyborgs Vloggers fully express themselves in an online environment, which becomes an extension of their inner world. And as I have explained in chapter three, their self is created through spoken narrative, an immediately outward and public gesture. The expression as well as the internalization of this narrative happens through the mediation of technology. If we look at this process on a magnified scale, it means that the vlogger expresses him/herself into the lens of the camera, that the image is processed through light sensors and algorithms, rendered and stored in zeroes and ones, and reconstructed on the computer screen again, for the vlogger to look at while recording him/herself. The self is constructed through technology, which leads us to the concept of the cyborg, defined by Donna Haraway as “a 41 hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” (149) The cyborg is not necessarily a literal conjunction of man and machine – like a person with a hearing device or blade runner Oscar Pistorius – but it rather describes the fading of clear boundaries between ourselves and our physical identity as it is structured in our social reality. As Haraway describes, the rigid boundaries that we have been taught by narratives of Christianity, capitalism and Oedipus, should make place for a more fluid conception of our cultural identities. It is no longer tenable to keep up the firm distinctions between self/other, culture/nature, male/female, reality/appearance, maker/made or God/man (177). The vlogger’s discourse preeminently illustrates this: the past four chapters have hopefully shown that these practices undermine the boundaries between private and public, authenticity and act, the body and the virtual. Analyzing vlogs cannot be done by looking at these domains separately, but rather by understanding the ‘hybridism’ that the vlogging practice calls for. In chapter three, I used Roland Barthes’ semiotic analysis to show the myth that vlogging points to, namely the extension of our inner life to the public sphere of the Internet. By using Barthes’ terminology, I have labeled this as a myth, but I would like to revise this claim. A myth – a commonly believed but false ideaviii – suggests the falsehood of this claim, while the practice of vlogging leads me to believe the opposite: vlogging blurs these boundaries and is therefore a prominent example of cyborgism. It brings new bodies into life, not afflicted by our old, rigid beliefs about identity, but capable of crossing these cultural boundaries and exploring the self on a whole new level. viii According to the Cambridge Dictionary Online 42 Chapter 6 CASE STUDIES After having written dozens of pages about the nature of vlogging and its implications on the experience of ourselves and others, I now wonder if this analysis only exists in theory and does not meet with the real practice of vlogging. After having studied the abstract fields of Philosophy, I was happy to switch to Cultural Studies in Leuven because of its focus on putting theory into practice. Studying the interaction between the academic discourse and the practices that actively engage in these research topics has been great fun. So now that the theoretical frameworks are up, it is time to sound my conclusions within the vlogging community. L ITERALLY T HE J OY In December 2013 I started my research on vlogs. I spent hours and hours on YouTube, searching for vlogs and vloggers I liked. Some videos made me feel extremely uncomfortable while others gave me a feeling of pleasant familiarity with the vlogger. After a few hours of watching, I felt emotionally exhausted and I was in dire need of real life, two-way human contact. For me, the world of vlogging and the real world are two completely different realms that will never meet. But for most vloggers, the two easily and happily intertwine. In my search for vlogs that I could use for my research, I came across a YouTube vlog called LITERALLYTHEJOY, which I already mentioned in the preface and in the second chapter. Joy (real name: Joy Lasher-Lewis) is a now 24-year old film student from Newark, Delaware who posted her first videos and vlogs under the name INDIEROCKERKID in 2008. In her video ‘First Vlog’ she introduces herself and explains that she does not really know what to talk about and asks the viewers for suggestions: 43 “I just was inspired… I guess… to start vlogging and so maybe you guys can give me some suggestions, but if you don’t, that’s okay. But if you don’t, I will hunt you down – just kidding. I don’t really care.” (‘First Vlog’) Browsing through her videos, I noted that the different impressions and small pieces of information start to form a complete image. Joy seems to be a sweet and shy, introverted young woman that goes to church and plays music in her room. In her videos she talks about trivial things in her life, for example cleaning the house, making diner or being cold. Joy is a Harry Potter fan, says that she is lazy and punishes herself for procrastinating over everything (even vlogging). And she is always apologizing for things she thinks she does wrong. The topics of her videos are simple, everyday experiences, but she also participates in small YouTube memes such as the ‘dear body’ video (popular in 2007/2008, in which vloggers film and address their body in second person perspective and explain what they like about it), or video responses to the ‘show your smile’ or ’10 random facts about you’-memes. In July 2008 she changes her channel from INDIEROCKERKID to LITERALLYTHEJOY because she likes the name better, and she starts to talk about a boy in her church that she met and would like to see again. A quick check of her timeline learns me that the boy in question, called Max, proposed to her in 2009, that they moved to Baltimore and got married on September 20, 2014. On March 12, 2013, Joy posts a video in which she announces her plan to vlog every day for the next eleven years, starting on her birthday that year until her 34th birthday in 2024. She explains that popular vlogger SHAYCARL, who started vlogging in his twenties and is then 34, had been vlogging for a large part of his life and that she wants to do the same. On April 15, she starts the video ‘IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!! (4/15/13 – Day 1)’, and continues to vlog regularly until October 18 (day 187). After that, the daily routine is breached and Joy seems to struggle with wanting to do a daily vlog but not having the perseverance to do it. She picks up the daily vlog in June 2014, but after about ten days, she stops again. Her current videos are irregular in both 44 frequency and form: she started a DIY-series named ‘Joy Makes Stuff’, and continues to upload song covers, vlogs and even a honeymoon video. As I am writing thisix, Joy has posted a total of 627 videos on LITERALLYTHEJOY and has updated her life on YouTube for the past six years now. She has 132 subscribers to her channel, but her videos get relatively few views: the least popular video has received only 6 views, and the average seems to be about 20 to 100 – unless for song uploads or her videos about Harry Potter, which account for 1851 views. In December 2013, I sent Joy a private message, asking about her motivation to start vlogging. A few days later, she responded: “My motivation to vlog has definitely been a combination of things. First of all, I've spent a lot of time watching people like the SHAYTARDS and INTERNET KILLED TV and seeing how much fun they have every day. Part of me feels like the fact that they vlog is what makes their lives so much fun, because so much of the stuff they've done since they started is in some way related to youtube [sic] or the career that they've made for themselves out of vlogging. I want my life to be as fun as theirs, so I vlog in the hopes that it will lead to great opportunities the way that others have. Another reason why I like vlogging, is because it's for myself, I'm not doing it for any body else. Sure people are going to watch it, and comment on it, but to me it's like an open diary, and my thoughts are the only ones that should be in it. […] Lastly, and this is very similar to the last one, is just to be connected with people in general. I've never been good a [sic] socializing IRL, but for some reason talking to a camera is much easier, and I hope to make many close friends this way, as others have. I think a lot of young people vlog for a lot of the same reasons why I vlog. To have fun, to work for themselves and to be