700709

research-article2017
QRJ0010.1177/1468794117700709Qualitative ResearchSmith

Special Issue: Qualitative Methods and Data in Digital Societies Q

The tragedy of self in digitised R
popular culture: the existential Qualitative Research

consequences of digital fame 1­–16

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/1468794117700709
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Daniel R. Smith
Anglia Ruskin University, UK

Abstract
Digital data is constitutive of many forms of popular culture and user engagement. How data
feeds back and is integrated into practice is of critical importance when it comes to analysing the
place of the ‘self’ in contemporary culture. This article provides an account of video-blogging on
YouTube. It takes as its case study three UK ‘YouTube Celebrities’ – Charlie McDonnell, Chris
Kendall and Benjamin Cook – and focuses upon three vlogs which all express disquiet with their
celebrity. This unease is articulated in relation to the digital consummation of self YouTube
provides its users. Through a textual and performance analysis the article explores the cultural
heritage of the vlog in what Charles Taylor calls western culture’s ‘expressive turn’. It argues that
what a digitised popular culture gives us is a novel space to rework longstanding cultural ideals
around the self, individuality and self-expression.

Keywords
performance, popular culture, social media, tragedy, YouTube

Introduction
The constitution of ‘self’ through digital data is a central social and political concern for
both social science and public debate (Lupton, 2016; Gerlitz and Lury, 2014; Giroux,
2015; Pasquale, 2015). Sociologists have begun mapping the territory of a digitised pop-
ular culture (Beer and Gane, 2008; Beer and Burrows, 2013) and argued that in ‘new
social life of data’ we need to understand how the ‘performativity of data circulation …
feeds into the performance of subjectivity and the constitution of everyday experiences’
(Beer and Burrows, 2013: 68).

Corresponding author:
Daniel R. Smith, Anglia Ruskin University, Helmore Buidling, East Road, Cambridge, CB1 1PT, UK.
Email: [email protected]
2 Qualitative Research 

To this end this article focuses upon the place of ‘the self’. The general consensus
prescribes to a jaundiced view. ‘One … needs anchors of integrity’, argues Pasquale
(2015), ‘in more substantial ‘sources of the self’ (in Charles Taylor’s evocative formula-
tion) than points, likes and faves.’ This disquiet with quantified expressions of human
worth is a leitmotif in classic critiques of modernity (Durkheim, 1971; Marx, 1976;
Simmel, 1990). Yet the paradox of our dissatisfaction with metricised forms of self-
worth is that such platforms also constitute a crucial basis to our individuality and its
acknowledgement by others (Gerlitz and Lury, 2014). As this dissatisfaction runs
through both academic criticism as well as social media users, this article provides a
cultural sociological account of the performance of disquiet through the case of video-
blogging on YouTube.
The aim is to take account of the cultural politics of ‘the self’ which informs anxiety
around digitally constituted forms of self-worth on social media. It will be concerned
with the performance of disquiet; a tragedy of self in digitised popular culture. This
account arises from a textual and performance analysis of three video-blogs which not
only acknowledge this uneasiness but also perform it. They are by three UK-based
YouTube celebrities, Charlie McDonnell (‘charlieissocoollike’), Chris Kendall (‘crab-
stickz’) and Ben Cook (‘ninebrassmonkeys’). The analysis will focus upon ‘I’m Scared’
(09/11/2012; Views: 1,809,985) by Charlie, ‘Quitting YouTube’ (05/01/2013; Views:
600,811) by Chris and ‘YouTube vs. The World’ (from 12:15-22:30) (28/09/2013 Views:
337,577) by Ben (‘ninebrassmonkeys’). These vloggers are all connected socially and
dialogically: they are young (24–35) ‘creatives’ who work closely with Google and
wider media industries as well as being subject to a shared audience and common ‘vlog-
ging culture’. Formally, these vlogs all express discontent and an ambivalent unhappi-
ness toward YouTube, their own self, relationship with their audience as well as
obligations to video-blogging. Yet the purpose of analysis is to unravel the ‘tragedy of
self’ to demonstrates its cultural heritage and anchorage in a particular history.
These vlogs will be treated, aesthetically, as tragic soliloquys which articulate internal
struggles of self about ‘what to do’. It is by thinking of these vlogs as tragic soliloquys
that I wish to bring together a cultural sociological account of the forging of selfhood in
social media practices and the cultural critiques which are associated with such pro-
cesses. Such an aesthetic understanding connects the romanticism of self found in popu-
lar culture with academic and cultural critiques of the ‘metricised self’ and their valuation
practices. Crucially we have to understand video-blogs (vlogs) as cultural performances
wherein individuals ‘display for others the meaning of their social situation.’ (Alexander,
2006: 32) Not only is the ‘soliloquy’ the cultural expression of liberal expressive (pos-
sessive) ‘individualism’ and ‘interiority’ (Belsey, 1985), the same social-political value
that underlines many critical accounts of ‘big-data’ (Pasquale, 2015), it is also a political
device in the performance of YouTube vlogging.
This special issue of Qualitative Research seeks to investigate how the rise of data-
driven societies impacts upon social practice. Central to qualitative research is the mean-
ingful interpretation and explanation of social actions. While Web 2.0 advances have met
with claims of revolutionising human social relations (for example, Wesch and
Whitehead, 2012), this article instead pursues these developments within the cultural
matrix and webs of meaning within which the social actors under analysis are situated.
Smith 3

