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This article challenges the notion that mediated mobilities are mere substitutes to physical mobilities. It proposes that practising mediated mobilities, especially in the form of vlogging, is a generative process by which individuals can redefine their experience of immobility during quarantine. To support this argument, the article analyses quarantine vlogs uploaded by individuals who were quarantined in South Korean quarantine facilities in 2020. The vlogs reveal that individuals turn to mediated mobilities as an adaptive strategy, but also shows that the practice of vlogging itself emerges as a means to redefine quarantine in vloggers' own terms. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how some vloggers turn the quarantine experience as a resource to be mobilized and how the practice of vlogging itself becomes a strategy to capitalize on the immobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the intersection between two key fields in which international migrants respond to displacement and negotiate a sense of home: digital media and religion. The example chosen is the vlogging strategies used by Indonesian marriage migrants to navigate complex religious relationships with their followers and weave these into wider homemaking practices. The vlog analysis and in-depth interviews with the Indonesian marriage migrants in France and Belgium show that religion is an important element in constructing a sense of home in new locations. However, the immediacy of vlogs exposes them to religious expectations from followers back in Indonesia. As a result, homemaking is shaped by a complex interplay between the feelings of belonging and alienation in relation to their followers. Using vlogs, the marriage migrants seek to maintain control over their sense of home by building a mediated form of religious tolerance with their followers through adapted religious expressions in the vlogosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite opaque automated systems and few formal channels for participation, YouTubers navigate algorithmic governance on the platform through a strategy we call user-generated accountability: the generation of publicity via content creation to reveal failures, oversights, or harmful policies. Through an analysis of 250 videos, we identify common strategies, concerns, and targets of accountability. Creators primarily upload vlogs that acknowledge the platform's positive aspects, even as they express concern with YouTube's policies, automated enforcement systems, poor communication practices, and discrimination against certain creators or content. In publicizing critiques of platform operations, videos enroll creators and audiences as active stakeholders in platform governance that can coordinate actions to draw the company's attention to matters of concern. We argue that user-generated accountability practices offer a productive starting point for understanding how platform governance disputes come to be and how systems might be shaped or rebuilt to better serve the needs of competing stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on an online ethnographic study of Dutch women who use YouTube as a medium to document their contested illness experiences. During 13 months of observations between 2017 and 2019, we followed a sample of 16 YouTubers, and conducted an in-depth analysis of 30 YouTube videos and of 7 interviews. By adopting a 'praxiographic' approach to social media, and by utilising insights from phenomenological theory, this study teases out how bodies are 'done' in (the making of) these YouTube videos. We describe three types of bodies: (1) inert bodies, (2) experienced bodies, and (3) authentic bodies. Ultimately, this study shows how vlogging about contested illness is a practice in which bodies are continually (re)configured, and through which the 'invisibility' of a sufferer's condition can obtain social visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we combine a number of related elements – YouTube films, autobiographical methods, diaries, letters, and walking – to explore the sociological value of the films of Nelson Sullivan (1948–1989). Sullivan was a film maker who documented New York, and elsewhere, in the mid-late 1980s; however, the films are 'vlogger style' and offer richly detailed, relational, and dialogical accounts of the ever-changing figurations between Nelson and a cast of other characters. Here we aim to walk sociologically with Nelson. We explain of how we analysed Nelson's films before considering the implications of repositioning 'vlogs' as something of a hybrid between letters and diaries. We then explore walking as an autobiographical act a little further. Finally, we conclude by considering the implications of Nelson's work for past, present, and future sociological practice which uses YouTube videos and vlogs, by emphasising the importance of the 'dialogic exchange'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how Brazilian platform workers experience and respond to platform scams through three case studies. Drawing from digital ethnographic research, vlogs/interviews of workers, and literature review, we argue for a conceptualization of "platform scam" that focuses on multiple forms of platform dishonesty and uncertainty. We characterize scam as a structuring element of the algorithmic management enacted by platform labor. The first case engages with when platforms scam workers by discussing Uber drivers' experiences with the illusive surge pricing. The second case discusses when workers (have to) scam platforms by focusing on Amazon Mechanical Turk