From the Bedroom to LA: Revisiting the Settings of Early Video Blogs on Youtube

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES www.necsus-ejms.org From the bedroom to LA: Revisiting the settings of early video blogs on YouTube Rainer Hillrichs NECSUS 5 (2), Autumn 2016: 107–131 URL: https://necsus-ejms.org/from-the-bedroom-to-la-revisiting- the-settings-of-early-video-blogs-on-youtube/ Keywords: audiovisual media, digital culture, genre, home, online video, Web 2.0 The home is only one of many settings in contemporary YouTube videos. On professionalised video blogs, domestic settings are only used when they are motivated by particular video projects. Videos of the popular Let’s Play genre may be recorded in the home, but the true settings of the videos are the worlds of the games in which the user acts through an avatar. Music videos on channels by mainstream pop stars, such as RihannaVEVO, obvi- ously feature diverse settings.[1] However, as crucial works of online video studies point out, the home and the bedroom in particular were common settings of early YouTube videos.[2] This article revisits the settings of early video blogs on YouTube and the arguments made about these settings and their cultural meanings thus far. Video bloggers’ use of domestic and other settings is a far more complex issue than it may initially appear. Conven- ience, creative ambitions, viewers’ expectations, and emerging conventions intersected in this dimension of video blogging. In contrast with the notion of ‘private spaces’ that were ‘simply’ shown ‘as ‘they are’,[3] I suggest that bedrooms were locations which were willingly, consciously, and performatively put into the scene on video blogs. These locations offered their own materiality and meanings for adop- tion or manipulation. For these reasons, and because videos were typically produced to be publicly shown on YouTube, I challenge the notion of a genealogical relation of video blogs with home movies and home videos.[4] Instead, video blogs should be historicised and contextualised with other public audiovisual practices. NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES In order to create variety or because specific video projects required different settings, vloggers also began using settings beyond the bedroom. Over the course of time settings appear to follow an expansive outward movement from bedrooms to other settings in the home, to local and regional settings. From mid-2006 on several vloggers got involved with established media industries and shot videos with Los Angeles as a setting. At the same time, people at the margins of the industries who were already living in LA started YouTube projects. Accordingly, the expansive movement appears to culminate in LA, signalling the fast integration of YouTube culture into popular culture at large. Corpus formation / terminology To form a corpus of user channels and videos I looked at YouTube’s ‘Most Subscribed’ of ‘All Time’ ranking as it was archived by the Internet Archive on three different dates in 2005 and 2006. The focus was set on the first two years of the platform’s operation, because previous research had established that the home was a common video setting in early YouTube culture. In order to revisit settings and arguments it was necessary to also deal with this period. I conducted an explorative analysis of the videos uploaded to the ranked channels during these years. I found that there was a majority of channels that shared several traits and a few others that did not share them. These traits were the following: upload of videos with live action; the ap- pearance of the user or of a fictional user character in the videos; upload of different kinds of videos to the same user channel; claims by the user or fictional user character of producing the videos; release of videos at more or less regular intervals. I decided to deal with this predominant group of channels for the main analysis. These 28 channels and the videos uploaded to these channels in 2005 and 2006 (that were still online at the time of corpus formation or had been archived by the Internet Archive) constitute the corpus. I refer to user channels with these traits as video blogs. For once, such a use of ‘video blog’ can also be found on YouTube itself. For example, the user Blunty3000 lists a variety of videos – diarist, home, dance, and lip sync videos, and parodic impersonations of other users – in his tutorial Vblog – how to be popular on youtube. There is also a narrow use of the term on YouTube. Some users refer to individual diarist videos as video blogs, for 108 VOL 5 (2), 2016 FROM THE BEDROOM TO LA example bowiechick (e.g. First Videoblog). I opted for the wider use of the term because the same users were producing different kinds of videos and uploading them to the same channels. For example, the user bowiechick also created and uploaded music videos (e.g. Little Wonder). In analogy with the term weblog, a video blog can thus be seen as an object comprising various videos with a common authorship and mode of distribution. I use ‘public diary clip’ for videos referred to by the narrow use of the term. The term ‘video blog’ is also used in a wide fashion by other researchers, for example by Patricia Lange. According to Lange, on a ‘video blog’ we can find ‘everything from “shows” for entertainment purposes to more sponta- neous, diary-centric, and informal communicative forms of video making’.