The intention is to interpret how data-driven apparatuses inform and shape the perfor-
mances and dramatic effects of situated social media users.
Methodologically this endeavour is characteristic of hermeneutics: treating social
practices as ‘texts’ whose horizons of meaning are not isolated instances but whose
meaningful orientations stretch back into deeper recesses of cultural tradition. Alexander’s
(2003) ‘structural hermeneutics’ requires a ‘commitment to hermeneutically reconstruct-
ing social texts in a rich and persuasive way.’ (Alexander, 2003: 13) In what follows,
instead of treating the meaning of vlogging in terms solely relevant to the structure of
digital platforms, the aim is to persuasively argue for a thick description of vlogging as a
continuation of the ‘expressive self’ of western, European modernity (Taylor, 1989). By
initially conceptualising the vlogs as reminiscent of ‘tragic soliloquys’, the article con-
textualises these vlogs within the cultural legacy of the Romantic Movement (Campbell,
1987; Taylor, 1989). The article then precedes to provide a textual, performance analysis
of their ‘tragic selfhood’ within the language of authenticity and classical humanism. As
such it seeks to interpret the actions of vloggers acting in digitised popular culture
through the lens of European tragedy, utilising themes of lamentation and inaction to
elucidate the dynamics of Web 2.0 structures and power-relations.

The research
The three vloggers and their individual vlogs are chosen as they demonstrate a transition
in YouTube as a media platform. They are early users of YouTube who have ‘found fame’
in the initial stages from user-generated sharing and community building. At the time of
analysis, they were experiencing its move toward a corporate medium which has formal-
ised previously chaotic user-practice. Crucial to the account is how this early vision of
YouTube as a space of sharing, creativity, community and mutual dialogue in video-
content remains central to their ethos of vlogging.

The vloggers
The three vloggers are all UK based with metric scores which place them in the cate-
gory of a YouTube ‘microcelebrity’. Their subscription rate, view-count, and name-
recognition is enough to evidence fame, but crucially this fame is readily deployed as
‘attention capital’. Their fame is a resource for commerce (channel monetisation
through advertising; branded merchandise, etc.). Senft’s (2012) definition of ‘micro-
celebrity’ on Web 2.0 encapsulates the double aspect of ‘authentic’ performance of self
on social media as akin to that of preserving a ‘brand identity’ while also using care-
fully managed ‘authenticity’ for commercial gain. Micro-celebrity is a practice as
much as an attribution (Marwick, 2014: 115–116). As such, it is fraught with difficul-
ties around authenticity vs. self-interested promotion (Senft, 2012) and negotiating
intimacy with commercial interest (Abidin, 2015).
Charlie McDonnell (25) has been on YouTube since 2007 and has 2,396,602 subscrib-
ers and a view-count of 295,560,961. Charlie has had success – in the sense of ‘micro-
celebrity’ (Senft, 2012) – on YouTube since his video ‘How to be English’ was featured
on the homepage of YouTube in 2007, bringing with it a fan base as well as national news
4 Qualitative Research 

attention. He is known for his vlogs which range from life diaries, commentaries upon
popular culture and educational science videos. Charlie has also received mainstream
media attention, appearing on UK chat shows and BBC Radio One.
Chris Kendall (28) has been on YouTube since 2006 and has 695,602 subscribers and
a view-count of 37,465,713. Chris’ vlogging success rests upon his character driven com-
edy, his highest viewed videos being parodies of TV shows and actors, ‘Sherlock (par-
ody)’ and ‘Colin Firth Impression’ and other parodies of Hollywood movies or popular
television shows. His celebrity also extends beyond YouTube, appearing in sketch and
situation comedies on the BBC (such as Cuckoo and Live at the Electric on BBC Three).
Ben Cook (33) has been on YouTube since 2012, becoming known for his documen-
tary series Becoming YouTube which provides a factional account of Ben’s adoption of a
vlogging persona and descent into the depths of YouTube creativity and celebrity. He has
197,796 subscribers and a view count of 5,693,181. While sharing a much smaller audi-
ence than Charlie and Chris, Ben’s vlog ‘YouTube vs. The World’ is an excellent drama-
tization of the politics and power-dynamics at work on YouTube. It interestingly
documents the constitution of self in a digital medium and can be seen to dramatize how
the ‘performativity of data circulation … feeds into the performance of subjectivity,’ (as
Beer and Burrows (2013: 68) call for).
Aired on YouTube between December 2012 and February 2014, Cook’s Becoming
YouTube is both an ethnographic documentary exploring the culture of UK YouTube
micro-celebrity as much as it is a dramatization of the life of a ‘nobody becoming a
somebody’ on YouTube, Cook himself. Becoming YouTube may be treated as a tracing a
transitional period in YouTube’s platform development. With the introduction of
YouTube’s ‘Advertiser-friendly’ content policy (initiated in September 2016) and
YouTube Red (November 2016) we are currently witnessing a move from ‘YouTubers’
as amateur content creators to celebrities providing exclusive originals on a serialised
streaming service (akin to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and so on). Becoming YouTube acts to
contextualise the move Chris, Charlie and Ben were experiencing with the impending
demands of increased commercialisation some five years ago. Appearing as interviewees
in the documentary, Chris and Charlie epitomise the YouTube culture Cook seeks to
cover and dramatize. We may read the vlogs under consideration here, falling directly
within this period (Charlie, Nov. 2012; Chris, Jan. 2013; Ben, Sept. 2013), as disquieted
commentaries upon this transition.
Becoming YouTube interviews major UK and some US ‘content creators’ (dubbed ‘the
YouTube digerati’) and dramatizes their situation through fictional narrative material,
both comedic and melodramatic. Yet this series itself is not to be separated from the
celebrity and vlogging culture it reports on. Cook is aware of, and dedicated to, how
YouTube is a dialogical medium and through the series he is actively proposing a right
and wrong way to ‘do’ YouTube vlogging – politically his position is committed to the
more utopian forms of democratic socialism which circulate around new social media
and Web 2.0. By profession a journalist who has contributed to the Radio Times and
Doctor Who Magazine as well as major UK newspapers, Cook’s Becoming YouTube is in
part an ethnography of the landscape of YouTube as it moves from an amateur video-
sharing site to a professional, corporate medium (Burgess, 2015) and part manifesto for
‘how to be a YouTuber’. Yet Cook’s documentary is also an idealisation of YouTube; it
Smith 5

