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Even though political vlogging, largely understood as the production of online videos to demand accountability from the state, provides an avenue for netizens to express dissent, this form of civic engagement comes with drawbacks. Based on selective archiving of the political rhetoric of 12 disenfranchised Ghanaian migrants domiciled in the United States and Europe, I draw attention to four main epistemic complications inherent in the diasporians’ public opinions of a perceived political crisis in Ghana. The analysis shows that the migrants raise emotional arguments concerning such topoi as corruption and bad governance; poor social infrastructure; unemployment; a weak educational system; and the problem of religion and superstition. The study also reveals that the political messaging of the migrants is fundamentally premised on a Eurocentric view of governance which, on the contrary, glorifies Western imperialism, and reinforces Victorian narratives that depict postcolonial subjects as indolent, psychotic, and malevolent. The paper is situated at the intersection of political rhetoric and postcolonial theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

#MeToo is a digital social movement that has garnered significant attention from feminist scholars since the hashtag obtained viral fame in 2017. Nonetheless, how survivors of sexual violence experience participating in #MeToo remains an understudied question. In this paper we analyze vlogs posted on YouTube under the hashtag to understand how women represent the affordances and drawbacks of participating in the movement, and how they imagine their experiential narratives may affect other survivors. We argue that vloggers represent #MeToo as a forum for breaking the culture of silence that structures sexual violence. As they narrate their experiences, vloggers challenge silencing mechanisms by cultivating voice, resistance strategies, and survivor solidarity, while encouraging viewers to similarly examine their own experiences. Vloggers also identify the emotional burdens associated with disclosure and the damages incurred by confronting rape myths and the entrenched denial of perpetrator guilt as drawbacks of participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media provides a repository of qualitative data relevant to difficult to research sensitive issues. Researcher practices vary in terms of how to ethically collect such data. Some argue that public social media posts can be collected without the informed consent of the authors. Others agree researchers can collect public posts but suggest anonymizing them to protect authors. For some, however, much social media activity consists of private conversations occurring in public that can only be researched with informed consent. This article contrasts confessional posts on support forums with confessional vlogs on YouTube to highlight how the affordances, norms, and genre of digital platforms require researchers to adopt different ethical practices in relation to data collected from different platforms. The article argues that researchers should familiarize themselves with a platform when they evaluate whether they are observing private conversations occurring in public or creative productions meant for widespread dissemination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a new Turkish social media influencer corpus consisting of 30 YouTube vlogs, this study explores young adults' translanguaging practices, prevalent linguistic events, and spatial repertoires in communication. The analysis focuses on vlogs, where linguistic resources become available in relation to the activities, audience, and organization of places or objects and young adults' translanguaging practices and their situated functions. The findings demonstrate how to use translanguaging as a comprehensive methodology to analyze communication unfolding with multimodal, multilingual, and digital semiotic repertoires at speakers' disposal and for the imagined audience integral to the communication in vlogs. Taking a corpus-linguistics perspective to translanguaging, we propose a usage-based focus and undertake a broader understanding of translanguaging as a linguistic and multimodal phenomenon. 30 YouTube vlogundan oluşan yeni bir Türk sosyal medya etkileyicileri derlemine dayanan bu çalışma, genç yetişkinlerin diller ötesi pratiklerini, vloglarda hakim olan dilsel olayları ve iletişimdeki mekansal repertuarlarını incelemektedir. Analizin odağında genç yetişkinlerin dilsel kaynaklarının, etkinlikler, izleyici ve mekanların veya nesnelerin düzenlenmesi, diller ötesi pratikler ve bu pratiklerin yerleşik işlevleri ile ilişkili olarak kullanılabilir hale geldiği vloglar bulunmaktadır. Bulgular, vloglardaki iletişimin ayrılmaz bir parçası olan hayali izleyici için üretilen iletişimin konuşmacıların tasarrufunda olan çoklu modlu, çokdilli ve dijital göstergesel repertuarlar ile bir bütün olduğunu ve bu iletişimi çözümlemek için kapsamlı bir metodoloji olan diller ötesilik kuramının kullanılabileceğini göstermektedir. Bu çalışma, diller ötesiliği derlembilim destekli bir yaklaşımla ele alarak, kullanıma dayalı bir odak önermekte ve diller ötesiliği dilbilimsel ve çok modlu bir olgu olarak daha kapsamlı bir anlayışla ele almaktadır. In our research, we look at how people use language in their everyday online videos (vlogs). Central to our study is the concept of translanguaging. It is a practical theory of language that helps us understand how people use different languages together, get creative with language, and create new ways of communicating online. This perspective goes beyond