Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment of YouTube Vlogging

Introduction The video blog (vlog) has been a staple for YouTube since its inception. Diary-like vlogs depict an individual facing the camera speaking straight to the viewer about personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings (Raun) as well as sharing everyday life (Lange, Kids; Kennedy “These”). Vlogs propelled YouTube into a participatory culture-driven media era (Jenkins; Burgess and Green; Strangelove). Notably, the context for creating and distributing vlogs substantially influences their creation and sharing. Commercialising vlogs through algorithms that promote certain content over others, collecting user viewing and behavioral data, and selecting ads to run with particular content based on user data all invite continued questions about vlog authenticity (Adams; Kennedy “These”). Based on an ethnography of early YouTube vloggers and videobloggers operating outside of YouTube, this article argues that neither YouTube nor the idea of the vlog are stable entities but rather may appear vastly different according to the parameters from which they emerged. This article draws on evidence collected during an ethnographic project that principally ran from 2006 to 2009, with additional research conducted at specific points until 2018. The original project included conducting 152 interviews and maintaining two video sites (one on YouTube and one off YouTube using a WordPress blogging site, both called AnthroVlog). I posted weekly to both for one year. I also viewed and analysed hundreds of videos, and examined selected changes on YouTube. I joined YouTube in May 2007 and was therefore focussed on YouTube’s early adopters who had joined the year prior or even as far back as late 2005. I also interviewed members of the early videoblogging community off YouTube. Videobloggers in this group staunchly believed that they should have control over their work and thus avoided YouTube, at least at first. In addition, I participated in and travelled to ten in-person YouTube gatherings across the United States (and one in Canada) and I video-recorded interviews about participants’ experiences on YouTube. This footage resulted in an ethnographic documentary entitled Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self through Media which was publicly released in 2020. An advantage of a long-term ethnography is that it enabled me to observe crucial changes, such as the site’s metamorphosis from a video-sharing site to a monetised platform that de-emphasised community features and deployed algorithms to identify content that would be profitable from an advertising perspective. When viewed across this history, it is apparent that the site called YouTube and the vlogs within them have never been entities with singular definitions or connotations. This article revisits the hopes and dreams of early vloggers on YouTube and videobloggers off YouTube, while also envisioning future pathways toward vlog creation, distribution, and sharing. It takes a past/future, historical/posthuman approach and concludes by exploring possibilities for crafting usable and meaningful video-sharing spaces. This article draws on posthumanism to reimagine vlogging futures by diving into and theorising vlogging pasts. Posthuman Lens Posthuman theory offers an intriguing way to reconsider theoretical understandings of YouTube and the vlog genre. A helpful framework is found in the work of N. Katherine Hayles, who acknowledges that the posthuman is a complex and heterogeneous concept that is basically a “point of view” (2). In this version of posthumanism, the mind itself is a collection of information that could theoretically exist outside of the body. It could even become instantiated in technological devices or media (Hayles), including—I would argue—in vlogs. Visions of the posthuman include myriad concepts. This article will explore two dialectics proposed by Hayles that fall somewhere between stereotypical posthuman visions of a merged superconsciousness or “singularity” and a more fragmented mosaic of nodes existing across a distributed but connected collective. One dialectic is a spectrum from material presence to absence, and the other is a continuum ranging from random noise to patterned information. To illustrate, when a body persists, say in an interaction, it continues to be present and is thus located on the presence end of the presence/absence dialectic. Further, in terms of the randomness/pattern dialectic, there is a repeating pattern of the body’s presence across the interaction. When we view a vlog, we have now moved to the absence part of the presence/absence dialectic because the creator’s body is not present, only a sign that represents it—their vlog. Hayles is interested in how these dialectics interact. She believes they both interrelate and lie in tension in potentially infinite ways. When the presence aspect of the presence/absence dialectic encounters the randomness end of the randomness/pattern dialectic, Hayles says we