is a production which contains all the signs of YouTube’s move away from egalitarian-
socialist forms of video-sharing (high-end sound, editing, video-quality and extended
pre- and post-production) and views drawn from interviewing ‘YouTube celebrities’, yet
advocates its amateur, grass-roots socialism of self-sharing as a political stance.

The vlogs: ethnographic context

The three vlogs – ‘I’m Scared’, ‘Quitting YouTube’ and ‘YouTube vs. The World’ – have
to be understood within this period of transition which YouTube has been subject to.
While isolated UK-cases, these vloggers are experiencing a cultural sea-change within
Web 2.0 culture. In the decade since its inception in 2005 as an open-access video-shar-
ing site to its current corporatized and industry driven period as a subsidiary of Google
Inc., YouTube’s indigenously ‘famous’ users are having to negotiate their current status
and relationship to their ‘platform’.
As a societal trend, Burgess (2015: 284) predicts that the tensions to be handled in
this epoch of social media technology is in users ‘maintaining their interpretative flex-
ibility … such that social media may continue to be sites of cultural generativity.’ Of
course, this is easier said rather than done. As Miller (2009) has cautiously stated, the
zeal for new media is often a rehashing of previous forms of utopian thinking which
accompanies new technologies. YouTube and its associated platforms, he argues, are
merely distillations of three older utopian ideals: ‘free-cable … movements of the 1960s
and 70s, the neoclassical, deregulative intellectual and corporate movements of the
1970s-80s; and the Post-Protestant, anti-accumulative hacker ethos of the 1990s and
today’ (Miller, 2009: 426). Ultimately, however, ‘until large-scale questionnaire and
ethnographic studies have been undertaken, we should remain cautious in our cybertar-
ian assertions’ (Miller, 2009: 427)
Of course, the problem with such methods Miller advocates is precisely what is at
issue with the crisis of empirical sociology in the age of big-data. The redundancy of
such methods is certainly worth considering. But it has its limits. Big-data is as much
a mythology/ideology as it is an advance in neo-liberal, technocratic capitalism (boyd
and Crawford, 2012; Smith, 2014; Vis, 2013): that big-data is ‘big’ such that it can
capture all of the social world and gain knowledge of all is certainly myth in Barthes
sense, ‘to naturalise beliefs that are contingent’ (Vis, 2013: 3). What big-data cannot
do, and sociologists can, is trace the meanings of social practices and locate the mean-
ingful courses of action articulated within a shared cultural framework and its norma-
tive orientation (Smith, 2014).
The vlogs considered here are a testament to this localisation of meaning and interpre-
tation. Three UK-based vlogs are chosen precisely because their view-counts, while rela-
tively substantial, are merely reflections of what other, non-microcelebrity vloggers
experience. Unlike other YouTubers who use YouTube to spring-board or extend their
celebrity elsewhere, these three young vloggers articulate views, experiences and senti-
ments shared by potentially any would-be (young) vlogger.
Equally important for the account I am providing with these vlogs is that: users of
social media may be informed by big-data (YouTube algorithms) and consummated by
it, but would prefer not to think of themselves in such terms. There is alternative history
6 Qualitative Research 

of the ‘self’ to which they remain culturally orientated. This is where the interpretative
strategy of tragic soliloquy gains its culturally specific salience. The ‘confessional’ may
be a generalised feature of the ‘western self’ and identity troubles have been argued to be
inherent to the emotional and immaterial labour of micro-celebrity (Abidin, 2015; Senft,
2012). However, it must be kept in mind that the ideo-geography of the ‘confessional’
has its own discursive and symbolic economy. The confessional vlogs for the ‘It Gets
Better’ campaign for LGBT young people, for instance, may share similar generic con-
ventions to the ‘tragic soliloquys’ outlined here. However, the relevance of the soliloquy
is as a special genre of the confessional. Soliloquys refer to a ‘western’ tradition of the
self, epitomised by Reformation Christianity and distilled into the ‘bourgeois’, ‘posses-
sive’ individualism that dominates commodified transactions (Belsey, 1985; Macpherson,
1962). These vlogs dramatize the politics of authenticity in and through the medium of
celebrification and, as such, the cultural heritage of the soliloquy is of distinctly ethno-
centric significance.