the traditional view, which treats multilingualism as simply switching between distinct linguistic systems. This is especially important on social media where global and local influences interact, and users access new activity spaces. We built a specialized corpus that contains 30 vlogs of six Turkish social media influencers on YouTube and used software called ELAN. This helped us analyze how they use both languages and visuals to communicate. What we found is that these influencers translanguage, use unique expressions, and include visual elements to connect with their audience online. Our study also emphasizes how interpreting and self--interpreting in translanguaging helps convey meaning for an imagined audience. By studying these practices, we learn more about how language works in today's social media spaces and how it challenges our traditional conceptions of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the rise in participant-based running video blogs (vlogs), where audiences are brought on runs from the point-of-view of the runner. Examining Irish YouTube channels that create content around trail and mountain running, it focuses on a number of themes, including emotionality, place, and sociability in storytelling. In doing so, it questions the ways in which the activity of filming encapsulates the act of off-road running and the quest for vertiginous experiences. It explores the motivations of content creators, potential tensions with the ethos of alternative sports, and interactivity between producers and viewers. It positions this coverage as unique within the sports media space, providing first-hand, dizzying accounts of a niche sporting activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fertility preservation incorporates relational and temporal dynamics that have both experimental and conservative dimensions in people's thinking about their reproductive futures, parenthood, and family building. In this article, we discuss video blog (vlog) narratives of people who have publicly documented their experience of preserving their gametes (eggs or sperm). The aim of the study is to examine how people, who are experiencing the prospect of fertility decline or disruption, frame their decision-making about gamete preservation and what this means for their future family building. As such, we organise the data around three demographic groups according to health, career and relationship status, and gender transition. To analyse the vlogs we use composite narratives, a method whereby researchers synthesise data to construct stories based on people's lived experiences, without attributing events or details to particular people. Using this method, we draw on two conceptual tools from the sociology of personal life; relationality and temporal scripts, to highlight how vloggers discuss fertility preservation in relation to time and their experiences to real and imagined others, in making decisions about their reproductive futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gastronomic tourism is a developed research stream in tourism studies. Previous literature, however, has mainly shed light either on the micro-context of food itself or on meso-contexts such as heritage and regional food sourcing. Given this situation, previous research has called for examining this aspect of food tourism, aptly named the 'cultural turn' in food tourism. This paper adds to extant theoretical conversations by studying popular international gastronomic tourism videos. As the world becomes increasingly globalized and cultural products suffuse across borders, travellers, particularly those from the Global North, sample and judge local cuisine and this incurs reactions from onlookers. Watched by millions of people, vlogs provide a virtual immersive socio-cultural experience to a tourist site. In this regard, this article asks the following research question: how does the Global North-South divide manifest in vlogged gastronomic tours and what responses do such phenomena provoke among international audiences? Using the approaches of textual analysis, content analysis and sentiment analysis, this study explores the afore-mentioned research question using the canvas of nine gastronomic vlogging tours as played out on YouTube. The authors analyse the most popular food vlogs of all time and use a gamut of more than three hours of video (with more than 215 million views) and more than 128,000 comments. The results show how vlogs may provide authentic cultural experiences and how the Global North-South divide is ameliorated through vlogging gastronomic tours. The question is important not only helpful for guiding destination marketers and tourism service providers about the multifaceted aspects of a destination, but also for understanding how particular social phenomena can foster connections among different peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews influencer marketing (IM)-research in the tourism and hospitality (H&T) field to provide a state-of-the-art of the past, present, and future of IM-research. It identifies research themes, theoretical underpinnings, and methodologies utilized in IM-research. Seventy-five studies are examined through co-citation, bibliographic coupling and content analysis based on the TCCM (theory/context/characteristics/methodology) framework. Co-citation analysis reveals that IM-research focused on travel blogs, vlogs, celebrity endorsement, influencer authenticity. An assessment of recent studies through bibliographic coupling indicates a partial shift toward the study of more contemporary issues. This field-discipline-focused hybrid-review contributes to literature and practice by presenting the past, present, and future of IM-research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although travel vlogs have recently been adopted as digital marketing tools to promote tourist spots, relatively little is known about which attributes of travel vlogs and how these attributes motivate audiences to travel. This study emphasizes the importance of information conveyed by the content of travel vlogs and aims to explore how the information quality (information usefulness, ease of use, and comprehensiveness) in travel vlogs affects audience travel intention through presence, enjoyment, and flow experience. