Vlog: Literary Tradition and Political Strategies

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.