microworkers' experiences with faking their identities. The third case presents when platforms lead workers to scam third parties, by engaging with how Brazilian click farm platforms' workers use bots/fake accounts to engage with social media. Our focus on "platform scams" thus highlights the particular dimensions of faking, fraud, and deception operating in platform labor. This notion of platform scam expands and complexifies the understanding of scam within platform labor studies. Departing from workers' experiences, we engage with the asymmetries and unequal power relations present in the algorithmic management of labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, YouTubers are translating their self-produced videos in order to reach out to a global viewership. Those YouTubers' translations often incorporate innovative practices that prioritise displaying affinity with their audience. Non-representational subtitling is one such translation apparatus. It does not seek to reproduce speech in another language accurately but contains additional information that is not otherwise included in the content. I examine non-representational subtitles deployed in culture-brokering YouTube vlogs, as well as viewers' reactions to those subtitles. The key argument of this article is that non-representational subtitling can be utilised as a means both of expressing YouTubers' voices outside of filmed space during the translating process and of manipulating ways to address viewers' different language constituencies. I also argue that translation-driven communities are interactive transnational networks in which viewers develop a sense of community by amplifying translation-mediated information, suggesting alternative translations, and expressing their feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite being ubiquitous and embedded in everyday life, 'the centrality of the Internet is still under-theorized in much masculinities research'. Contributing to the knowledge base in this area, here we place under the microscope the performance of heteromasculinities undertaken by the three most popular YouTube gaming vloggers in 2015-2016: PewDiePie, VanossGaming and Sky Does Minecraft. The focus of this article thus sits at the intersection of YouTube vlogging and gaming cultures, a site that is of particular sociological interest given the latter's associations with the (re)production and function of hegemonic masculinity. In examining the performances and constructions of gender by male gamers on YouTube, our research adds to the growing body of work highlighting the emergence of increasing levels of complexity in the construction of contemporary masculine identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a qualitative study of YouTube bereavement vlogs and posts by young people about parental death, this article examines the rise and significance of intimate mourning between strangers. An unexpected finding of this research has been the speed with which young people create vlogs or post messages of their bereavement; very often within hours of a death. The question of time in relation to bereavement grief is thus a feature of this article’s analysis. The article argues that YouTube, like other social media, exposes and contests the disenfranchising of grief in offline social settings and relationships while, at the same time, enfranchising disaffected and excluded bereavement discourse via media sociality. It also argues, conversely, that YouTube, like other social media, is now a primary social space (not secondary or supplementary); it provides the where and how and who to connect with regarding personal grief and bereavement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the intersection between trans identity and technology as it manifests in trans video blogs on YouTube. Taking my point of departure in eight case-study vloggers I analyse the different ways that the vlog can work as a medium of transformation. The vlogs engender the ongoing process of ‘becoming’ man/woman/trans by inscribing the vlogger in multiple and intersubjective reflections, being visible to themselves and others as an image. I argue that the co-production of trans identity in/through the vlog takes the shape of a mirror, a digital diary or autobiography, and as artistic explorations and communications. The article demonstrates how vloggers take advantage of the multimodality of the medium to tell stories of trans that can animate and motivate others to dare to be visible or claim an identity as trans. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An exploratory mixed-methods study involving a combination of online ethnography and descriptive statistics was conducted to investigate school-related vlogging. Five areas were emphasized: (1) characteristics of school-related vlogs, vloggers, and viewers; (2) vlog context (where recording occurred); (3) vlog content (what was said and shown); (4) vlogger culture (patterns of speech or practice); and (5) motivations for vlogging about school. A purposive sample of 120 personal video blogs (vlogs) was collected through a systematic process on YouTube during a three-month period. Results of the study revealed that vloggers were young, recorded in multiple settings including classrooms, showed and described their school experiences, shared a vocabulary for interacting with an audience, and vlogged for a variety of reasons including the desire to alleviate boredom, for fun, because friends were doing it, to build confidence or improve their speaking skills, document their experiences, share information, or to connect with others. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]