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) is adopted to analyze data collected from 241 respondents who had experience with watching travel vlogs. The results indicate that the three facets of information quality positively influence travel intention through the mediating role of presence, enjoyment, and flow experience. The total effect of information comprehensiveness on travel intention is the strongest, followed by information usefulness and ease of use orderly. The findings extend the literature on travel vlogs by validating the role of information quality in travel vlogs. In line with this, travel vlog creators are suggested to pay attention to information management when making vlogs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a rich introductory chapter on the advantages and disadvantages of digital media work for women comedians, the book explores how, and to what ends, women comedians use various media. I Women Comedians in the Digital Age i provides a fascinating, detailed, and nuanced look at the ways in which women comedians leverage work in digital media to build their careers. Women Comedians in the Digital Age: Media Work and Critical Reputations After Trump: by Alex Symons, New York, Routledge, 2023, 208 pp., £34.99 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1032215020. [Extracted from the article]

The rise of vlogging (video blogging) culture in China has been entangled with the wanghong culture and platform economy, which creates tension between individual empowerment and structural power for vloggers. How do young Chinese vloggers construct online identities tactically to cope with the structural pressures? This dissertation explores young Chinese vloggers' practices, identities, and tactics in interaction with the social media platform Bilibili. By conducting a digital ethnography between 2018 and 2022, I argue that young Chinese vloggers tactically construct and perform their online identities to negotiate with norms, aesthetics, and regulations in the wanghong culture and platform economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2018, toubu vloggers – a term that refers to the vloggers who earn the majority of traffic and attention through vlogging their daily lives on Chinese social media – remain a limited quantity in the emerging and rapidly growing Chinese vlogging market. This article aims to explore the performative identity strategies developed by Chinese toubu vloggers to attract attention and stand out from the multitude of vloggers on social media platforms. A case study was conducted with a qualitative content analysis of 73 vlog posts published on the user-generated video platform Bilibili from May 2017 to August 2019, by four Chinese toubu vloggers: Nihaozhuzi, Jyhachi, Cbvivi and Mashasha. This study revealed four personae constructing strategies applied by toubu vloggers to grow and retain their online audience, including anti-standardised originality, negative affect authenticity, ungraspable intimacy and frank commodification. Further, the study offers an explanation of how these strategies contributed to their success by defying the highly standardised and institutionalised Chinese wanghong industry that is characterised by perfection of self-presentation and blurred commodification. These strategies illustrate the agentic and subversive potential that vlogging practices can hold in a highly hermetic cultural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This practical, practice-based article sets out to define and describe vlogging based on the author's experiences while teaching a blended learning course. Vlogging is a short duration video recording that engages the learner in critical self-reflection. It is a scaffolding strategy for moving students from a descriptive diary to situated experiences and into a more nuanced iterative reflexive, meaning-making self-identity. With smartphones, tablets, and computers readily accessible, students can easily use vlogging to capture the immediacy of their reflections that provides a time-lapse view nurturing a reflexive process. Further, instructors can use vlogging as a learning analytics tool to gather student feedback that provides insight into the learning process. Findings from an exploratory descriptive study offer insights into the challenges and benefits of using vlogging with blended learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bindi Kang's 'Curating Unmarked Banality' explores the digital videos in Jingjing's Life Journal on Today's Headlines and examines the seemingly ordinary and repetitive nature of vlogs by migrant workers, uncovering their captivating appeal to online audiences. The research argues that the vlogging of mundane life offers an updated narrative of migrant workers' urban experience, creating a contemporary Asian worker's rendition of the flâneur–a classical literary archetype known for its associations with urban public life and leisurely observation. By self-documenting their daily experiences, these workers are