connected with other people. I've also noticed some similarities in what other YouTubers have gone through in their lives through watching the ‘Draw My Life’ tag, and I think this is a good indication of why a lot of them vlog. A lot of YouTubers, have been bullied or gone through rough situations in their lives, were introduced to youtube [sic] at some point in the midst of all that, and it bettered their lives by it connected [sic] them to people who were like them." (private message, December 19, 2013)x ix November 27, 2014 x “Draw My Life is a YouTube video fad in which people describe their life, or an aspect of it like their job or relationships, by drawing stick figures. The footage of the drawing process is then sped up for the video, with an added voice over explaining the artwork. Similar to the exploitable template Draw Your Life, these videos often depict how a person has grown and changed throughout their life.” (Knowyourmeme.com) 45 Joy’s answers about her motivation did not sound strange to me, but I was surprised by her openness to a certain degree. She is honest about her desires to imitate other vloggers in the hope that, as a result, her life will come to be more fun. This remark implies that self-exposure would lead to popularity, and that having a well watched YouTube channel improves your fun in life. But as I explained in chapter 3 and 4, the narratives used for public diaries are adapted to the audiences’ desires and the self is played, promoted or even staged. If we were to become more popular by playing ourselves better on YouTube, would this give us more fun in life? If our personality becomes character, and our character becomes popular, would this improve our joy (no pun intended) in life? It definitely could, although I must say that I question the desirability of that scenario. Joy’s second reason is that she vlogs entirely for herself, and not for anybody else. This I have to question as well. In my opinion, Joy is very much concerned with her number of YouTube subscribers, and every video ends with a request to subscribe to her channel. In a 2009 video she challenges her viewers to leave a comment below the video with constructive criticism, after she noticed that her previous video had not been viewed (‘04/06: Rain’). And on May 9 she posts a video in which she celebrates her 100th subscriber by making pancakes. Her viewers matter to her, so even although her initial motivation was to start a video diary for herself, it turned into a public arena in which both Joy’s and her viewers thoughts are the subject matter. Her third reason is interesting though, and this is where not a traditional producer-receiver relation is described, but where a feeling of community and connectedness is created. Joy points out that she is not very good at keeping social contacts in real life and that talking to a camera is much easier for her. This is a new way for her to connect with people and find friends. The ‘Draw my life’ tag, as Joy mentions, is a way for vloggers to introduce themselves and give viewers a little insight in their lives. People that have been bullied connect with each other to share experiences and give each other positive comments. For example, I searched for a random ‘Draw my life’ video and watched ‘Draw My Life!’ by PINKSTYLIST, a British vlogger that posts tutorials for theatrical make-up styles. In his video, he talks about being bullied at school and how this influenced his life. A few of the responses below the video show that a sense of solidarity is created: 46 “Charlie your a good guy OK don't listen to the bullies ever again there mean u don't have to worry about them anymore u always have us bye your side OK don't worry” (all sic, ELLIOTT DALY) “Charlleeeee! You're such an amazing person ^.^ you've become such an inspiration and idol to me and my sister. Especially my sister! She wants to pursue a career in make-up. You and Graham are adorable together! (I plan to make fan-art for you guys w) You're absolutely great and me and my sis will always love you c: We wish you the best!” (all sic, SHARKTITS UNIVERSE) I must add to this that there are also negative comments below the video that pick on him for being gay, but the main tone of the responses is amicable and empowering. According to Joy, sharing these experiences on YouTube helps people learn how to deal with being bullied or feeling alone and excluded. Vlogging can become an important part of someone’s social life because of the empowering presence of a YouTube community. OSHITBRITT Another vlogger that caught my attention was the twentysomething OSHITBRITT, whom I mentioned briefly in the second chapter. OSHITBRITT (real name: Brittany Touris) positions herself as ‘writer, feminist and recent college dropout’ and in her first vlog (‘MY FIRST VLOG – WHAT AM I DOING HERE?’), she makes her first feminist statement – that women “are the same amount of human as men”. Like Joy, Britt seems quite shy in her first video: her voice is quite soft and she frequently looks away from the camera. But one year and 54 videos later, Britt has developed into a somewhat experienced vlogger with a lot more self-esteem than in her first videos. She confidently talks into the camera and shares her thoughts with the viewers. In each video she poses a small statement or argument, some more solid than others, but all show a deep and strong feminist belief. In contrast to Joy, OSHITBRITT never mentions trivial things like what she did that day, but she does express her personal and intimate beliefs, which qualifies her as a vlogger. As a vlogger or video diarist, one of the features of the diary would be to put a date on top of every entry (following Philippe Lejeune in the third chapter). This feature leads us to a small paradox, namely that the date is both present and absent in every video. Britt never starts her video by mentioning the date and the timeline does not seem to interest her at all. But the YouTube 47 interface automatically shows the date of the upload on every video, so even though she never mentions the date, it is inevitably there. This is the case for many vloggers: some mention the date in the video or in the caption (like Joy), while others do not, in which case the date is still present. But when we look at OSHITBRITT and other vloggers, it seems like they involve a timeline in their videos in another way. Britt posts a new vlog every Tuesday, and in that sense, she creates episodes of her diary. It is a gesture in which she serves her viewers with regular updates, which would surely increase the view counts. Yet it also could contribute to the question of originality and authenticity, because the vlogs do not gush from the internal desire of the vlogger, but from the need of the audience. And when speaking of ways of self-expression, we would not easily think of expressing yourself at the demand of an audience. That indeed, seems like quite a paradox again. Thinking back to the relation between self-expression and self-promotion in the second chapter, I would say that the vlogs of Joy and Britt are in essence selfexpression, but shifting more and more towards self-promotion for the sake of popularity. The weekly episodes contribute to the earlier discussed feeling of watching a show in which the self is ‘played, promoted or even staged’, and add another dimension to the use of narrative. ITSCHRISCROCKER A vlogger who plays very well into the concept of self-promotion is ITSCHRISCROCKER, who I have also mentioned before. ITSCHRISCROCKER IS a 26-year-old androgynous man from Tennessee, who gained worldwide attention in 2007 with his video ‘LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!’, which currently has 48,761,795 views in totalxi. Chris Crocker’s (real name: Chris Cunningham) dramatic performance in which he passionately defends Britney Spears after her breakdown, during which she xi December 3, 2014 48 shaved her hair off. He cried out in defense of Britney because she was not doing well at the time and he feared for her mental well-being. Seven years later, the video has become a YouTube icon and has received a substantial following in the form of satire and memes. Chris started his videos as an effeminate gay man who would dress and talk like a girl, creating an exaggerated drag character of himself. His early vlogs are recorded in and around the house of his grandparents, and consist mainly of monologues on being gay and a minority member, how people respond to him and how he deals with that. In his