[5] Bedrooms Bedrooms are common settings of videos on early video blogs. Opened in November 2005, only a couple of months after YouTube went online, Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla’s smosh is an early and at the same time con- sistently successful vlog. The duo created and uploaded music videos for theme music from children’s television shows and video games of the 1980s and 1990s before specialising in sketch comedy videos. The setting of most of their early and several later videos is Padilla’s bedroom in his parents’ house (Figs. 1-2). Melody Oliveria aka. bowiechick is a vlogger who inspired many others and primarily used her bedroom as a setting for her diarist videos (Fig. 3). The producing trio behind the infamous lonelygirl15 recog- nised the bedroom as an important setting of video blogging and reaf- firmed its status by making it the prime setting of the character Bree’s videos in their unacknowledged fictional YouTube project (Fig. 4).[6] In spring and summer 2006, when YouTube became a focus of news media because of its increasing popularity, it was always noted that many YouTube videos were shot in young people’s bedrooms.[7] The bedroom thus seems to hold a special status among all other settings in early video blogging. HILLRICHS 109 NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES Figs. 1-2: Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox illustrate a gong sound effect and a panting warrior in the first two shots of Mortal Kombat Theme, a music video for theme music of a video game (smosh). 110 VOL 5 (2), 2016 FROM THE BEDROOM TO LA Fig. 3: ‘Hello, my name is Melody.’ The vlogger by the user name bowiechick introduces herself in First Videoblog. Fig. 4: Bree, the fictional vlogger character who claimed to be running lonelygirl15, introduces herself in First Blog / Dorkiness Prevails. Kathrin Peters and Andrea Seier note that early YouTube videos display ‘an endless series of private spaces, especially teenager’s bedrooms’ and that ‘the interiors usually attest to a certain average taste’.[8] However, we should not forget that teenagers’ bedrooms are, among other things, places of rep- resentation. Teenagers decorate their rooms the way they like, with posters HILLRICHS 111 NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES of favourite stars, photographs of friends, and souvenirs. Their rooms are places of identification and distinction. Already, without arranging the room for shooting or the mediation of the camera and YouTube, there is a private local audience for these rooms: the vloggers, their friends, and parents. Above Oliveria’s bed there are posters of David Bowie and a Hallow- een souvenir (Fig. 3); she explicitly introduces these items to her viewers in the video My Room (Vid. 1). Above Padilla’s bed there are other posters, and on the adjacent wall several dozen CDs or DVDs (Fig. 2). What may appear as an ‘average taste’ from an adult perspective contains specific markers of distinction for teenagers and young adults. An argument that private spaces and practices were made public on YouTube crystallises around the use of bedrooms as settings. According to Jean Burgess ‘“privatised” spaces of cultural participation’ increasingly ‘have become “publicised” via webcams, SNS profiles and YouTube’.[9] Peters and Seier maintain that the ‘private spaces’ of bedrooms are ‘often simply [shown] as they are’ in YouTube videos.[10] Michael Strangelove is perhaps the most vocal proponent of the argument: YouTube tempts young people to bring the world into their bedrooms when it might be bet- ter to keep the door shut and the camera off. […] YouTube provides us with a win- dow into the home. His social and political assessment of YouTube is pointed: [t]he platform invades our privacy, erodes our autonomy, and threatens essential social dynamics such as the need for moments of private non-compliance. […] It may also be changing our children’s identity and their future prospects.[11] Strangelove does not account for users’ agency of representing their world and for their very own decision of uploading (or not uploading) videos. As Rebekah Willett has shown in her study of young people’s use of camera phones, video production for circulation within the family and small circles of friends – private reception that is – not only survived the revolution of the tools of production and distribution, it still seems to be the default for most videos created.[12] It goes without saying that these private videos cannot be found (by researchers and others) among the videos publicly shown on YouTube, but that does not mean they do not exist.

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