Toward a cultural sociology of the ‘vlog’

Before I explore these YouTubers vlogs I want to provide a cultural account of what a
‘vlog’ is and how they may be hermeneutically situated within this ‘western’ tradition
of selfhood. What is the drama they enact and what meaningful cultural sentiments do
they endorse?
The vlog has been understood as a cultural space and performative means to narrate,
document and forge a sense of one’s individuality to both self and others (Papacharissi,
2010). In many ways vlogs are forms of what Malinowski (1923) referred to as ‘phatic
communication’, communication which has no other purpose than demonstrating that
one is present in an interaction and is granted acknowledgment by their interlocutor, ‘the
other’ (cf. Jerslev and Mortensen, 2015; Lange, 2010). It is in and through YouTube’s
form of user-engagement that vloggers participate in a cultural practice and performance
aimed at forging and realising a vision of their ‘expressive individuality’, one crucial
‘source of the self’ for modern identity (Taylor, 1989). Vlogs are performances of self to
oneself and others. Or better, vlogs are performances of self as other. The ‘expressive
turn’ which Taylor (1989) identified in western romanticism is the notion that the self
emerges from the power granted to the imagination; imaginative visions of self are made
manifest and given form in various artworks (novels, poems, paintings, musical compo-
sitions and so on). Vlogs may be treated in the same vein: one comes to see themselves
more in their expressive products, as objects of culture, than as subjects of expression. In
the history of western modernity, we may interpret the vlog as a continuation of
Durkheim’s ‘cult of the individual’ (1971): the collective performance of individual self-
recordings turns oneself into a sacred object, initiating a cultural space to witness indi-
vidual uniqueness and reflect upon a uniqueness we ‘all’ share.
The practice of ‘self-objectification’ means people come to see themselves as others
see them (Miller and Sinnanan, 2014). Significantly the brand taglines of YouTube
actively rely upon turning oneself into products, but products which are ‘you’. YouTube’s
taglines include ‘Broadcast Yourself’ and ‘Dare to be You’ and after its launch in 2005.
Time magazine named their 2006 Person of the Year You, ‘You control the information
Smith 7

age. Welcome to your world.’ (Lange, 2007; Miller, 2009). This ‘You’ needs placing in a
wider socio-cultural context. The ambiguity of the term you is such that it both includes
ourselves and turns the individual (singular) it into a collective (many) (Lange, 2007).
The ambiguity of ‘you-I’ may be placed, also, within Taylor’s (1989) philosophical his-
tory of western selfhood.
Taylor (1989) extends his search for contemporary forms of selfhood back to its
Judaeo-Christian foundations. In St. Augustine’s Confessions, the keystone of western
radical reflexivity, we find inwardness as the basis for adopting a first-person standpoint
(an ‘I’) in distinction to another, a ‘You’, which in Augustine’s theology was a path to
God (Taylor, 1989: 127ff). The self addresses itself in first-person (I) to God as an other
(You). In the post-Romantic development of ‘inwardness’ and self-reflexivity, this You is
turned from a God (who in Augustine’s theology curtails our creative imagination) to
become our own inner-depths, an inwardness whose depths are inexhaustible. In this
rendering, the central idea is ‘that each person has his or her own original way of being’
(Taylor, 1989: 184) and our ‘inescapable feeling of depth comes from the realization that
whatever we bring up, there is always more down there. Depth lies in there being always,
inescapably, something beyond our articulative power.’ (Taylor, 1989: 390)
While the ‘confessional’ character of contemporary consumer and media culture has
been well documented (Bauman, 2007; Matthews, 2007; Raun, 2012), Varul (2015) has
sought to explicitly stress its religious origins in relation to a theodicy and (implicit) ethi-
cal maxim. As Campbell remarks on the ‘romantic theodicy’ at root in consumer capital-
ism, God is replaced with individual creativity (Campbell, 1987:182). This becomes a
form of faith but one that is ‘a purely personal drama of salvation and redemption to be
acted out within the confines of the self.’ (Campbell, 1987: 182) Most importantly this
self is never finished and the drama ongoing; the romantic personality of expressive
inwardness demonstrates a ‘refusal to commit to any of the projects, dreams, identities
constructed in the imagination.’ (Varul, 2015: 455) Such a theodicy has its critics
(Schmitt, 1986; Rojek, 2015):

Romantics tend to possess neither integrity or constancy. … Rather, they are adept at having
things every which way, and embracing and discarding positions willy nilly, because they
operate under the dual discipline of the unrestrained ego and ‘the occasion’ rather than lode
stars of principle and consistency… (Rojek, 2015:77)