room, filled with Britney-posters, he dresses up in make-up and wigs, in an improvised studio, created by holding a curtain behind his head. His extravagant personality and all-out exposure made Chris a much debated subject on the Internet. From the moment he started vlogging, the responses were extremely hateful. “what the fuck is wrong with you...? You're a sick devil... go to a mental hospital...” (sic, DAVID TREJO) “so the electric chair is still warm from troy davis, lets throw this thing on there” (all sic, JACK SPARROW) These are just two of the 30,004 of responses from the past seven years to one of his first videos, ‘This & that.’, in which he sits on his couch and addresses his haters. His legs are pulled up, his voice is high and almost falsely sweet. “Hey, what up everybody, this is Chris. I'm still kinda blowing smoke out my ears because the haters just refuse to give it up, you know? And to the people who be saying, you know, this and that: Yo, girl, I don't understand. Look at this, girl!” He puts his legs down and shows his skinny torso and his small biceps. Suddenly he changes his tone from innocent girl to a vicious screamer who takes on the character of a black woman: "Girl, what is it, girl? What I got to hide, nigga, what I got to hide?" It was not only his androgynous appearance got him all malicious responses, but many people got angry over the fact that he used the N-word and seemed to impersonate a black woman. The confusion amongst his viewers concerning ‘what he was’ was enormous, evoking both hateful and comical reactions: “Chris Crocker = black woman in gay white man's body but still love you/him. he/you're funny as shit :D” (all sic, MISTERFREEHUGS) 49 His genderbending continued when he gradually started to look more masculine over the years, until a full masculine appearance in 2012, which brought him a lot of positive comments on his good looks. In a recent interview with Queerty in February 2014, Crocker spoke about his considerations about fully transitioning to female (Baume). In the space of a few years, Chris Crocker became an Internet celebrity who made a career out of being on YouTube. This is where another important aspect of YouTube should be mentioned that has stayed invisible throughout this whole analysis: the fact that money is being made with vlogging. It should come as no surprise that there is a commercial motive behind almost everything, even the act of self-expression. In a corporate video on the YouTube Creator Academy, Partner Product Manager Andy Stack explains how YouTube can serve as a monetizing ecosystem in which creators, viewers, advertisers and YouTube all play into each others wishes. And for some vloggers it has turned out to be a very profitable enterprise. Vlogger JENNA MARBLES (real name: Mourey), whose first viral video dates from 2010, possibly made up to $346,827 in 2012 (O’Leary). Her videos are comic, meme-like and very interactive, and she now has a complete team behind her to help her produce and distribute her videos (ibid). Earlier mentioned daily vlogger SHAYCARL, whose channel SHAYTARDS is hugely popular and revolves around his allAmerican family (him, his wife and their five children), has become so successful that he sold his company Maker Studios this year to The Walt Disney Company for $500 million (Spangler). There is a lot of money to be made in vlogging, but not just for everybody. Money comes with views and likes, so it will only be profitable if you play your cards right and gain popularity with the YouTube audience. Again, it proves that sticking to a popular, corporate format to express yourself pays – in the literal sense. 50 In these case studies, the visions of both Henry Jenkins and Alexandra Juhasz are still visible and present. YouTube proves to be a platform where participatory culture can grow and expand, and where ideas of ourselves and the world we live in are shaped and reshaped by the products of our peers. But these products are also subjected to the corporate standards that are necessary to even make them visible. And to gain the favor of the mass, these products are very likely to reinforce our dogmatic views of society. They are not likely to take any risk to reshape our dreams, for if they do so, they will very likely end up on NicheTube. Vlog interview – questions to frequent vloggers To understand the act of vlogging and the vlogger’s community it has been helpful to correspond with Joy about her experiences. But as an outsider, it is hard to fully grasp the experience of vlogging by just watching. Not only is it hard to talk about doing something you have not done yourself, it is also not very fair, in my opinion. This would mean that I would have to start vlogging myself, an idea that did not appeal to me at all: after having watched hours and hours of vlogs, I could never picture myself sitting in my living room, speaking to my computer and sharing my face on YouTube. Considering the topic of this thesis it would be the fairest thing to do, so in an attempt to get in touch with more vloggers, I put aside my scruples and recorded my own first vlogxii. While making my own vlog, I try to follow most of the rules and codes I described in chapter two. I sit in front of the webcam (a built-in camera on my laptop) so I can make eye contact while reading out loud what I am going to say on my computer screen. I sit directly in front of the camera at a right angle, in a medium close-up shot showing my head and torso. My eyes are lined out according to the rule of third – just as VLOGBROTHERS suggested. I keep my video short (1:49 minutes) and do not do anything to improve the quality of my camera. Then finally, I make sure that I have clearly state something about myself (“I am from the Netherlands and I am doing research on vlogs”), address a particular audience (“frequent vloggers”) and although I do not ask viewers to subscribe to my channel, I cautiously try to promote myself by inviting viewers to respond. The goal of my video is to get in touch with vloggers, so I pose six questionsxiii and xii https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH_l-WBYlQI xiii See appendix I 51 invite vloggers to answer them in any way they like, for example in a responding video or via a private message. I post the video online on November 25th and to increase my scope, I send the link to 25 vloggers in a private message, inviting them to watch and respond. A week later, my video has 5 views and no response. Thinking back of the first chapter in which I described the beehive effect and the metaphorical NicheTube, I’m starting to see how hard it is to actually broadcast yourself. In search for tips on how to get more YouTube views, I (ironically) find possible solutions on YouTube: in ‘How To Get More Views On YouTube – Top 9 Techniques’ SOLD WITH VIDEO explains 9 tips, such as buying views with AdWords (Google’s advertising service), sharing videos on social media, using tags, thumbnails and keywords and creating annotations. The first method focuses solely on getting the numbers up, while I am looking for real viewers. Social media is not preferable because I do not have any vloggers in my network. The last four tips all focus on configuring the metadata by adding words that will help the video to pop up in the search results. I add the tags ‘vlog’, ‘YouTube’, ‘first’, ‘question’ and ‘interview’ to emphasize the content and ‘new’, ‘share’, ‘help’, ‘watch’, ‘respond’ and ‘broadcast yourself’, to the metadata of my video. The private messages seem to be getting few responses, so to draw more attention to my profile and my video, I start commenting publicly on the videos from my target group (i.e. my group of 25 vloggers): Hi Britt, I like your vlogs and would like to ask you some questions if that's ok. You can find them in this video: /watch?v=SH_l-WBYlQI Thanks! A few days later, I get my first responses. BLACKUNIGRYPHON and MAINELYBUTCH let me know that they will upload a video response and OSHITBRITT posts her answers in the comment section below my video. Her answers are short and not very detailed xiv . To my question about the positive and negative responses, she answers: “On more controversial videos, I get a lot of debate. But I welcome that sort of thing. It's what's great about the Internet – people sharing their point of view. Other than that the responses are pretty positive, which is encouraging.” The next day, BLACKUNIGRYPHON (real name: Kandice Zimbleman) lets me know that her video is online. In a nearly 