Governing the Resilient Self: Influencers’ Digital Affective Labor in Quarantine Vlogs

Abstract

This article explores quarantine vlogs on YouTube to examine the cultural production of influencers during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. By using a grounded theory approach to analyze 9 quarantine vlogs filmed by woman creators along with 480 user comments, this article argues that quarantine vlogs are shaped by influencers’ competing desires of (1) offering care and soothing content to the viewers and (2) instrumentalizing the discontents of the pandemic moment as a neoliberal device to preserve their aspirational self. In quarantine vlogs, influencers interact with their audiences by recognizing the emotional and mental strains of navigating the pandemic or their relative privilege, while they reframe the pandemic experience as an opportunity for productivity and self-growth. Consequently, influencers engage in significant affective labor and self-governance during a global health crisis to establish a resilient persona and maintain their online visibility.

Introduction

Like many other vlogs pertaining to YouTube’s lifestyle realm, the quarantine vlog of Ashley Rous—a lifestyle and fashion blogger who is also known as bestdressed—starts while she is still in bed. She wakes up, takes a shower, and starts her skincare routine in front of the mirror. Then she starts talking about how she has been feeling lately. She admits both to herself and to her audience that her

mental health has been a little bit all over the place the past couple of weeks. Ever since the big Rona ¹ started [she] [felt] like [she’s] been through the seven stages of grief, except it’s the seven stages of a worldwide pandemic.

Pink hand-lettered words reading “Stage 1: Keep Calm and Carry On” are juxtaposed on top of her face reflecting from the mirror which stands right next to succulents decorating her single-room apartment in New York City (NYC). The quasi-pessimist feeling at the beginning is replaced by positivity and productivity toward the end of the vlog. The video ends when she throws herself back to her bed after decorating her place, doing errands, painting, cooking, and dancing. Ashley Rous’s lifestyle and fashion channel has 3.77 million subscribers, and her quarantine vlog has been watched nearly 3 million times 2 months after it was filmed in May 2020. Rous’s vlog is one of the many quarantine vlogs on YouTube, and it perfectly illustrates how creators responded to the pandemic moment and self-fashioned simultaneously by balancing performances of neoliberal vulnerability and resilience.

The pandemic had an impact on social media use, especially on what people share and the way they perceive the shared content. Influencers too have been affected by COVID-19, particularly in the early days of the pandemic. On one hand, some content creators’ usual storytelling practices and content flow have been interrupted as they stayed home; particularly fashion and travel influencers experienced difficulty in adjusting their usual content to the pandemic conditions (Rossi, 2020). On the other hand, in parallel to increased social media use during the pandemic, some niche influencers such as fitness influencers and “plantfluencers” gained popularity during lockdowns (Gretzel, 2020), and some content creators were especially able to provide a source of escapism and comfort to their followers (Archer et al., 2021; Niu et al., 2021). At the same time, the pandemic negatively affected people’s perception of aspirational content, and caused a lot of users to question the timeliness of sharing such content amid the difficulties of the pandemic living (Molla, 2021). Quarantine vlogs emerged on YouTube in this context, in parallel to worldwide lockdowns and stay-home orders, and they have been recognized by the media as a rising trend. According to digital media and entertainment website Refinery29, as early as March 2020, there was already an overwhelming number of quarantine vlogs on YouTube, some of them with “hundreds of thousands of views” (Lindsay, 2020).

By specifically examining the recent genre of quarantine vlog, this article explores how influencers incorporated the COVID-19 pandemic into their regular content production on YouTube. I adopt a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006) to analyze the YouTube transcriptions of 9 quarantine vlogs filmed during the early months of the pandemic, along with 480 comments gathered among the top comments through purposive sampling. My analysis shows that quarantine vlogs are different from ordinary vlogs (also known as “video diaries” and “video blogs”) because they are shaped by influencers’ competing desires of (1) showing vulnerability, and offering care to the viewers and (2) instrumentalizing the discontents of the pandemic moment as a neoliberal device and tailoring their aspirational persona to the pandemic moment by establishing a “resilient” self. In other words, in quarantine vlogs, influencers show vulnerability as they recognize the emotional and mental strains of navigating the pandemic as well as their relative privilege to build intimacy with their audiences. However, they instrumentalize the pandemic to create a resilient persona who can cope with the pandemic by increasing their productivity and aiming for self-growth. Since the creation of the resilient self is essential to preserving (and possibly expanding on) influencers’ already established aspirational persona and follower base, influencers engage in significant affective labor and self-governance during a global moment of crisis to maintain their visibility. This self-governance is managed through a temporal strategy, which consists of reconstructing the shared pandemic moment and personal time. Borrowing from the diary form, vlogs enable this temporal construction and self-fashioning by marking the pandemic as a time for shared vulnerability, opening up about personal struggles and vulnerabilities tied to this moment, and reconstructing a self-trajectory that strives toward productivity and progress.

