The power of Vlogging

What's up y'all! For proper introductions, My name is Vincent, also known as VC by my friends. I am a senior Management major and Communication minor at TLU which is why I am creating blogs of course. As far as introductions go this is as good as it will get. 

For those of us who have our friends or family talk to, we commonly get asked the question, "How was your day?" If you haven't, imagine me asking you, how was your day today?  There's two ways we can answer this question. The first is simply stating how our day went within a sentence. 

good! 

oh it was terrible! 

it was just a regular day. 

The other choice of course, is to actually talk about your day. In the 1700's to roughly 1950's era, Lee Humphrey's discusses in his book, The Qualified Self, Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life, that this was a time of publicly sharing diaries with family and friends regardless of the material. Humphrey's goes on to later state that the 1950's to pre 2000's was a period of using a diary for actually holding secrets like what everyone thinks a diary is used for, but from the 2000's to now everything and everyone has gone back to open book. How does the concept of a diary go back to being public? 

My opinion? technology. 

The creation of cell phones and internet allowed for the development of applications on phones and websites on the internet, which is basically what pushed this need for social interaction everyday whenever people are away from each other's presence. Because of this, people got creative. 

Social media was used for posting to let people keep up with each other and what is going on in their lives. Let's focus on the most famous youtuber Felix Kjellberg, otherwise known as PewDiePie 

This is one of the first ever posts by PewDiePie on his instagram. "Everything is [finally] ready! Moving to Italy today! :D". Before fame? there is no way this gets 100,000 likes. Even though this was the normal instagram post in June of 2012 when it was posted, it does not warrant thousands of likes as a regular person right? 

Fast forward 8 years and millions of followers with fame later, and you get this. Look at the difference in basically everything. Picture quality, content, captions. Why such a transition? Of course, having come 8 years from where you were previously adheres to obvious ideas that a person grows out of their old self and into a new "me". However, how much change comes when the growth period comes with having the most subscribers EVER on youtube and becoming one of the most famous people on planet earth? 

George Herbert Mead explains his concept of "I" vs "Me" when it comes to perceptions. After reading this, it can be summed up to say that the "Me' of Mead's description is centered around what is acceptable to people, or your followers on social media that requires well-thought publications to platforms that everyone can see. The "me" is an idea of playing a background in fitting into the overall majority. The "I" however is the opposite and deals with being more unique in comparison to norms of society and what is expected of a person. "I" is standing out as a person who doesn't fit in to what social media platforms are trending with 

The focus of this blog wasn't around PewDiePie and his success through vlogging on youtube, HOWEVER his success on youtube and being completely open to answering the question "how was your day?" through vlogging his life started to affect who he had to become in order to keep his fame. Being open with his life allowed for people to want more of him, which shifted his perspectives in comparison to Mead's "I" vs "Me". Felix was no longer an "I" kind of person, and become PewDiePie to suffice the public eye, or being "Me".