30-minute-long video called Video Responce to xiv See appendix II 52 Anneroos [sic]xv she vents her thoughts on how she started vlogging, how she experiences YouTube and what it means to her. From her home computer, she tells me that she was born in 1979 and grew up in the nineties when she came in touch with online communities, where people were very friendly, polite, educated and helpful in her experience. Through websites such as Livejournal.com and Myspace.com, she started sharing her life online. YouTube, she explains, was still a niche and very different from what it is now. She started vlogging because it was just another way of blogging and self-expression, because talking was sometimes easier than writing. Ironically, she answers that she does not feel free to share everything she wants because YouTube has become a venture for corporatism (after it was sold to Google), but also because of the new audience: when she started vlogging the community consisted of many young likeminded people who were open and friendly to each other. Now, she explains, you can get attacked, you can get preyed on, flamed or hacked, if people do not like what you say. So in expressing herself freely on the Internet, she does indeed self-censor. Then she explains that she is very lonely – many friends live far away and next to her husband and daughter, there are not many people around. For a long time, she has interacted with people via social media but she feels that people do not have time to read a blog anymore. Vlogging, she says, is for her a way to get her thoughts straight, because she has to express herself in a coherent narrative – something she says has been difficult for her sometimes. Vlogging is an expressive experiment to channel her stream of consciousness and to escape her loneliness. She gets quite emotional when she speaks about this, and her genuine response leaves me a bit dazed. Her video is very intimate, which feels strange to watch, but it’s also very special to have a stranger share that much with you. Her sincerity and openness move me, and although her motivations are highly personal, I think there is a core to her story that can be applied to many vloggers: vlogging to not be alone, to get in touch with likeminded people who can understand and empower you, who can relate to your story and share your thoughts. I, for example, already experience this in person thanks to Kandice’s response: even though she does not know me, she shares her story with me. xv See appendix III 53 Through her tears she looks into the webcam: “I just wanted to say something. Or at least try to.” Joy, Brittany, Chris and Kandice easily embrace a hybrid form of public/personal identities; they are not scared to share their thoughts, their doubts, concerns or beliefs with an anonymous crowd. They are not too reserved to show themselves to others, and not ashamed to speak out loud into their computer, or to show their face to strangers. They flourish along the borders of these cultural boundaries that have rigidly parted one domain from the other. And they are not afraid to transgress. 54 Chapter 7 CONCLUSION NEW BODIES IN AN ONLINE WORLD The aim of this thesis has been to make a thorough and extended analysis of the vlogger’s discourse, in order to understand what it means to express an embodied self in an online environment. Many interesting perspectives have not been touched upon throughout the writing of this thesis, such as the possibilities that vlogging offers for the deaf community, the dynamics of LGBT vlogs, censorship due to geographical constraints, or the problematics of suicide vlogs – a phenomenon Julia Watson pointed out to me. These topics call for more extended research and a wider conception of the vlogger’s discourse than I have offered in this thesis. However, the limitations of my research have also enabled me to dig deeply into theoretical frameworks that the very act of vlogging immediately touches upon. In my opinion, these frameworks present aspects that vloggers encounter in their online practices of self-expression. They precede these perspectives and therefore offer an initial base to explore the meaning of embodied online self-expression. Having looked at different domains of the vlogger’s practice, I would argue that the act of vlogging transcends the boundaries of domains that we have learned to keep apart, such as real and fake, private and public, self and other, embodiment and virtuality. These crossings create new relations between ourselves and the world around us, causing us to rethink our ideas about identity and ourselves. I would like to see this as the emergence of new bodies in an online world. To explore vloggers’ practices on YouTube, I have differentiated five domains of research, some theoretical, some practical, and dealt with these analyses in four case studies. First and foremost it is important to see the revolutionary potential that YouTube has to offer in theory. As Henry Jenkins has argued, YouTube has taken the power of media production, selection and distribution out of the hands of traditional media distributors and given it to the public. Thanks to grassroots distribution, it gives users the freedom not only to express their 55 dreams and ideals, but thereby also to shape the zeitgeist. We can now take a participatory approach to our social reality. But I have put the emphasis on the theoretical aspect of this potential. As Alexandra Juhasz describes in her empirical YouTube research, much of this potential is lost when it is put into practice. YouTube is a platform for true civic discourse, but this has been quickly encapsulated by its corporate practice, and the aim to create popular content by its users. To contrast with mainstream corporate videos, vloggers present their content in a recognizable format, which contributes to its credibility. These visual characteristics (looking into the camera, non-professional video quality, personal story) are easy to follow, but also easy to fake: many fake vlogs have proven the ease with which users can feign sincerity. Vlogging presents us with a visual fallacy, namely that dilettantism guarantees authenticity. This presents us with a first breach in a traditional dichotomy of the real and the false. The aim for popular content afflicts the vlogger’s journal: although a vlog is a video diary in which the vlogger can freely and genuinely express her/himself, vloggers do adjust their narrative to attract an audience. This forces the diary to be clear and comprehensible, to fix itself in one narrative or identity. This is in sharp contrast to Philippe Lejeune’s definition of a diary, which is a series of dated traces – not stories. The online video diary revises itself and becomes an arena for the vlogger to show a character, a persona which develops itself in front of a watching eye. It also changes the relation between our interior and the exterior, because the narratives used to shape our identities are immediately outside, which causes the Internet to be an extension of our inner world. This second breach shows how the private has now become public. The third breach deals with the traditional relation between ourselves and others, causing the relation between vlogger and viewer to change drastically. Viewers have now gained power over the chain of supply and demand, and are not a passive spectators anymore – as they have been for a long time. Vlogger and viewer both express desires of looking and getting looked at, and feed each other in a voyeuristic spiral. The eyes of the viewer are dominant and insatiable, which turns vlogging into self-expression on demand. Finally, the fact that vlogging exposes the body introduces a last breach with the traditional conception of our cultural identities. As opposed to other forms of online self-expression, vlogging inevitably involves the body which means that its 56 exposure is one of the preconditions to vlog. This changes the way that vloggers see themselves within the wide field of online expression: they literally show themselves to whoever is interested, and they do not feel the need to shield their physical identities from the anonymous crowd. Their bodies become public domain. Of course this self-expression is mediated on multiple levels. On one level, it is mediated by the vlogger: as my correspondence with Kandice teaches me, she does in fact self-censor. She consciously chooses what to share and what not; she even records her vlogs multiple times in search of the right flow. On another