In the following section, I review the existing literature on the conceptualization of vlogs as Foucauldian technologies of the self and discuss different approaches to affective labor performed by the influencers. Then, after laying out the research design and ethical considerations that shaped this article, I present three sections of my findings. The first section focuses on how influencers frame their decision to film a quarantine vlog. The second section explores the impact of “negative affect” (Berryman & Kavka, 2018) produced in quarantine vlogs on selfhood and how creators embrace their vulnerability. The following section suggests that while content creators mitigate the aspirational tone of their content by disclosing their anxiety and stress linked to the pandemic moment, they also keep reproducing the neoliberal discourse of productivity through an implicit self-governance and “dialogue with time” (Giddens, 2020), which consists of reimagining the past and the future through nostalgia and the ideal of self-improvement.

Literature Review

Technologies of the Self From Diaries to Vlogs

Vlogs are connected to earlier genres such as diaries, blogs, and video diaries (Berryman & Kavka, 2018; Humphreys, 2018; Ibrahim, 2021; Strangelove, 2010). Similar to these former genres, vlogs are shaped as confessional narratives that are based on the recounting of personal and intimate events (Berryman & Kavka, 2018). Hence, to address the constitutive elements of vlogs, revisiting these preceding autobiographical genres is necessary. In this section, I review how vlogs can be conceived as Foucauldian “technologies of the self.”

Foucault (1988) explains the technologies of the self as procedures that

permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (p. 18)

Confessional genres such as letters and diaries are seen by Foucault (1988) as technologies of the self, and they are characterized by their focus on “the struggle of the soul.” (p. 30; see also Siles, 2012)

Although Foucault (1988) mainly focuses on Greco-Roman and Christian traditions to debate how technologies of the self are essential in the construction of selfhood, while revisiting Foucault’s technologies of the self, Nicholas Rose (1990) and Anthony Giddens (2020) extend this debate to modernity and neoliberalism. They argue that in the modern era, technologies of the self have transformed to reflect the Western, capitalist ideal of progress (Giddens, 2020; Rose, 1990). In that respect, Rose (1990) remarks that with modernity, self-inspection and self-regulation replaced the Christian notion of confession, and writing became a critical tool to achieve self-governmentality in everyday life. Giddens (2020) echoes Rose by arguing that self-reflection via writing is based on incessant “self-observation” (p. 71) and the goal of “self-actualization,” which is perceived as being “authentic” or “true to oneself” (pp. 75-78). According to Giddens, journaling helps to record these observations, to arrange them in a narrative structure, and to bend time to the will of the “authentic” self who is the protagonist of this narrative. In this self-narrated version of everyday life, the individual procures the power to reorganize and reimagine her past and future to achieve the ultimate goal of “self-actualization” (Giddens, 2020, p. 77). The journal allows both intervening in the past and planning ahead; and in line with the modern ideal of progress, life is comprehended as a narrative of “passages” from one life phase to another (Giddens, 2020, p. 79). Thus, in modern self-narrative genres such as diaries, selfhood is exercised as a “reflexive project,” which aims to build a “coherent and rewarding sense of identity” (Giddens, 2020, p. 75). This suggestion implies that diary-keeping functions as a process of self-governance, and contributes to the regulation of the self (Rose, 1990). From here, it can be inferred that in a neoliberal society, the primary act of production is the individuals’ capacity to produce themselves as a neoliberal project.

Rose and Giddens’s dialogue with Foucault’s work informed the works of scholars who were interested in understanding the construction of neoliberal subjectivity in digital cultures and communities. For instance, Ignacio Siles (2012) remarks that blogger identity is built through the act of blogging, which serves as a technology of the self. According to Siles (2012), bloggers were engaged in self-fashioning while they “envisioned ordinary life as the ground for the establishment and the development of selfhood” (p. 412), and bloggers “turned to writing about daily life and their ‘inner world’ as a key technology of the self, that is, as a procedure for managing a relationship with the self” (p. 413). At the same time, Siles (2012) argues that the blogging activity helped bloggers to build an online identity that enabled them to accomplish a particular relationship both with themselves and with their audiences.