Simply, critics see the romantic personality as vacuous. The romantic personality is one
with an inability to commit to set paths of action and principle. Yet, for Varul, the roman-
tic personality holds an alternative ethical value: ‘we are obliged to respect the reversibil-
ity, the open potential, the creative expressivity in others as much as we feel ourselves
entitled to our own.’ (Varul, 2015: 456)

The analysis
The ‘tragic vlogs’ analysed below attest to such a romantic politics of selfhood. Yet this
is merely one possible way to understand the vlog. If vlogs are a practice which value the
self as sacred and where performances of ‘self as other’ become realised, then we need
8 Qualitative Research 

to understand not only the cultural politics which lies behind such practices but also how
this becomes evidenced and confirmed in vlogging as such.
Of course these videos are indeed isolated in the vast array of vlog content on YouTube
and by no means generalizable. Yet they are in fact an interesting performance of that
which is much more typical of YouTube. They are phatic communications which seek
affinity by way of deferral: affinity vlogs confess to dramatic inaction (not uploading
videos for a while) and provide an index to future action (Lange, 2010: 82). The point I
am drawing out with the select vlogs is that in their dramatic inaction they are able to tell
us something interesting about the politics and performance of self involved in vlogging
on YouTube. By way of dramatic inaction, they articulate the tragedy of self which a
digitised form of selfhood is subject to. Yet, through their performance, they seek to
accomplish not solutions but possible ways of thinking about what a vlog, and YouTube,
is. Their actions are not directed toward conveying information or courses of action.
Instead they are a reflection upon the medium itself. They performatively situate a ‘prob-
lem’ in the presentation of a YouTube self. As performances of tragedy they have the
dramatic orientation toward intervention; a claim to what counts as and ought to be
thought of as normative goals of truth and justice (Baker, 2014).

‘I’m not here to entertain you’: tragedy and inaction

Treating these vlogs as tragic soliloquys arises from the shared textual and performative
similarities with them. They occur when the drama of the play has paused and they turn
‘inward’ and reflect upon their status within the narrative itself; they do this in seeming
(not actual) isolation. This is clearest in Charlie and Chris’ vlogs as Charlie appears
against a black backdrop in black and white; devoid of colour and negative space (only
a black void). The dramatic effect is an outward expression of inner turmoil. Chris, on
the other hand, uses a thumbnail for his vlog with his head sunken and hand over face and
obscured by his hair. Ben, however, begins his soliloquy as a series of verbal self-lacer-
ations after a scene in his fictional sketch has gone wrong. Crucially, they all break their
comedic persona which they have become ‘famous’ for. These vlogs are not what we
‘usually’ watch these vloggers for.
The opening of Charlie’s ‘I’m scared’, the first voice to articulate the problem of vlog-
ging in YouTube’s process of industry celebrification, attests to this:

I’m not here to entertain you today; I don’t have the capacity to do that right now.
I am here as one regular human being to another; because I am not happy right now.
I’m not happy with myself; and I need to talk to someone about it.

Charlie is dramatizing inaction. He is acting out an inability to perform. Classicist

Richard Seaford (2003) has traced the textual qualities of tragic drama, noting that char-
acters express themselves in speeches which comprise two-opposed statements which
often describe their actions in contradictory pairs. It is in tragedy where people become
problems unto themselves: ‘In the tragic perspective … human action are seen, not as
things that can be defined or described, but as problems.’ (Vernant and Vidal-Nacquet,
Smith 9

1990: 38). In textual form, Seaford (2003:141) calls this form-parallelism and dramati-
cally this leads to the central feature of tragedy: lamentation. As Charlies goes on he
says, ‘I just haven’t been the best version of myself recently.’ Charlie’s ‘I’m Scared’ is a
lamentation of self as other: his former self and current self as YouTube vlogger are read
through past videos and present efforts.
Lamentation takes a form that allows its expression to intersect with the dramatic
features of being a YouTuber. Chris and Ben share, while not the same script style, a
similar way of depicting dramatic inaction. Chris’ vlog begins:

Quitting YouTube. [Long pause]. How do I want to start this video? I want to start it by starting.
That is it. That’s all. There is no perfect start there is just beginning. [Pause]. Hi, I’m crab
[Laughs]. Hello. This is me quitting YouTube. Okay, I’ve got some explaining to do. I feel like
I’m probably going to get into a little bit of trouble, but, you know.

Here we have lots of ‘words’ but little ‘action’: inaction is dramatized through delays and
deferrals, silence, rhetoric and self-referral. Ben, too, begins in a similar way yet instead
turns toward the audience and directs his self-ire toward the viewer:

You can put that in, are you filming? You can put that in. Hello, faithful viewer. Person at home.
You probably won’t see this, so. Probably don’t even care, do you? You don’t care about
changing the world. Why should you, it’s not…you just want to watch British Boy With a
Fringe…

In Ben’s case we have, again, many words and little action but also further demonstration
of how anxiety and disquiet directed toward themselves results from being watched – as
others to themselves. When Charlie speaks of a ‘version of himself’, Chris negotiates
‘how to begin’ and Ben berates an audience who ‘probably won’t see this’ they reveal the
circuits of recognition (and misrecognition) of self at work in YouTube vlogging: vlogs
are performances of self for others, and others confirm their sense of self.
It is in this way that we can talk of a vlog as a performance of self as other. Charlie
says:

I realise this recently when I tried to work out, why I do anything, really why anybody does
anything and the best answer I could come up with is – every person, deep down, whether
they’re willing to admit this to themselves or not, wants other people to like them.