level, there is automediality, or the mediation of the self through medium technology, which, in this case, is YouTube. It constitutes her self-expression and becomes a part of it, rather than being available as a tool. The webcam and YouTube interfaces have become a crucial part of Kandice’s self-expression and are now inseparable from her subjectivity. Following Donna Haraway, I have argued that the vlogger is a prominent example of a cyborg. By this I mean that the vlogger is capable of transgressing boundaries between domains that we have learned to keep safe: real and fake, private and public, self and other, embodiment and virtuality. From this transgression, new bodies arise: bodies that are able to easily flow between one and the other and still experience a unity, hybrids. Bodies that can be both real and fake, both self and other. These bodies should not be understood as a physical structure but as a collection of qualities, not bereft of contradiction, but alive in transgression. As strange as it might be, I would not count myself as one of those new bodies. My aversion to publishing my own vlog shows me that I am not at all able to see myself as a hybrid form that can exist online just as easily as in real life. But in contrast to myself, the vloggers I have been in touch with seem to prosper from these fading boundaries: they are neutral as to what is real and what is fake – as long as the experience is true. They see the difference between their on- and offline lives and they do self-censor, but they have no problem with operating equally both on-camera and away-from-camera. They are at ease with being both public and private at the same time. They do not care who sets the agenda – themselves or the audience. And they see no difference between their embodied lives and their virtual lives. 57 Online social structures have become their new habitat, and are in no way inferior to our physical social reality away from camera. They are free to explore themselves in relation to the domains they have blended, and can now move freely as new bodies in an online world. 58 LITERATURE & DIGITAL SOURCES Selected books and articles Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Atkins, Kim. ‘Paul Ricoeur (1913 – 2005)’. where old and new media collide. New Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. York: New York University Press, 2008. Website, n.d. Web, November 2014. Print. Chandler, Daniel. ‘Denotation, Connotation Juhasz, Alexandra. ‘Learning the Five and Myth’, Semiotics for Beginners. Lessons of YouTube: After Trying to Teach Website, 2014. Web, November 2013. There, I Don't Believe the Hype’. Cinema Journal 48, 2009. pp. 145-150. Print. Chandler, Daniel. Notes on ‘The Gaze’. Juhasz, Alexandra. Learning from YouTube. Website, 1998. Web, November 2014 Online video book. MIT Press. Web, April Christian, Aymar Jean. ‘Real vlogs: The 2014. rules and meanings of online personal videos’. First Monday, Volume 14, Number (I) Lejeune, Philippe. On diary. Honolulu: 11, 2009. N.p. Web, July 2014. University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. Print. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars (II) – – –. Chér Écran. Paris: Paris Seuil, and Society. Phoenix: Arizona State 2000. Print. University. Web, November 2014. McAdams, Dan P. and McLean, Kate C. Fiske, John. ‘British Cultural Studies and ‘Narrative Identity’, Current Directions in Television’. Channels of Discourse. Psychological Science 22, 2013. pp. 233- University of North Carolina Press, 1992. pp. 238. Web, October 2014 284-326. Print. McNeill, Laurie. ‘Teaching an Old Genre Hall, Stuart. ‘Encoding, decoding’. The New Tricks: The Diary on the Internet’. Cultural Studies Reader. London and New Biography, vol. 26, 2003. pp. 24-47. Web, York: Routledge, 1999. pp. 507-517. Print. November 2013. Haraway, Donna. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Science, Technology, and Socialist- Narrative Cinema’. Visual and Other Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. Pleasures. Indiana: Indiana University Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Press, 1989. pp. 14-26. Print. Reinvention of Nature. New York: Návrat, Pavol. ‘Bee Hive Metaphor for Web Routledge, 1991. pp.149-181. Web, Search’. CompSysTech 2006. Web, April December 2014. 2014. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Pisters, Patricia. Lessen van Hitchcock. where old and new media collide. New Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, York: New York University Press, 2008. 2007. Print. Print. 59 Smith, Daniel W. ‘The concept of the Reuters. ‘YouTube serves up 100 million simulacrum: Deleuze and the overturning of videos a day online’. Reuters, July 16, 2006. Platonism’. Continental Philosophy Review Web, December 2014. 38, 2006. pp. 89-123. Print. Spangler, Todd. ‘Maker Studios Says Disney (I) Smith, Sidonie and Watson, Julia. Acquisition Is Approved by Shareholders, Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self- Who Reject Relativity Bid’. Variety.com, Presentation.’ Identity Technologies: April 14 2014. Web, December 2014. Producing Online Selves. University of Tabak, Alan. ‘Hundreds Register for New Wisconsin Press, 2013, pp. 70-95. Print Facebook Website’. The Harvard Crimson. (II) – – –. ‘Reading Autobiographies. A February 9, 2004. Web, July 2014. guide for interpreting life narratives. The Associated Press. ‘Number of active University of Minnesota, 2010. Print. users of Facebook over the years’. The Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Associated Press, October 23, 2012. Web, RosettaBooks LLC (electronic edition), April 2014. 2005. Web, December 2014. The Associated Press. ‘Piercing the veil of Stone, Allucquère Rosanne, ‘Will the Real Lonelygirl15’. The Associated Press, Body Please Stand Up?’ Cyberspace: First September 13, 2006. Web, July 2014. Steps. N.d. Web, December 2014. YouTube. ‘Statistics’. YouTube, n.d. Web, December 2014. Online sources Alexa. ‘The top 500 sites on the web’. Alexa, YouTube videos n.d. Web, December 2014. ANDYMOOSEMAN, Baume, Matt. ‘EXCLUSIVE: Chris Crocker ‘What is a Vlog?’. YouTube, 2008. Web, January 2015. Tells All, Describes His Weird Fame, ANNEROOS GOOSEN, ‘Vlog interview – Gender Transition And Porn Plans’. questions to frequent vloggers’. YouTube, Queerty Magazine. February 7, 2014. Web, 2014. Web, January 2015. December 2014. BLACKUNIGRYPHON, ‘Video Responce to CNN. ‘‘Gangnam Style’ breaks YouTube’. Anneroos’. YouTube, 2014. Web. January CNN, December 3, 2014. Web, December 2015. 2014. CASEYANTHONYVLOGSS, ‘Casey Anthony Cogan, Marin. ‘Wardrobe Malfunction: in Video Diary (vlog) (HD)’. YouTube, 2012. the beginning, there was a nipple’. ESPN The Web, January 2015. Magazine. January 28, 2014. Web, April EQUALITY AMERICA, ‘First Vlog on my 2014. journey to sharing life’. YouTube, 2014. Hopkins, Jim. ‘Surprise! There’s a third Web, January 2015. YouTube co-founder’. USA Today. October INDIEROCKERKID, ‘First Vlog’. YouTube, 11, 2006. Web, April 2014. 2008. Web, January 2015. O’Leary, Amy. ‘The Woman With 1 Billion Clicks, Jenna Marble’. NY Times.com, April ITSCHRISCROCKER, 12, 2013. Web, December 2014. YouTube, 2007. Web, January 2015. 60 ‘If I were Miss Universe..’. ITSCHRISCROCKER, The Blair Witch Project, Dir. Daniel Myrick ‘LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!’. YouTube, 2007. Web, January & Eduardo Sánchez. Haxan Films, 1999. 2015. Film. ITSCHRISCROCKER, ‘This & that’. YouTube, THEJONUSVLOG, ‘How to make your first 2007. Web, January 2015. youtube vlog or video the best it can be!’. YouTube, 2012. Web, January 2015. KOTAS: KNIGHTS OF TIME AND SPACE, ‘CNN/YouTube Debate: Global Warming’. VLOGBROTHERS, ‘How to Vlog: From the YouTube, 2007. Web, January 2015. Vlogbrothers’. YouTube, 2011. Web, January 2015. LITERALLYTHEJOY, ‘04/06: Rain’. YouTube, 2009. Web, January 2015. VONIVLOG, ‘Trying to Conceive Journal – My First Vlog (long)’. YouTube, 2013. Web, LITERALLYTHEJOY, ‘A Day Without Shoes! January 2015. (4/16/13 - Day 2)’. YouTube, 2013. Web, January 2015. YOUTUBE CREATOR ACADEMY, ‘How YouTube videos make money’. YouTube, n.d. Web, LITERALLYTHEJOY, ‘IT’S MY BIRTHDAY January 2015. (4/15/13 - Day 1)’. YouTube, 2013. Web, January 2015. MASTERMUSIC480, ‘First Vlog VSG WLS’. Websites YouTube, 2013. Web, January 2015. OSHITBRITT, www.dictionary.cambridge.org ‘MY FIRST VLOG – WHAT AM www.knowyourmeme.com I DOING HERE?’. YouTube, 2013. Web, January 2015. PINKSTYLIST, ‘Draw my life!’