Digital diary forms, including blogs and vlogs, share similarities with diaries in terms of how they permit transgressions between public and private. Diaries in the 18th and 19th centuries were more public than they are commonly thought to be today and were written to be shared with others, especially with family members at a distance (Humphreys, 2018). Vlogs establish a similar intimacy at a distance between the vloggers and their audiences. According to Michael Strangelove (2010), the YouTube audience plays the part of “a virtual partner,” and “an imagined friend,” which generates a desire to confess, but constitutes at the same time a “surveillant and normative gaze” (pp. 72-4). Despite these similarities, digital diary forms can be distinguished from traditional diaries because of the platforms and data structures they belong to. Yasmin Ibrahim (2021), who recently traced the historicity of vlogs dating back to diaries and journals, suggests that vlogs can be regarded as technologies of the self, which contribute to the accounting and commodification of the self in a digital environment. Ibrahim (2021) contends that “the authentic self” was “monitored and surveilled” by the gaze of the audience as much as “through data traffic” (p. 10).

Strangelove (2010), Siles (2012), and Ibrahim’s (2021) works emphasize that in a digital realm that is regulated by platform capitalism and an attention economy, the self is constructed with imagined and real audiences in mind. That means influencers perform both affective labor (Hardt, 1999) and “visibility labor” (Abidin, 2016) to maintain and expand their follower base as the primary rule of surviving in a competitive “attention economy” (Marwick, 2015). Moreover, these recent works demonstrate that although blogs and vlogs inherit from diaries, their functioning as a neoliberal “technology of the self” should be examined case by case, and by paying attention to the context of each practice. In the next section, I discuss some principal tenets of global influencer cultures to elucidate how they contribute to the self-fashioning of influencers in terms of fostering intimacy, relatability, and aspirationality in vlogs before further delving into how these elements are incorporated to quarantine vlogs.

Self-Fashioning in Vlogs: Balancing Intimacy, Relatability, and Aspirationality

While rendering what was once considered private into a public display of the self, a vlog gives a sense of authenticity, immediacy, and intimacy as if the genre is built upon communicating the authentic self (Ibrahim, 2021). As a technology of the self, a vlog is a performative genre, which is composed of “controlled presentations” (Griffith & Papacharissi, 2009), and a “calibrated amateurism” (Abidin, 2017). By creating a sense of relatability and intimacy, a vlogger performs significant affective labor (Berryman & Kavka, 2018; Ibrahim, 2021; Raun, 2018). This affective labor includes combining the performance of the authentic self (Abidin, 2017; Jerslev, 2016; Tolson, 2010) and a “perceived interconnectedness” (Abidin, 2015) with the viewers. The performative aspect of the vlogs distinguishes them from the diaries. Although the discovery of the authentic self was the main purpose of the former genre, vlogs are built on the motivation of performing the “authentic self” to gain more followers and monetize their content.

In addition to performing authenticity, vloggers strive to create a sense of intimacy with their viewers. According to Raun (2018): “Intimacy is an important and necessary signifier in relation to both the form and content of the videos and the relation between the creators and their audience” (pp. 100-1). Despite their high number of followers, and their positive “self-branding” strategies (Duffy & Hund, 2015; Khamis et al., 2017), which require performing happiness, beauty, health, and success through a detailed “self-reportage” (Berryman & Kavka, 2018), influencers often brand themselves as being “relatable” or in a way that their viewers can “identify” with them (Abidin, 2015). As a technology of the self, by blurring the line between the private and the public, vlogs help influencers to perform the authentic self and create a sense of intimacy with viewers. At the same time, vlogs allow content creators to redesign the temporal organization of their everyday lives, glorify the mundane with the discourse of productivity, and thus, transform their screen lives into a self-reflexive project. This performance relies on a wide range of activities that contribute to an influencer’s online persona, and permit influencers to align themselves with the postfeminist “ideal of ‘having it all’” (Duffy & Hund, 2015).