shown to challenge the conventional urban-rural binary that prevails in Chinese mainstream media portrayals. These vlogs serve as an act of 'reverse (un)marking', reaffirming and showcasing a mediated urban identity for the migrant population. The analysis adopts Peggy Phelan's concept of the 'unmarked'–which examines the ideology of visibility and its relation to power in performance–and Wayne Brekhus's sociological extension of the term to critique the disproportionate focus on the 'marked' in academic inquiry. Through 'reverse marking', this research discusses the significance of these digital narratives in the broader cultural landscape, examining how such mediated performances engage with issues of visibility, representation and identity formation of traditionally underrepresented groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2018, transgender YouTuber Natalie Wynn (aka ContraPoints) released "The Aesthetic," a video in which she explored the social pressure placed on trans women in the public eye to pass. Taking this video as a starting point, I analyze trans beauty influencer Gigi Gorgeous's early transition vlogs in which she details her experiences with cosmetic surgery. The narrative Gorgeous constructs in these vlogs, I contend, employs transnormative discourses that center an internal struggle with gender dysphoria. However, I complicate this narrative by placing Gorgeous's vlogs in conversation with Wynn's vlog where she recounts her own experience with facial feminization surgery, pointing to the external pressures she faces to conform to beauty norms. I contextualize these narratives within the literatures on aesthetic labor and social media influencers to explore how Gorgeous and Wynn's desires to pass and to be beautiful are informed by their status as highly visible trans women working in the cultural industries. By theorizing passing as labor, I argue that beautification practices such as cosmetic surgery are investments that trans women in the public eye make in the hopes of attaining social and economic capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using content analysis to analyze vlogs released by the Chinese official media over COVID-19, this study explores how the government conducts emotional governance on social media during national trauma. The analysis unveils two archetypes (civilian hero and miracle government) that are adapted by official media outlets to convey emotions, including national responsibility, national pride, and healing patriotism, to consolidate the legitimacy of the regime. In addition, this study analyzes the sources of these vlogs and demonstrates that netizens are motivated by the authority's recognition to participate in vlog production. Thus, an "inter-embedded" emotional governance model characterized by technological innovation, casual style, and interactive format is formed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines "recovery vlogging" as a mode of postfeminist empowerment, and considers how the public disclosure of one's recovery from an eating disorder can serve to foster community, while also putting the onus on the individual. Understanding the recovery community as it has emerged on social media platforms helps to unravel the ways in which young women leverage online spaces to support one another, while also navigating the contradictory demands of neoliberal brand culture. Through a case study of YouTuber Jen Brett, a Canadian recovery vlogger, this paper asks: What is at stake as individuals continue to make their bodies their brands? While Brett inspires her viewers to face their fear foods, accept their bodies, and quiet the voices of their disorders, her content still relies on the regular surveillance of her food and her body. As such, progress becomes valuable only insofar as it is visible, measurable, and linear. When recovery is entwined in self-branding and framed as something that can be achieved through self-determination, self-discipline, and choice, we risk obscuring the need to accept, to connect, and to heal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video bloggers, also known as vloggers, continuously create and share authentic videos on popular platforms like YouTube. Travel influencer vloggers (called vloggers in this study) influence their audience by sharing their trip experiences and giving reviews about destinations and travel brands. This study employs aconstructivist grounded theory approach of 35 YouTube vlogs from 21 vloggers through a3-phase theoretical sampling. The theorizing process resulted in the development of Vloggers' Approaches and Practices (VAP) Theory by identifying the main approaches as content (CA) and objectives (OA), the two main practices of travel influencing (TIP) and vlogging (VP), and their relationships. The theoretical and managerial contributions can be important for scholars of influencer marketing, and practitioners that work with vloggers like destination marketing organizations (DMOs), hotels, tour operators, and transportation services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The TV industry has long been under pressure to adapt its workflows to use advanced Internet technologies. It also must face competition from social media, video blogs, and livestreaming platforms, which are enabled by lightweight production tools and new distribution channels. The social-distancing regulations introduced due to the COVID-19 pandemic added to the list of challenging adaptations. One of the remaining bastions of legacy TV production is the live broadcast of sporting events and news. These production practices rely on tight collaboration in small spaces, such