. YouTube, 2013. Other Web, January 2015. Lasher-Lewis, Joy. personal SOLD WITH VIDEO, ‘How To Get More Views correspondence, December 19-23, 2013 On YouTube - Top 9 Techniques’. YouTube, 2013. Web, January 2015. 61 APPENDIX I. Vlog interview – questions to frequent vloggers Uploaded November 25, 2014 By ANNEROOS GOOSEN 25 views, 2 likes (December 29, 2014) Hello, my name is Anneroos, I’m from the Netherlands and this is my first vlog ever. I’m actually doing some research on vlogs for my master thesis, so I’ve watched your vlogs regularly now. And because of that I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about vlogging and I thought, what better way to ask my questions than through a video message. So it will be something like a vlog interview, I hope you like it, I hope you will respond, so let me know. First question, a simple question. What was the reason for you to start vlogging? Question 2. How do you experience YouTube as a platform for social expression? Do you feel free to post everything you want or do you ever leave out stuff because you think that your viewers won’t like them? In other words: do you self-censor? Question 3. How much personal information do you share? And are you in any way influenced by your surroundings? Question 4. What do your family and friends think about your vlog? Do they ever watch, and if so, do you ever talk about it in real life? Question 5. What types of responses do you get on your vlogs? Looking at both the positive and the negative, what do they mean for you? Question 6. What do you think are the most important features of a vlog? And how do you feel about the use of super professional equipment for a personal vlog of video diary? Is that a good thing or does it ruin the feeling of authenticity? All right, thank you, and please respond by vlog or you can email me if you have any questions. If I’m good at editing I will post my email address right here. Thanks, bye. 62 II. Com m ent by OSHITBRITT on Vlog interview December 3, 2014 By OSHITBRITT 1 like (December 29, 2014) Here are my answers! 1. I wanted a platform to connect with my audience other than through my writing. I wanted to just be goofy and also talk about important topics. 2. I feel pretty free to post whatever I want. I only censor stuff that is really personal. I try to be as genuine as possible. 3. I share whatever information is relevant to the topic I'm discussing. 4. A lot of my family and friends watch, but our conversations don't really go any farther then, "I liked your vlog the other day!" 5. On more controversial videos, I get a lot of debate. But I welcome that sort of thing. It's what's great about the internet - people sharing their point of view. Other than that the responses are pretty positive, which is encouraging. 6. I think the style of the vlog is up to the individual. Some people might go for a welledited, high quality clean look. Others might do a more candid approach that focuses on the content instead of the style. Neither is better than the other. It just depends on how they want to present themselves! I wanted to give you my answers in written form, but I might do a video on the topic as well! I'll get back to you if I do. III. Video responce to Anneroos [sic] Uploaded December 4, 2014 By BLACKUNIGRYPHON 12 views, 1 like (December 29, 2014) Ok, this is my video response to a very polite and friendly lady in the Netherlands, I believe her name is Anneroos, I'm not sure if I pronounce it correctly, I don’t really speak Dutch – actually I don't speak Dutch. So I’m gonna do my best to answer these questions because this person was very kind and polite to me so… [phone rings] I’m gonna set my phone to silent, because… that would be rude. Ok [laughs] so… reason to start vlogging, gosh, that’s a really long… where do I even start. I first started on YouTube, cause, I’m generation X, I was born in 1979 and in the nineties I was one of those people who was very interested in the world wide web, the internet, and back then it was a lot of sharing and open source, and people tended to be on the internet were more friendly, polite, educated, it was just generally nicer. People were very helpful, so I still have this culture to 63 me. Also, it was the Clinton era which was also a different time, it was a very different time period. By the George W. Bush era – and I’m sorry if it’s very American-centered, my timeness here, I apologize, my era’s and stuff [laughs] and generations – but in the George W. Bush era I was in my twenties and that’s what, around 2005 was when a lot of people that I knew started to switch from dial up modems, I don’t know if you know what that is, it’s from, before when you went on the internet you needed a modem to connect to your telephone line, and it was very slow, I think the fastest was a 56k modem, and it was very noisy and expensive, and it just wasn’t very reliable either. When things started to switch to broadband, ADSL and cable, I think they use other things in Asia and Europe that are maybe called something else. So there was a website that came around that everyone knows as YouTube and it was mostly a small community, I remember when people would just post videos, it was just another form of communication, it was just the proto social media time. Most people used live journal, Livejournal.com, which was a very popular social networking as a type of journaling for younger people, especially college people, I was one of those people. This was before even Facebook was popular, MySpace.com was more popular at times. YouTube was more like a niche, certain people were in it and sometimes mainstream little bits of content would go on there and people liked it that way, but then what happened was, YouTube sold it to Google and that’s when it became corporate and it changed a lot and it’s become what it is today. But during that first initial phase of it just being an experiment of sharing video and media, it was very different. If you wanted to become a director you had to take a test, you had to do all these things and since I went to school for video and animation it just naturally attracted me to it, I’m an artist, I’m very self-expressive, I like helping people and sharing information and I’ve used this website as a resource a lot. It’s not the only website that I’ve used, I use many other website and I’ve just kind of more stuck with YouTube, just because I’m just used to it and it’s easier, even though there were others at many times that were just better, but they just didn’t last. I’ve also used other types of social media before they were popular such as Twitter, and I remember before there were hashtags, I remember before it was popular, I remember mostly geeks and environmentalists who used it, and that’s why I was on there, because I’m also an environmentalist – that’s a whole long story. So, for me, it was mostly self-expression and just another way of blogging, because talking was, I don’t know, easier sometimes than writing things, but I could still write, no problem. Question number two, which is actually several questions. Ehm, how do you view YouTube as a platform for social expression? It’s very convenient, it’s easy, it’s generally free, even though there’s ads on it now, it’s changed several times. It’s different now though since smartphones put Internet access at the fingertips of people who weren’t part of the original Internet crowd. Before, there was like unspoken rules, like manners, and how to behave and how to treat people, whereas, I feel like people used to go to the internet as a way to sort of, often times escape the nastiness of bullies or whatever in your 64 world, in your real world. And now, all of those bullies are on the Internet. And it’s funny because a lot of the original people, a lot of GenX’ers and original people who helped build the internet and help it become what it is today, don't wanna be on the internet anymore, they wanna take a walk, they wanna walk a dog, they wanna go swimming. And I also find that to be the case with myself as well, like I miss being around trees, you know? Do I feel free to post everything I want to do? Eh, no, when I was in my twenties, YouTube was just a thing for younger people, it was a younger generational type thing. Now, every corporate, everything is on there, they want to find ways of using it, to manipulate, and advertise, and do all kinds of things. And I think president Obama was really good at using this type of medium to get himself elected. I used to be a fan of watching his videos and when he first became president