are witnessing mutation. For example, if a person’s genetic code is changed, the body is still present but the pattern that was there before has now been unpredictably disrupted and moves towards the random end of the randomness/pattern dialectic. Similarly, when YouTube changes over time, the pattern that was YouTube is disrupted and moves away from being a stable platform and more toward an entity containing various changes, such as the way monetisation altered the original pattern of YouTube. Hayles draws on science fiction to analyse these concepts. She uses Greg Bear’s novel Blood Music to illustrate a posthuman instantiation in which these dialectics are in tension through mutation. In Bear’s novel, an inventor creates biochips that evolve until each one achieves a level of intelligence, taking over the body of their inventor. Later on, a consultant named Michael Bernard also becomes infected with the intelligent biochips who reintegrate his consciousness into a collective. Bernard tries to hold on to his original identity by telling the intelligent biochips that he is Bernard. After making numerous copies of his consciousness, the cells explain: “There are many BERNARD.” Each BERNARD is a replication of the original mind of Bernard whose body is still present but undergoing change. These copies are mutations, or in posthuman terms “alters”, of a being once known as Bernard. The patterned mind and body of Bernard have been disrupted and changed in random, unpredictable ways. The convention of using capital letters is a clever way of showing sameness yet important difference between the original entity and the collection of altered copies. Media exhibits a type of posthumanism because it extends an idea of a person beyond their body and includes replications of the original creator, as instantiated in a particular work. For example, when a person vlogs, the vlog and its representations of its creator persist in the ether even though the creator’s material person is absent during a viewing of the vlog. What is present is a representation of a creator from a certain point of view. As Goldhaber notes in his work on the attention economy, media enable creators to enlarge “the size and scope of your own mind”, as viewers read a text or view a video or vlog even after a creator’s passing. Goldhaber’s writes [and I add a few clarifications in brackets]: Since [the creators’] own mental processes recur to a substantial degree in [viewers’] minds as [viewers watch the videos], having attention can make [the creator’s] mind live again, in a way. It is perhaps the closest humans can come to life after death, as well as to expand life while still living. Vlogs as posthuman “alters” contain patterned replicas of creators’ ideas and thoughts. Yet information in representations also mutates over time as a video may be changed or new comments may be posted to it, thus modifying its reception and interpretation. For example, YouTube may remove original underlying music that conflicts with new copyright rules. Vlogs thus mutate. YouTube is seen as a single entity when in fact there are many YOUTUBEs, to use posthuman nomenclature. The YouTube that I researched before and during the acquisition by Google had certain rules, parameters, time limits, video styles, forms of participation, and commercialisation pathways that differ considerably from the types that exist today in an environment with algorithms, influencers, vacillating commitments to moderation, and other conventions. Indeed, there is a different YOUTUBE continually being produced, as some 500 videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute, not to mention the number of videos that are also being deleted (GMI Research Team). In the fourth quarter of 2024, some 9.5 million videos were reportedly removed from YouTube (Ceci). The YOUTUBE that ushered in 2024 was demonstrably different from the YOUTUBE at the end of that year—and this is only one data point of change. Friction often occurs when the human meets the posthuman. For instance, when we as human researchers generalise about YouTube as a platform or the “vlog” as a genre, we gain and lose analytical vitality, especially over time. Using the term “vlog” serves a practical shorthand for understanding one type of online video, albeit one with many sub-genres and flavours including vlogging in specific communities such as the trans community (Raun), family vlogging (Kennedy “Arriving”), commercially-motivated vlogs, influencer-based vlogging such as beauty vlogging (Berryman and Kavka “I Guess”), and nontraditional experiments such as negative affect vlogs (Berryman and Kavka “Crying”), just to name a few. Yet, every vlog is created within a techno-sociocultural-commercial context that renders one VLOG as potentially very different from another VLOG, each of which were created amid platforms with varying configurations. Kennedy (“Arriving”) makes a similar point, arguing that vlogs are a form of identity construction that happens n

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