Here we’re seeing the articulation of inwardness and expressive depth in relation to
external recognition. Charlie disregards the claim to his persona in this video, speaking
in the language of ‘one human being to another’. To be a human being to another, he
must be afforded the ability to appear as he wishes. On YouTube we see this problem of
recognition expressed in the metric-language of digitised social media. Chris is more
explicit in this politics of the self in drawing out the ‘YouTube-ness’ of this:

What I have quit is YouTube. […] I’m surprised anyone is going to sit through this. They’re
going to be like ‘Oh yeah he didn’t quit. Dislike!’ [Pauses. Moment of revelation.] And that is
what I’m trying to get away from! Thinking like that. […] […] I think what it was, I’m a creative
10 Qualitative Research 

person, I like to make people laugh, and YouTube reacts to certain things that you do, like it
reacts to things like if you’re pretty, or if your video is about the ‘top 10 things that happen to
you when you fart’ or something. You know, YouTube reacts to that. And YouTube doesn’t react
to other things, like if I do a video based on a TV show in the UK that nobody really watched but
I found funny, it doesn’t react as well to that, so what happens over time you become a little bit
more effected by your followers and stuff, and you stop doing what you want to do.

All these statements refer to claims to their ‘creativity’ being limited as it is judged
through the ‘likes and dislikes’ of YouTube’s metrics. We see Chris employ the language
of ‘likes’, as a metric of value, which becomes the basis of YouTube valorisation – in the
Marxian sense – as his persona having exchange-value (Smith, 2014). ‘YouTube’, says
Chris, ‘reacts to certain things.’ Indeed, Charlie’s accounts makes much the same claim:
‘what holds me back isn’t that it isn’t going to be very good it’s that you won’t like it, and
by extension you won’t like me.’ While Ben’s ire states: ‘That any of you idiots can type
at all is a surprise. Well there you go: dislike this.’

Algorithmic sociality, or tragic connections

While these vlogs all perform claims to intimacy, disclosure and disquiet in the language
of ‘one human being to another’, the question is really how are they (and we) relating to
one-another? Digital sociality is not a direct relation of reciprocity. The dialogic medium
of Web 2.0 is constituted through the technical means of algorithms. Algorithms create
illusory relations of ‘connection’: ‘Most Viewed’, ‘X Likes’, etc. are forms of relations
between selves which arise from the ordering and organising patterns of the algorithms’
criteria, thereby obfuscating how connections are made and naturalising the processes
involved (Beer, 2013; Lash, 2007; MacKenzie, 2006). As Beer (2013) claims, the pro-
cesses algorithms are put to are often thought of as dehumanising as people are judged
without human discretion. But the real problem is that these algorithms know what is
desired and as we’re seeing from our vloggers, they come to ‘think like the algorithm’.
In so doing, they misrecognise human connection with algorithmic connections: they use
terms like ‘affected by your followers’, but these followers are others forged by the algo-
rithms YouTube employs. Their creativity becomes short-circuited and can be read as a
digitised ‘dialectic of control’ (Giddens, 1982): knowing that YouTube’s algorithms
‘react to certain things’, Chris’ internalises their predictive power and has to direct his
content accordingly. As such algorithms come to organise the metaphysical categories of
time, agency and power which the ‘self’ works within. Instead of forging connections
between self-and-other, rather YouTube – like many others platforms – ‘aims to deploy
its measure of the influence of individual in social media so as to drive its own actions.’
(Gerlitz and Lury, 2014: 181, original emphasis)
Here all three vlogs articulate this problem in relation to ‘time’ and it is an ‘algorith-
mic time’ (MacKenzie, 2006:64) which is the basis of their fame as ‘broadcasted selves’:

not only am I not posting content as regularly as I want to and know that I can … (Charlie)
I was away for two months, that felt really good, it felt really freeing … taking two months
away from it, it takes you out of it … out of the addictive side of YouTube (Chris)
Smith 11

I saw the YouTube digerati and I thought, ‘I want a piece of that’… Well, look where it’s got me
– a weekly series on YouTube, that isn’t even monthly, no ideas, no proper job, no hope. (Ben)

