Vanilla Vloggers – Insubstantial Selves?

Last Updated on August 24, 2016 by

Lifestyle vlogging seems like a very nice way to avoid earning a living – and a handful of popular vanilla vloggers (such as Zoella) are managing just that – simply by uploading videos of themselves consuming various items and having fun with their friends and pets.

Obviously I’d like to avoid earning a living too, but lacking the youth, beauty and sheer inanity to do so with any integrity I’ll have to settle for being interested in the rise of the vanilla vloggers from a Sociological point of view. What exactly are we to make of people who make money vlogging? Are they just insubstantial selves, or is there more to it than this?

To this end, the following passage from Giddens’ Modernity and Self Identity (page 190-191, I’ve just re-read it) seems to describe the type of self typically expressed by many of the vanilla vloggers out there….

‘In late modernity [there is a type of] self which evaporates into the variegated contexts of action, a response which Erich Fromm characterised as ‘authoritarian conformity‘. Fromm expresses this in the following way:

‘The individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be….. this mechanism can be compared with the protective colouring some animals assume. They look so similar to their surroundings that they are hardly distinguishable from them’.

Having watched quite a few of these vlogs (albeit not in any systematic way – doing systematic content analysis on this content (lack of content) would drive me insane), I predominantly see what Fromm describes above – the latest fashion trends come out, they buy them, the latest restaurant or even opens, they go there, social mannerisms pertaining to masculinity change, they change the way they express their masculinity…. and so on…

At the end of the the day the depressing thing here isn’t the vanilla vloggers themselves , it’s the fact that they’ve got millions of followers, who either aspire to be like them, or worse, are currently churning out their own vanilla vlogs, failing to realise that they’re going nowhere because the market’s already saturated.