he had hired or appointed people to read letters and concerns and I thought, wow, this president really cares about how I feel and how we all feel, and I think it was called Change.org or Change.gov, it might still be there, and they actually vlogged also. But all that stuff, he didn’t do any of it, it was just promises and he just didn’t do it, he didn’t, I mean he even got a Nobel Peace Prize and when he got it he was just like no, I’m gonna pick war now. So, not happy about that. Also I don’t feel free like before, like when I was younger it was like I said, it was younger people, people in their twenties, people in their teens, and you could just talk about stuff with other young people. And now, if you talk about certain things or certain words, you can get attacked, you can get preyed on, flamed, you can get hacked. And it’s happened to me, you do have to censor certain things. Do you ever leave out stuff because your viewers won’t like it? Yes, definitely. Like, when I first started I would do stuff based on my art sometimes, but people just didn't care, because there not all artists. But if I left it up over time, people who were artists, people who did know who I was, because I publish my art under my alias, BLACKUNIGRYPHON, and they could follow me, find me there and they could understand what I was talking about whereas general audience, general people, they wouldn’t understand any of that. What else, yeah, I definitely self-censor. Do I self-censor, of course, I do. I’ve had definitely backlash, because I mentioned something that actually truly happened somewhere. And even if I didn’t mention the person, if that person happened to find that video, they knew it was them and they were guilty of it and I got hell for it. Yeah. Number three, this is another two questions. How much personal information do I disclose and am I in any way influenced by my surroundings? Yeah, there’s times where I actually record and re-record several takes and I review it and I think yeah, maybe I shouldn't talk about that, I definitely shouldn't mention that. Sometimes I even cut stuff out because I’m often told that I’m too honest, too much information, like that I shouldn't tell people all the truth or all of what I actually think, or all of how I actually feel. And there’s certain things also that I know I shouldn't disclose. Just some things that I will be vague on specifically, just because I don't wanna be in any legal trouble. And there’s several and I 65 can’t even tell you what they are. No, I didn't commit any crimes or do anything bad [laughs]. Eh, influenced by my surroundings? Yeah, if I record a video outside I have to talk differently or try and be aware that people will walk around and think, you know, you’re nuts, think you're crazy, it happens a lot. If I'm at home, I really don't like to record around people, it distracts me, and also people walking around, people will just write comments about somebody walking around. When I was in my twenties, my daughter would walk around and people actually would watch my video blogs just to see my daughter, because she’s so cute, my daughter is half Chinese and she’s incredibly cute and adorable. Eh, number four, what do my friends and family think about vlogs? Eh, when I first started doing vlogs, there was times where I did like more of a comedic type, where it was like a satire or an exaggeration of certain things like stand-up comedy. And there were many people who did this similar style, and my family did not like it. They did not like it at all. They thought I was being rude, insensitive or making fun of them when I wasn’t, or sometimes I was, they couldn’t handle it. They just could not handle it, they thought I was like, I don’t know, somehow ungrateful or disrespectful or whatever, even If I wasn’t. So, do they really watch? Eh, no, they just think I’m insane or something [laughs]. If so, do they ever talk about it in real life? No, they don't. I just don't talk about it to them, they don't care and even if I would send them a video they wouldn't click it and watch it. They don't care. What types of responses do I get, positive and negative? Now that the Internet especially and YouTube is accessible by smartphone, you get a lot of hate, you get a lot of trolling. Eh, if you’re a girl, you especially get from men, I get the most types of hate from white men, especially older white men, babyboomers, I don't know of you know what that is but babyboomers are like the generation after the world war II, they had kids, which was like the sixties and seventies, which is like my father and mother’s generation. These people can be so self-righteous and stuck on themselves, so nasty. And something like religious types, libertarians, political types, people who just, also there’s a lot of people who just, they just haven’t had an education, they had a poor education and they base all of their information on just, prejudice or something. Yeah, that’s a kind of negative response I get. As far as positive stuff, it depends on what type of video I do, if I did a video on how I made some art thing or creative thing or some kind of meaningful thing, I’ll get a lot of comments from creative people. And they’re really friendly and nice or inquisitive and they ask me like how I did it and what I did and so on. Other times if I'm talking about, like, when I mention things based on my generation or younger generations like in defense of younger generations or even in defense of the elderly or whatever, or I’m calling people out on certain things, I get a mix of, or like people who are the underdogs, they are like happy that I mention it, it’s like o my gosh, somebody is actually talking about my experience, because a lot of times they mention it they get like spit at, like how dare you say anything. But then the negative is like those babyboomers, they’re really mean 66 sometimes. And if I mention what they do and how they do things, they suddenly become these, o you’re victimizing me, you're blaming me for everything, when the person just attacked me you of nowhere, ok? So, let’s see, number five, what are the most important features of a vlog? I really don't know, I’ve seen vlogs, I mean, I think they should have at least some decent lighting like get a lamp, or if you don't have a camera that self-adjusts. I think that’s it, and try to speak clearly, but there were actually very popular vloggers back in the 2000s, of guys who were like autistic or had some disability, even some today still, and they’re very popular, even though they’re not very easy to understand, I think that just because you have a speech issue or have some disability that should not be a reason for you to not videoblog. Eh, how do you feel about super professional camera and equipment, is it good or bad? Eh, definitely if I had better equipment I would totally use that. If I had better programs for video editing I would definitely use that. If it was more convenient, more streamlined, I would go in that direction every single time. Is it necessary? No, but I think, if you can do anything you can do to make it look better, feel better, flow better, I think you should, but then some types of professional video bloggers, I think they cut their stuff too much, I think it forces, I think a lot of these types of video editing it shortens peoples attention spans. If you even watch movies and TV-shows today, they cut and edit things that they run so quickly, but if you go to watch a film from like the 1940s or 1950s or silent films, they’re just so slow, and the people talk in the style of this dialog, like if you've ever seen the TVshow Lassie, or many classic Hollywood films, they’re just so very calm, you know, slow, paced and I think people today can’t handle that, there’s many times I’ve recommended materials, movies, things like that, that come from those older times, and people who are used to, especially smartphone users, they can't handle it, they can’t handle the calm slowness. People also don't like to sit through long, classical music pieces or long oldfashioned operas. Many operas and ballets will be cut and edited to run shorter because people just can’t sit still and they can’t focus. I think that’s an issue, also, some people edit in like a rhythm, like it has a rhythm to it, I do like a lot of those, I think those are pretty interesting. But I do feel like, I don't always like how people edit like they have their head over here, cuts and then their head is over here, and then they’re all in the camera