Vlog: Literary Tradition and Political Strategies

Abstract

Modern media are constantly changing and consist of a wide
range of forms, genres, types. Successful verbal formulas, compositional
findings are quickly adopted, become stereotyped, then forgotten and
reinvented at a new level. The media convergence processes have accelerated
the mutual exchange of innovations between printed and audiovisual media.
In the information space, everyone is competing with everyone: traditional
media holdings and private accounts in social networks, on-air TV, radio, and
YouTube videos and podcasters.
Media replicate innovations, which in a broad historical perspective are the
reincarnation of traditional art forms. The analysis of modern trends in mass
culture reveals various elements in the new media that were characteristic of
the literary process of the past. It can be genre features, and artistic techniques.
The authors of vlogs rely on well-known formats for presenting information.
At the same time, they rely on some cultural codes that have been known for
centuries. Numerous video blogs provide valuable material for the analysis of
many media processes.
The notion of mediatization must be taken into account in order to
understand the vlog and the creative features of its creation. In this case, we
should talk about the mediatization of a person’s spiritual experience. This
process is aimed at the personality-level transformation of both the author
of the video blog and its audience. The concept of “culture of complicity” of
H. Jenkins allows us to consider the vlog as an active co-authoring by numerous
communication participants in the creation of content.
The literary tradition of personal correspondence, memoirs, and a personal
diaries has created a cultural code, the basis for constructing works of video
bloggers. Creating their media pronouncements, they demonstrate, sincerity,
closeness to the audience, and repeatability rethought at a new technological
stage. The genres of personal diary desacralized in the modern media space
attract the audience by violating previous cultural prohibitions. Memoir
narrative offers a reliable look at events already known to the viewer. The cyclic
tradition of the diary holds the audience, brings the viewer back to watching
new videos and shapes the rhythm of new media in the long term. The elements
of confession make an audiovisual work as convincing as possible. All these
laws of genre forms are actively exploited by the creators of political content,
which in some cases is a manipulative form of mass communication.