Brooke Erin Duffy uses the concept of “aspirational labor” to address the form of immaterial and affective labor (Hardt, 1999) which is carried out by young woman bloggers as a “highly gendered, forward-looking and entrepreneurial enactment of creativity” (Duffy, 2017, p. 443). Highlighting a specific category of this labor, Crystal Abidin (2016) coined the concept of “visibility labor” to stress how users adopted popular hashtags, mentions, and tags to stay relevant and visible on social media. Yet, as Sarah Banet-Weiser (2021) argues, online visibility always goes hand in hand with performances of authenticity and vulnerability, as if they are the two sides of the same coin. By drawing examples from Internet celebrities such as Tavi Gevinson and Caroline Calloway, she shows that vulnerability is indispensable to online performances of White, cisgender femininity in the United States, and a natural continuation of the “can do girl” (Banet-Weiser, 2021; Keller, 2015), an equalizer to the otherwise “manipulated, curated, filtered self” (Banet-Weiser, 2021). The performances of vulnerability have gained heightened importance during the pandemic, making a significant part of the relational labor exercised by creators, and coincided with neoliberal logics of resilience (Banet Weiser, 2021; Baym, 2015; Duffy et al., 2023).

As I demonstrate in the following sections of my analysis, self-fashioning in quarantine vlogs is a temporal project that recognizes restructuring the pandemic moment, past, and future to simultaneously manage the neoliberal discourses of vulnerability and resilience. In quarantine vlogs, the aspirational and visibility labor performed by these content creators is highly demanding and complex as they must balance their immediate reaction to the pandemic moment by showing vulnerability and responding to various emotional sensibilities of their followers, and at the same time, to render their content monetizable by being positive and productive. As such, they fashion themselves as “resilient subjects” who benefit from the popular discourse of resilience, which demands women to have a positive mindset and be adaptive to cope with the difficulties, crises, and systemic issues of living in a neoliberal society (Gill & Orgad, 2018).

Research Design

To study how influencers incorporated the pandemic into their content, I adopted the grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006). Through a combination of top search results for the keywords “quarantine vlog” and purposive sampling, I collected 9 videos that were filmed between March and June 2020 in the United States, along with 480 comments for analysis (Table 1). Since the data collection and the analysis processes took place concurrently, the first couple of videos were chosen randomly among the most popular quarantine vlogs, while the rest were collected through purposive sampling by prioritizing videos that focused on the pandemic and quarantine experience. ²

Table 1.

List of Quarantine Vlogs with Approximate View Counts and Number of Comments.

Content creator	Date	View count	Number of comments
bestdressed	May 2020	3.7M	17K
Claudia Sulewski Elena Taber Hailey Sani Kelly Stamps Liah Yoo	April 2020 April 2020 March 2020 March 2020 March 2020	663,356 108K 198K 95K 222K	1,045 280 413 845 406
linh truong	June 2020	435K	2K
Paige Kaiser Wear I Live	April 2020 March 2020	266K 88K	489 195

Quarantine vlogs emerge from ordinary vlogs and share their quintessential characteristics such as the narrativization of everyday life and the performance of authenticity. However, they are distinguishable from ordinary vlogs in terms of how they address the pandemic moment and how vloggers perform activities that are associated with the pandemic lockdowns. This temporal concern makes quarantine vlogs distinctive when compared with ordinary vlogs, which led me to focus on vlogs addressing the pandemic moment. The most popular quarantine vlogs can be divided into two groups: (1) lifestyle vlogs filmed by young women and (2) family vloggers. For this article, I restricted my analysis to young women creators to examine how the individual self is constructed, and I picked videos from different creators and only one video from each creator even if they produced multiple vlogs during the pandemic to establish variety in the sample among creators. Each one of these videos ranges from 8 to 20 min in length and carries similar characteristics about how the pandemic moment and the self is fashioned. While this study focuses on a relatively smaller data set, this limitation allowed me to conduct a more in-depth analysis of each vlog. However, since Ashley Rous’s video combines most of the elements that are prevalent in these videos, I provided more examples from this video in the analysis section, which are then supported by similar examples from other videos.

I manually collected the most popular comments from the top comments section of each video until reaching a “saturation point” (Charmaz, 2006) where the topics and themes of the comments became repetitive. While traditional diaries were publicly circulated to a certain degree, vlogs are circulated even more widely. This approach also allowed me to analyze how quarantine vlogs relationally function as technologies of self between authors and audiences, by paying close attention to how users engaged with the relational labor of YouTubers to the point of surveilling their authenticity along with their performances of vulnerability and resilience.