as control rooms and outside broadcast vans. This paper focuses on current socio-technical changes, especially those changes and adaptations in collaborative practices and workflows in TV production. Some changes necessary during the pandemic may be imposed, temporary adjustments to the ongoing situation, but some might induce permanent changes in key work practices in TV production. Further, these imposed changes are aligned with already ongoing changes in the industry, which are now being accelerated. We characterize the changes along two main dimensions: redistribution of work and automation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sponsored vlogs (video blogs that embed advertising) are increasingly targeting young adolescents and challenging their abilities to critically process advertising. This study examined the impact of an advertising disclosure on young adolescents' advertising literacy (i.e., advertising recognition and affective advertising literacy) for sponsored vlogs. In addition, the underlying mechanisms, including advertising literacy and influencer effects (i.e., influencer trustworthiness and parasocial interaction [PSI]), that can explain the influence on advertising effects (i.e., purchase intention) were examined. Finally, the moderating impact of a peer-based advertising literacy intervention was investigated through an informational vlog about advertising. The results of a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental study (advertising disclosure: no disclosure versus disclosure; peer-based advertising literacy intervention: regular versus informational vlog) with 160 young adolescents (ages 11 to 14) showed that an advertising disclosure increased young adolescents' recognition of advertising and their affective advertising literacy for sponsored vlogs, and that only affective advertising literacy negatively affected influencer effects (influencer trustworthiness and PSI) and subsequently purchase intention. Regarding the moderating role of this peer-based advertising literacy intervention, this study showed that an advertising disclosure can also have positive effects on the influencer and subsequently on advertising effects when young adolescents are informed about advertising through an informational vlog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we report findings from a feminist discourse analysis of YouTube vlogs in which women and girls discuss and narrate their experiences of sexual violence. The analysis yielded three discourses and three counterdiscourses: the refusal discourse and the complicating consent counterdiscourse; the deviant perpetrator discourse and the community problem counterdiscourse; and the not that bad discourse and truth telling counterdiscourse. Our findings indicate that the YouTube vloggers simultaneously reproduce and resist dominant sexual violence discourses; they use both dominant and counterdiscourses to understand, situate, and make sense of their experiences of sexual violence. Counterdiscourses were constituted when vloggers resisted dominant discourses by pointing out their inconsistencies and fundamental flaws and presented alternative patterns of meaning. The #MeToo movement and YouTube's nature as a narrative platform allowed the women and girls in our study to locate their stories of sexual violence within broader contexts and connect them to a continuum of experiences and a complex cultural problem. In a post-#MeToo world, the vloggers' narratives evidenced their development of a digital networked feminist consciousness. Situated within feminist understandings of sexual violence and prevention education, as well as the emerging research on the #MeToo movement, this study contributes to the literature on public sexual violence pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Travel vlogging is gaining popularity and studying the practice of travel vlogging can provide insights into tourist behaviour, communication, and management. The notion of practice was adopted as the theoretical base and the analytical framework. A qualitative approach was employed, including interviews with 12 strategically sampled vlogger tourists and analysis of their vlog productions. The findings suggested that travel vlogging is a practice bundle constructed by four sequential practices; designing, filming, editing, and posting. Through a collaborative relationship, the four practices achieve the shared meanings of self-concept expressions, a sense of documentation and ritual, and pleasures in vlogging. Moreover, travel vlogging affects tourist experiences; it creates a self-other divide, mediates the experiences of the 'self', and moderates the experiences of the 'others'. Such impacts vary across the dimensions of travel stages, materiality, and engagement. Theoretically, the study offers fresh insights into the practice of vlogging and the creation of travel vlog content; pragmatically, understandings and implications for quality experiences of vlogger tourists are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Content creators on YouTube have started documenting their visits to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in vlog form. This social media format has enabled influencers to assume the role of popular historian, endowing their trips with a sense of moral responsibility. Critical tools should be applied not only to content analysis but also to metadata and various methods of curating visibility on the platform. Additionally, mechanisms of self-promotion and the fate of official narratives of commemoration in an era of user-generated content are of interest. Is this new cohort of popular history practitioners a welcome development in the field of commemoration? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last several years, an increasing number of rural vloggers from China have opened their YouTube channels, Facebook pages, and Instagram accounts. They broadcast their farming, working, cooking, and crafting. The visual narratives make interesting storytelling about contemporary China, given the fact that these social media platforms themselves are officially inaccessible there. Using Li Ziqi, one of the most viewed Chinese YouTubers, as my case study, I will discuss the politics behind the construction of the "good China story" at the grassroots level. I argue that the aestheticized labor plays a central role in making the good story and its nation-building rhetoric, which is enabled and disrupted by the negotiation and contestation of the aspiring rural individual, the profit-driven cooperation, and the overseeing state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the vlogging practices of Chinese international students during the COVID-19 pandemic and their positive roles in coping with the double bind. By doing thematic analysis of the content of vlog videos generated by Chinese international students on both Chinese and English audio-visual platforms, we identify three overarching themes of their vlogging stories: 'everyday personal experience sharing', 'vlogger-generated citizen journalism' and 'producing counternarratives'. We argue that Chinese international students creatively practice 'actualizing digital citizenship' through dual vlogging. Their vlogging implies a strong sense of civic engagement, connectivity and empowerment, and is conducive to the self-resilience of the affected group as well as their identity and solidarity building in the crisis. Our research advocates for a shift of digital citizenship studies to recognize the flexible, individualized and loosely networked 'actualizing digital citizenship' practice. We also call attention to take the everyday digital practices of the international students seriously to understand their concerns, needs and resilience in the uncertain and difficult times in order to better support this vulnerable cohort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White Canadian Simon and Martina Stawski's Eat Your Kimchi vlog complicates the interpretation of YouTube fandom as counter-hegemonic. Combining performance studies and media studies, we suggest "white-expat-fans" to explicate their racialized, spatialized and fannish negotiation and (dis)identification with K-pop. As fans, they identify with K-pop and subordinate themselves to its singers. As expatriates lived in South Korea and fulltime bloggers, they are responsive to local culture and financially rely on K-pop fans locally and globally. As whites, they parody, mock, and pathologize K-pop as a feminized Oriental Other and reclaim racial privilege, compensating their feeling of marginalization from spatial and fannish orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the learning impact of introducing vlogs and blogs to graduate international business case studies. Data were collected over a four-year period from graduate business programs to compare assignment performances from students when case studies were presented with versus without the inclusion of vlogs and blogs. A rubric measuring six criteria was used to evaluate case study submissions and identify areas drawing upon specific learning skills. A crosswalk between the rubric and Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive levels linked student performance and these skills. Group comparisons of the 535 observations showed the inclusion of vlogs and blogs led to statistically significant improvement in students' learning outcomes in overall scores, failing rates, and high-score achievements. A performance examination of th3e international business case studies against the six specific grading criteria also showed marked advances in students' higher-level thinking skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis or creation, which have been linked to developing cross-cultural awareness. The study indicates that instructors should thoughtfully curate sets of vlogs and blogs pertaining to products, services, values, cultures, and economic systems from multiple diverse origins to use in administering international business case studies used in their course curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of EFL learners and teachers toward vlogs as a source of aural input for L2 listening practice inside and outside of classroom. A total of 389 EFL university students drawn from 29 listening/speaking classes and their teachers participated in this study. After four weeks of exploiting vlogs in the classroom, perceptions from students and teachers were collected through questionnaires, focus group-based discussion, and interviews. The findings of this study indicate that students found vlogs engaging, interesting, up-to-date while simultaneously being a source that will ensure learning. Teachers also had positive perceptions toward the use of vlogs in their classes to improve students' listening skill and vocabulary learning, as well as other aspects of the L2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vlogging on YouTube is a process of self-formation whereby a vlogger constructs and presents their identity in relationship with the platform, technology and all of its participants. I frame vlogging as Automedia — a process of being and becoming — forged through the merging of self with networked digital media. In order to understand this process, I argue the researcher must engage