The celebrity vlogger, caught in an ‘algorithmic time’ – a power immanent to their prac-
tice as vloggers (Lash, 2007) – becomes ‘other’ to themselves. In the face of their
YouTube analytics – demographic, geographic, most-popular, most-viewed content –
they are in a position of excess of knowing and deficit of recognition. In terms of drama,
these vloggers have knowledge of their situation but fail to act on it (Critchely and
Webster, 2013: 5–6). As Nietzsche (1993: 39) remarks: ‘understanding kills action,
action depends upon a veil of illusion.’ We can see here the excess of knowing produces
much the same effect Nietzsche suggests the tragic figure, Hamlet, suffers from: leth-
argy. Having knowledge of the realities of their celebrity they are compelled to inaction.
As Ben says, ‘I’m so tired! I don’t think I want to Become YouTube anymore!’ Or,
Charlie: ‘I’m not here to entertain … I don’t have the capacity to do that right now.’
While these vlogs dramatize inaction they are not ineffective in this regard; tragedy
has a purpose and takes the form of an argument. This is found in its dramatic goal of
catharsis. Tragic drama represents a sequence of events towards a hero’s downfall and
suffering by way of the ‘logic’ within their actions, ‘a mistake such as anyone might
make’ (Vernant and Vidal-Nacquet, 1990: 247). Through theatre spectators identified
with the tragic hero and saw their own potential to succumb to such fate. In the face of
this spectators of a tragic hero’s downfall are obliged to reflect upon the ethical implica-
tions of their own courses of action (Vernant and Vidal-Nacquet, 1990: 247). With our
vloggers, this catharsis is organised around recourse to the language of humanity. Their
anxiety and disgust around their celebrity is treated as a fault of ‘being human’:

I hope that this is just what it’s like to be human, that everybody feels the same way as me, just
as anxious as I do about other people, but I don’t know for sure, and I don’t know what to do
about this either is, like the simplest answer is to just stop caring about it, but I have no idea
how to do that. (Charlie)It’s the sad thing, and I think every YouTuber isn’t on it fully, to share
themselves and have a laugh. A lot of them have a bigger idea of what they’re going to do and
so have I. And it’s not a bad thing, it’s not a selfish thing, it’s a very human thing. Everyone’s
projecting them into the future, like, ‘what’s coming up?’ (Chris)

These appeals to ‘being human’ – especially in the ‘confessional’ aesthetic in celebrity

culture – is certainly part of a skilful and artful ‘exposure management’ which keeps their
celebrity in-tact (Rojek, 2015). Yet our analysis ought to go beyond understanding the
realpolitik of celebrity performances (on YouTube or elsewhere). Rojek (2015) provides
a condemnatory critique of contemporary forms of public engagement, namely that
acceptance and approval trump moral character and integrity; the performance of inti-
macy and disclosure of private and personal disquiet is the end of shared and meaningful
publics. Rojek (2015) is worried that the ‘gestural economy’ of acceptance and approval
in contemporary culture is fundamentally isolating and devoid of purpose beyond a
façade of acceptance. Indeed, this could be a way to view these vlogs: they may claim a
common humanity but in fact they are gestures geared toward manipulating favour and
acceptance to preserve their power and celebrity.
12 Qualitative Research 

The soliloquy: an aesthetic-ethical act

I want to go beyond such an interpretation and salvage the romantic ethic and virtues
they epitomise. Rojek’s objections are ancient inheritances. Plato’s Republic also denied
the tragic poets a place in his ideal polis due to their production of illusion (over truth):
theatre would produce a society of the spectacle. Critchley and Webster (2013: 16–17)
note how the ancient sophist Gorgias described theatre as truths communicated in lies:
by way of illusion theatre achieves truths through deception and promotes values in illu-
sions. Crucially these ‘truths’ are performative; through drama we gain a ‘case’ for them
and taking them up. In a culture where public forums are privatised, we ought to see how
social performances aim to re-fuse collective sentiments in ways which are increasingly
theatrical (Alexander, 2014). These vlogs all evoke a common myth in western culture:
they draw upon and make the case for the autonomous, unique and self-enclosed ‘self’.
This is founded in the cultural history of the soliloquy.
The soliloquy has a privileged place in Western drama. It is a product of liberal
humanism and renaissance drama which proclaimed ‘the existence of an interiority, the
inalienable and unalterable property of the individual, which precedes and determines
speech and action.’ (Belsey, 1985: 34) However, where does this interiority come from?
What are the origins of our inalienable sense of individuality? Belsey (1985) gives the
example of Hamlet, the archetype of the liberal humanistic self. Hamlet is indeed a use-
ful example to draw out some (cautionary) parallels with our vlogs: his soliloquys are all
confessions of inaction (‘to be or not to be’).
When Hamlet expresses his grief as ‘I have that within which passes show’ compared
to the ‘actions that a man might play’ (Hamlet in Belsey, 1985:41) we are at the root of
the mystery of subjectivity which has plagued the ‘western self’ since the renaissance.
For Belsey, this inaction is the ‘self’ of liberal humanism falling into contradiction with
its own sense of unity:

Who is speaking when Hamlet castigates himself for his inaction? … The ‘I’ of the utterance is
here identified as the other, the ‘I’ of misrecognition, in contrast to the ‘I’ which recognises the
failure to act as inadequate, something to castigate. That ‘I’, the distinct differed subject of
enunciation, is the humanistic subject… (Belsey, 1985: 50)