I used YouTube’s automatic transcription tool and coded both the transcripts and comments on the qualitative data analysis software NVivo. I applied the line-by-line coding method (Charmaz, 2006) to analyze the common themes in the videos and comments. This approach helped me to understand main patterns in user comments through YouTubers’ and users’ own words. I updated these categories as they developed in parallel to my extending data collection and analysis processes. It was only after this initial coding and analysis process that I was able to connect my research to broader theoretical discussions about Foucauldian technologies of the self and affective labor.

As Markham and Buchanan (2012) suggest, “the fields of internet research are dynamic and heterogeneous” (p. 2) while the definitions and expectations of privacy might be ambiguous and changing. Although one of the premises of internet-based communication is perceived anonymity, as Gray (2012) shows, online anonymity is more complex than it appears, and certain groups are more vulnerable in digital spaces. Since the videos are filmed by influencers with a high number of followers, and they are already public, I kept the names of content creators to credit their work. However, considering that commenting users’ understanding of privacy might differ from that of the creators, I decided not to provide any usernames in the article and to anonymize the comments by slightly changing some of the wording to make comments less searchable.

Findings

Responding to the Pandemic Moment: Caring for the Audience

During the first half of 2020, right after many countries started to take precautions against COVID-19 such as stay-home orders and mandatory quarantines, vloggers around the world started to share their everyday experiences of the pandemic with their audiences. Seemingly not very different from the other vlogs on their channels, isolation and quarantine-themed vlogs were unique in terms of witnessing a historical moment and providing a glimpse into the lives of Internet celebrities or ordinary content creators. In that respect, quarantine vlogs are a response to the pandemic moment. By filming a quarantine vlog, a vlogger indexes the time where they speak from and positions themselves within that temporal construction. This temporal construction allows creators to fashion themselves, and for that reason, justifying their reason to film a quarantine vlog is an essential step for the vloggers. To begin the video, content creators often explain what led them to film and share a quarantine vlog with their audiences. The reasons for filming a quarantine vlog and ways to frame this decision might vary from one YouTuber to another, but it is still possible to find commonalities in creators’ opening speeches, especially in terms of how they address the moment and how they locate themselves in it. In this section, I discuss some of the reasons that lead YouTubers to film quarantine vlogs and how they frame these decisions.

The pandemic has affected many people around the world disproportionately. Some content creators recognize the disproportionate effects of the pandemic by expressing their hesitancy about filming a quarantine vlog for a variety of reasons, including their doubts about the helpfulness of quarantine vlogs for the viewers, and the awareness of their privileged position that allows them to work from home. For instance, Ashley Rous who is also known as bestdressed states that she initially “hesitated” to produce a video related to quarantine because she did not think that it was “helpful,” and she thought herself to be in a “privileged” position. Similarly, Liah Yoo acknowledges her privilege by admitting her financial security that comes from her “upper-middle class” background.

Such acknowledgment of privilege also extends to creators’ racial identity and current events that occurred during the pandemic. The early months of the pandemic in the United States coincided with the search for racial justice after George Floyd was killed in police custody. In her quarantine vlog, Linh Truong starts with the acknowledgment of the Black Lives Matter movement and recognition of her positionality and privilege as an Asian American who grew up in a middle-class family although the rest of the video does not cover the George Floyd event, and rather focuses on Truong’s daily routine. This acknowledgment and Truong’s open support of the movement make the video more relatable to their viewers. For instance, one of the commenters, who identifies as a Black woman, appreciates Truong’s response while she states that she found the vlog touching.

This type of relational labor is necessary since posting or not posting a video during the early months of the pandemic is a double-edged sword. On one hand, the pandemic shifted what people perceived as appropriate for sharing on digital media and users developed a distaste for aspirational content that seemed too performative (Molla, 2021). On the other hand, developing a follower base on YouTube requires regular content production, and most content creators who want to increase their followers aim to upload at least once a week to preserve their connection with old followers and to gain new ones. Such disclosures can be seen as part of the pressure content creators feel to upload regularly. At the same time, through these disclosures and by touching upon the common emotional effects of the pandemic, they can communicate a sense of shared experience and support, despite their privileges that may or may not extend to some or many of their viewers. As such, they draw themselves into a position where they can offer care to their followers during a historical moment of shared vulnerability. As such, the acknowledgment of privilege becomes part of the relational labor exercised by YouTubers to create a bond with their audience.