in the same activity of automediality. I detail my autoethnography on YouTube — my eighteen months of vlogging — and discuss the knowledge I gained from my experience of being and doing on the site. My autoethnography highlights the skill, labour and time involved in vlogging, the relational way that identity is formed and maintained on the site, the conscious and ongoing work of narrativising the self, and the vulnerable nature of automedial identities and narratives of this kind. I conclude that autoethnography is an essential part of an automedial investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing rhetorical listening, I attend to the ways autistic authors narrate their relationships with objects in blogs/vlogs. These authors implore readers to engage with autistic object-orientations, unsettling the dominant assumptions undergirding some of our discipline's foundational interpersonal communication theories, including theories of symbolic interaction, uncertainty management, and self-disclosure. These narratives reveal possibilities for cultivating theoretical orientations and disciplinary practices that are inclusive of neurodivergence. They also highlight the unjust power relations pervading interpersonal communication theory, provide insight into possibilities for transforming these systemic constraints, and reveal critical intersections and innovations among interpersonal communication, rhetoric, and interdisciplinary object-oriented studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intends to contribute to a novel research area - the construction of critical transgender narratives on Youtube – examining how some Spanish trans youtubers shift the focus from the 'fleshy metamorphosis' [Barnett, J. T. (2015). Fleshy metamorphosis: Temporal pedagogies of transsexual counterpublics. In L. G. Spencer & J. C. Capuzza (Eds.), Transgender communication studies: Histories, trends, and trajectories (pp. 155–172). Lexington], to becoming trans 'media-bodies' [Raun,T. (2010). Screen-births: Exploring the transformative potential intrans video blogs on YouTube. Graduate Journal of Social Science, 7(2), 113–130]. We examine the channel Lost in Transition, by Spanish transgender advocate Elsa Ruiz Cómica. In contrast to other trans youtubers, who focus mostly on 'passing' as the ultimate trans achievement, Elsa creates alternative narratives. We will argue that her practices emerge as a new political subject, disobedient to the legal and biomedical framing of transgenderism as a disorder. Our main conclusion is that Youtube is a site of 'digital trans activism' [Raun, T. (2016). Out online. Trans self-representation and community building on YouTube. Routledge.], where non-binary youtubers can perform the nonconforming subaltern body [Platero, R. L., & Rosón, M. (2019). 'Neithermale or female; just Falete': Resistance and queerness on Spanish TV screens. Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies, 11(1), 135–143. doi:10.1386/cjcs.11.1.135_1] that would otherwise be invisible. This has implications for the public debate on transrights, as it lifts the issue of transition out of the medical sphere and puts it at the center of abroader cultural debate on gender identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article utilizes the term "digital authoring" in order to explore the ways in which children create multi-modal, digital media texts. Drawing on the notion of "emergent literacy" we share vignettes from different pedagogical and research contexts where children use media to tell stories in different forms with different technologies. These accounts demonstrate the value to children of opportunities to make volitional choices about the mode, media, and form of their own texts. We reflect on moments of authoring in our vignettes which provide insights into the intrinsic pedagogic affordances of cultural practices such as vlogging and video diaries situated as they are, in wider socio-cultural practices. In doing so, we draw on the notion of "playful tinkering" as a key pedagogical approach which recognizes the value of children's volitional engagements with digital media, to their emerging skills and dispositions as authors of digital media texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

YouTube has provided a platform for many queer vloggers in South Africa to find audiences and to represent queer lives via a public medium. The platform allows for multiple queer identities to be represented in dynamic ways, complicating the ways in which mainstream mass media often stereotype or distort queer lives and experiences, and simultaneously challenging the widespread social marginalisation of queer people. This article explores how queer South African vloggers have created communities that function as heterotopias, spaces that allow for social and cultural norms to be contested or reversed. These heterotopian YouTube communities provide forums where identity, space and authenticity or "realness" are invoked and reimagined in ways that speak back to the limitations or oppressions experienced in offline spaces. The communities also offer viewers and commenters the space to share, reflect on and demonstrate support for the experiences of others. Videos of influential South African vloggers are analysed to demonstrate the heterotopic potential of these queer communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how 21 transgender individuals used YouTube transvlogs to co-create their own transformative agency. Drawing on a social justice framework, I conduct narrative content analysis to explore how a historically marginalized population enacted their own transformative