The problem of the liberal humanistic self, then, is that they are unable to express their
own origin and own meaning. The liberal, humanistic self cannot be ‘themselves’. We
are seeing much the same at work in the vlogs. Vloggers talk of the same forms of mis-
recognition but fail to come down on who they are. Brian Cumming’s reading of Hamlet’s
soliloquy furthers Belsey’s, arguing that soliloquy’s are ‘a place of self-doubt and self-
cancellation’ (2013: 172). In his soliloquy’s, Hamlet, ‘far from speaking his mind, con-
fronts us with a fragmentary repository of alternative selves, and searches within for the
limits of being.’ (Cummings, 2013: 180) This is precisely what is at work with the vlogs
discussed here, for our vloggers are also showing themselves in their vlogs to be ‘alterna-
tive selves’ – performances, characters, their ‘brand’ – but never themselves. Ben, Chris
or Charlie’s ‘true selves’ are not found in these vlogs, either; while exceptional to their
usual ‘show’ each vlog is instead another self in a ‘fragmentary repository of alternative
selves’. As Belsey (1985: 50) says: ‘Hamlet’s subjectivity is itself un-speakable since the
Smith 13

subject of the enunciation always exceeds the subject of the utterance. … and this is the
heart of his mystery, his interiority, his essence.’ So, too, with our YouTubers: they are
more than their vlogs and they are here performing this more by way of inaction, deferral
and non-commitment. This is not the fall of public man or the end to a virtuous civic
(digital) culture, instead it is performing claims to extra-private selves when privacy
becomes public. If private life is lived in public, then privacy becomes what is not cap-
tured or recorded.
As such these vlogs seek to make a claim on the mystery of their self, a mystery which
YouTube’s digitised forms of ordering, organising and measuring worth seemingly extin-
guish. These vlogs seek to salvage a consistent link between who they are seen to be and
who they think they are without either side collapsing into the other. It is here that we find
an ethics of selfhood which connects the romantic character of contemporary popular
culture with vlogging as its cultural expression. All three vlogs dramatize how their self
was formed through vlogging and their reception on YouTube; and they agonise about
their position in this state where they have seemingly committed to a version of them-
selves which others have more influence in forging. This is the tragedy of self for the
YouTuber (Simmel, 1997). As political and aesthetic acts, these vlogs seek to make the
case for a reversible, occasion driven sense of self.

But how is this an ethical virtue?

If the occasionalism and reversibility of the romantic is to be an ethical virtue, then Varul
(2015: 456–457) notes it must be drawn out in choices of action which hold choosers
accountable to themselves. Instead of committing to a single path, the occasional charac-
ter of acts leads to the necessity of developing a ‘moral career’ of the self. This career
holds the impulse to choose accountable by forging an immanent link between the new
choice and the old. To not commit to ‘one version of oneself’ is itself an ethical principle
as it aims to weave a path which is unending and not curtailed by others; a project which
is autotelic. In all three vlogs there is a wish to move outside of their consummated selves
as vloggers, selves made ‘whole’ and seemingly ‘finished’ by the digital data which is
accumulated and constitutes their performances. It is in seeking this ‘outside-ness’ to
their self where this romantic virtue is held onto as a political position of a ‘how to be a
vlogger’. Against the data which consummates these vloggers, we may view these vlogs
as protests toward a thwarted sense of being ‘outside themselves’.

Conclusion
The debate around big data and digitally constituted popular culture has been provoca-
tively claimed to be ‘an increasingly powerful, prevalent and popular way through
which sociologists might continue to procedurally “miss the point”’ (Smith, 2014: 191):
privileging the aggregates of practice over practice itself fails to understand their practi-
cal accomplishment. The argument here has been completely in keeping with such a
position. The focus on how vloggers speak about their own practice has meant that the
analysis of the digital constitution of ‘self’ in social media aggregators is rendered into
a drama; a drama which arises out of how a select – but culturally significant – group
14 Qualitative Research 

of YouTube users come to terms with their relation to their medium. Digital data acts as
a character (agent) in the drama of self which has a particular, contingent cultural his-
tory. How a digitised popular culture connects with wider histories of ‘self’ has shown
that cultural meanings shape and define the situated practice of YouTube users. We may
not generalise from these cases but we can see how new forms – vlogs – connect with
enduring practices (soliloquys) and legacies (romanticism). Ethnographers of the inter-
net have the role of taking practices of a general form – the internet – and show how its
users draw upon culturally situated narratives in their forging of its content. Central to
this account has been how YouTube, as a source of the self, plays a role less of denying
us of our integrity by subjecting our performances to a regime of ‘points, likes and
faves’ (Pasquale, 2015) but instead reminding certain users that such renderings remain
inadequate. Metrics sourced from big-data algorithms act as antagonists to the romantic
heroes of YouTube explored here. Their ‘tragedies’ are performative and self-aware
depictions of unease which connect to a myth of western personhood: that each indi-
vidual has a ‘self’ that is sovereign and whose expression in various creative outlets –
from Sunday painting to commodified YouTubing – perpetuates this endless ‘expressive’,
unique individuality.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

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Author biography
Daniel R. Smith is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge, UK). He
has written on social media, celebrity culture, stand-up comedy and class and social distinction. His
monograph Elites, Race and Nationhood: The Branded Gentry was published by Palgrave in 2016.