and then they’ll cut that out and that’s just so much work that even if you didn't do that you could still have a good videoblog. Eh, does it ruin the feeling of authenticity? No, I don't think it does, I don't think it does when you have good equipment. I think If you have good equipment, if you have a blue screen or a green screen of you have really good equipment like Adobe Premier or After Effects you should use that, nut I do also feel that since everything had become more shortened and more abrupt, faster paced, that I feel that there’s no need to ad an intro to a videoblog anymore, I noticed even TV-shows, in the beginning there’s no theme songs anymore really, other than like Game of Thrones and for some people it’s like murder to them, they just, like o my god it’s been three whole 67 seconds when is this gonna be over. Eh, if you watch, there’s a popular TV-show we watch here, I don't know if you’ve ever heard of it or seen it, it’s called Once upon a time, it’s like a fairy tale TV-show, and the beginning is like computer animated intro, it’s only a few seconds and then they play this like, jingle that’s like dun, dun, dun, dun, dun [sings tone] and then that’s it, and then it fades in, ok? So videoblogging has totally affected mainstream media, because I’ve seen it, I’ve witnessed it, it’s happened, it's a real thing. I do think it’s better to focus more on the content of stuff because also today there’s a lot of commercials and commercialism and I want to see really good content on TV that’s creative, but because they’re just pushing commercials a lot, they cut out a lot of things and I feel like commercials are not as quick or abrupt sometimes, sometimes you just focus on one annoying thing and it’s a longer commercial, I feel like sometimes commercials seem longer than before. Before I used to feel like commercials were short and now they’re long. I don't know why that is, I also don't like to watch mainstream TV that much, I think the only thing I watch on my mainstream TV is, there’s a public broadcast casting channel, it’s called PBS, and I do watch like Once upon a time, that’s it. Other than that, I do watch Netflix, I don't know if you know what Netflix.com is, that’s a paid service, it’s mostly mainstream television shows, usually it’s old stuff, and yes I do watch a lot of older things from the twentieth century, a lot of times I find them to be, just more comfortable to watch, better content, and there’s no torture, there’s no torture in it. I mean there’s no justified torture either, and also it’s just against racism and today I feel like it’s so blurry and things have just become bad, things have just become nasty. I don't like the way my country has gone, you know? And I think people, a lot of videobloggers on the Internet, and people, like are Americans, are unhappy with a lot of that as well. I think, when I look at a lot of videoblogger today, they talk about their dissatisfaction with where this country has gone. I don't see it always with Canadian videobloggers and I’ve watched lots of Canadian videobloggers and many from Europe, and I don’t even see that many from Asia anymore, usually when I watch videobloggers that are Asian they live in Canada, United States, UK, Australia or something like that, maybe New Zealand [laughs]. I don’t even see videobloggers from Singapore anymore, I used to see them all the time, what happened? I don't know. I don't know, I do feel as far as the feeling of authenticity, I think there are some videobloggers that are inauthentic. They sort of figured out that certain audiences like this or this or that, and so they will cater to that. I think in a way that’s smart from a marketing perspective, that’s a good thing, but if you’re the type of person that you wanna move on to other things, you would be worried about being pigeonholed to just this or this or that topic, and it can become very depressing for you. There are several videobloggers who do make-up and they’re not happy about always just doing make-up and they wanna talk about other things. And because of that, the main bulk of stuff on their channel, they had to make other channels just so that they could have a break and express themselves more 68 authentically on a different channel, you know, because it might annoy their subscribers and then they wouldn't subscribe. And I’ve gone through this kind of thing myself, so, I don’t know. I don't really, even though I can make money, I don't even make that much money on videoblogging. I miss the social interaction with like my peers. But there’s times that I just didn’t wanna deal with it, for just a few years or every so often because I didn’t like, I just didn’t like nasty people, sometime like, I was pretty tough for like a lot of things and I could handle a lot of things, but there’s people who, all they wanna do is make trouble, they’re like psychopaths or something. Eh, not into that, I just don’t think you should have to put up with that. You can block people, for a long time I used to be very tolerant, very accepting, but at this point I do block people, I have blocked people. Eh, what else? Also I think that the reason that I, I decided that this week I would make a goal of just vlogging every day of this week, I don't know if I’m gonna vlog on the weekend, and I thought about trying to do it this month but then I thought, if I made that goal then I’d probably just not do it, but if I made the goal of doing it every day like for at least Monday to Friday, at least, then you know, I might do it. I also was doing it because I just, I'm very lonely, most of my friends live in a different state or have moved away or have died, it’s a very sad situation in my country right now, I have so many really just terrible stories of people like… its sad.. I don’t even think I should mention it... And so I don't often have anyone to really talk to other than my daughter and my spouse. So most of my interaction with people for a long time, for several years was just reading on social media, which has been condensed, like Facebook and Twitter, which is just like a 140 characters. Or just blogging, because you have the people who have come to the smartphone, the commonness of the smartphone access, people just don’t have time to read what you actually think. Read a whole blog, like actually spend 5 whole minutes and read something. So I just still wanted to express myself, but also I wanted to practice just speaking and talking because I feel like there’s just so much in my mind that when it comes out I feel like I'm stuttering or, I’m tangent so much because I think so many things at once, and trying to get it to a coherent stream was pretty difficult in the past like three years. And it bothers me because even when I talk to someone on the phone I’m like, god why do I sound like such an idiot [laughs], but when I write, when I would write things, it was fine. Maybe I’d spell something wrong, or I’d forget a comma, but I just felt like I should have this experiment this week and this challenge to do this. I don't know if I’m still going to do this next week, I don't know if I'm still going to do this next month, But I just felt like I just wanted to express things, because I’ve just been so cloistered, to myself, I feel like most of the time when people complain of something it’s not even that big of a deal, but when I have things that are just so horrifically terrible and bad, I don't say anything, I just… shh… I don’t wanna talk to anybody about it. [starts crying] And so, for me just to come back and talk about anything at all right now, I just felt like I needed to do that. I just wanted to say 69 something. Or at least try to. So right now it’s just an experiment, and expressive experiment. Because also some of it’s sort of stream of consciousness and I want just, I have so much inside of me, and I don't know exactly what, what wants to come out, I think that’s also why I, when I record my videoblogs, I have several takes, several times where I record it and then I will rerecord it because I want it to kind of flow better [laughs]. I used to be actually really good at this and I also used to be a public speaker, I used to do lectures and teach people. Because I’ve just been so cloistered and so to myself, I… it’s kind of embarrassing, I… you know what I mean? I hope that made sense. So I apologize for my crying, I'm sorry for being such a baby about it, I don't know why I'm being emotional about it, and I apologize. So thank you and have a good day. 70