development without researcher intervention. I suggest that by questioning the status quo, explicating and envisioning new activity patterns, and committing to concrete online and offline actions, transvloggers develop themselves and their community in transformative ways. Vloggers' resistance and pursuit of new developmental pathways illustrate the power of individuals to design their own technological transformative systems even amidst challenging circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides evidence from a 4-year longitudinal study on the comparative use of illustrative video podcasts during Economic Geography lectures vis-à-vis traditional educational methods in order to guide pedagogic practice and future research on the relative merits of technology-enhanced learning in higher education. Key benefits derived from the introduction of video podcasts identified in this study included positive affective and cognitive attitudes of students towards educational technologies, increased teacher satisfaction and improved teaching evaluations. Key challenges included negative impact of video podcasts on student behaviour (attendance and broader engagement), and uncertain impact on learning performance (exam scores). The study highlights the benefit of sequencing the improvements to the learning/teaching process, starting with a module review and revised content, before proceeding towards the integration of learning technologies into the content delivery. More broadly, the paper calls for pedagogy to remain vigilant, critically reflecting on the intricate relationship between educational technologies, teaching content, and the wider socio-political context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

YouTube’s development in its first 10 years has witnessed the growth of an indigenous celebrity culture. This article seeks to explore the celebrification of online video-bloggers in relation to their own discursive community. Using the case of the VlogBrothers and their community of ‘Nerdfighters’, this article demonstrates how their philosophy set towards ‘Understanding Others More Complexly’ becomes a central part of how ‘celebrity’ is understood and legitimated on YouTube. This vision of celebrity is egalitarian and democratic, rooted in western culture’s ‘expressive turn’, because it views each person as a unique individual and others as equal, legitimate subjects. Situating this discursive formation within the culture of Web 2.0’s neo-liberal developments, the article seeks to explore how ‘celebrity’ may be conceived beyond its commercial, corporate axis and instead be considered a state of ‘selfhood’ which allows each person equal space to consummate a unique vision of themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The connection between fieldwork and development of graduate attributes is explored in this paper. Digital technologies present opportunities to potentially enhance the learning experience of students undertaking fieldwork, and develop core digital attributes and competencies required by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and employers. This paper reports the success of adopting digital video capture in technology-rich field experiments that form part of final year undergraduate courses in Physical Geography at an HEI in New Zealand. Student perceptions were obtained via a range of approaches. Results suggest that deployment of digital video reinforces student learning and connects with core graduate attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Video podcasts have become one of the fastest developing trends in learning and teaching. The study explored the effect of the presenting mode of educational video podcasts on the learning process and learning outcomes. Prior to viewing a video podcast, the 94 Chinese undergraduates participating in the study completed a demographic questionnaire and prior knowledge test. The learning process was investigated by eye-tracking and the learning outcome by a learning test. The results revealed that the participants using the video podcast with both the instructor and PPT slides gained the best learning outcomes. It was noted that they allocated much more visual attention to the instructor than to the PPT slides. It was additionally found that the 22 min was the time at which the participants reached the peak of mental fatigue. The results of our study imply that the use of educational technology is culture bound. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study investigated the impact of podcasts and vodcasts accessed through an iPod on fourth- and sixth-grade students’ vocabulary acquisition. Students were randomly assigned to either a podcast group or a vodcast group. Regardless of group assignment, each student completed three six-minute podcasts or vodcasts a day for three days. On average, students learned four out of nine words taught regardless of group assignment. The vodcast group learned significantly more words compared to the podcast group at the receptive level and at the expressive level. Student comments indicated that iPods should be used to teach and to review words. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a qualitative research study to examine the impact of using vodcasting in a middle grades language arts classroom. The study focused on a teacher in a southeastern U.S. public middle school who integrated video podcasting in her 8th grade classroom in place of a traditional paper book report. It mentions the 5 clear findings of the study which supports vodcasting as a literary strategy that nurtures young adolescents' creativity, collaboration and learning motivation.