This kind of relational labor becomes further visible when content creators mention the calming or soothing effects of quarantine videos, their desire to check in with the viewers, to spread positivity, and to offer some distraction during difficult times while they talk about what led them to film a quarantine vlog. For instance, Elena Taber who expresses that she initially hesitated to film a quarantine vlog states that she found watching such videos “quite soothing to watch at a time like this.” Some content creators make such statements even more explicitly by indicating that they want to check in with the viewers and spread some positivity and distraction. For instance, Liah Yoo states,

I have the strong urge to create and make this video to check in with you all to say “hello,” “how are you,” and “I hope you guys are very well,” and I really mean it. I hope you guys are all doing very well. We are facing this entire challenging time and a very testing time together. I just wanted to let you know that my hearts are with you.

Such statements allow content creators to build upon the previous “affinity” (Lange, 2009) and “perceived interconnectedness” (Abidin, 2015) with the viewers, by showing that they care about their followers. At the same time, by emphasizing the soothing effects of quarantine vlogs and tailoring the content of a vlog according to the pandemic moment content creators engage in significant affective labor.

Many viewers respond well to the care at a distance provided by the content creators. Often, users report that they find watching quarantine vlogs soothing. They express feelings of being in a “safe” space as this commenter who responds to Ashley Rous states: “For some weird reason her videos make me feel safe. I don’t know why but it makes me feel warm and comfy.” While some commenters are vague on why they are feeling “safe” or “comfy,” others appreciate the video or the content creator for providing a distraction, calming the viewers, and encouraging positivity:

Your vlogs and “routine” videos are so inspiring during this time especially and for my videos! It’s so nice and even essential to have something to distract yourself with these days, and your videos really ground me :) <33

This effect is often recognized also by other commenters, and the video is appreciated for having a calming effect: “I have seen this video so many times, it just makes me feel really calm.” Likewise, another user acknowledges that watching a particular video had a direct effect on their lives by making it “better.” For instance, a commenter wrote: “sometimes when I feel lonely, I revisit this video and it makes my life better.”

Some viewers transfer this sense of safety from the vlog to the community: “I feel that I am on the safe side of YouTube where everyone is friends with each other.” However, to borrow from Lauren Berlant (1998), this budding intimacy is an “aesthethics of attachment” (p. 285) in the sense that normative ideologies shape which expressions are deemed private, intimate, or authentic. In quarantine vlogs, normative gender roles are at play since vloggers’ vulnerability and the care they offer to their followers are understood in gendered terms. Gender is at play especially when users define the community in terms of the postfeminist “girl power” discourse and a supportive “feminine community,” and when users address the content creators as “sis,” “sister,” “queen,” and note that they see the creators as a “friend.” For instance, after Kelly Stamps encourages her followers to start a YouTube channel during the quarantine, one of the commenters writes that they are working on their own channel and they are inspired by the example of Black womanhood presented by Stamps while addressing her as “sis.” It is especially striking to see how one commenter compares the emotional intelligence of the fans based on the gender of the creators. They write: “The level of emotional intelligence in the comment section is insightful and refreshing. I do not see this kind of a sincerity when I watch a male YouTuber and look at their comment section.” Thus, creators’ ways of addressing the current moment allow them to self-fashion both as a woman and creator. As they acknowledge their privilege, they also perform care for their followers, which is then positively acknowledged by their followers as a form of authentic intimacy.

While commenters usually respond positively to creators’’ performances of vulnerability, their response also confirms that their surveillant gaze is taken into consideration by creators as they turn their everyday lives into social media content and strive to gain visibility. Thus, creators should constantly engage in self-governance while considering how their audiences will respond to their performed authenticity. In fact, as I explore in the following sections, the performances of vulnerability and the gendered relational labor are intrinsically tied to another performance, which is the construction of the neoliberal self through the discourses of productivity and self-maximization. This demonstrates that women creators felt the pressure to build relatability and intimacy with their audiences by making their vulnerability open but at the same time leveraging that vulnerability in alignment with broader postfeminist sensibilities of resilience.

Acknowledging Vulnerability: Anxiety, Confusion, Loneliness

If the quarantine vlogs start by indexing in the pandemic moment and positioning the vlogger as an almost caregiver, they quickly turn into an acknowledgment of the vulnerable self as vloggers start discussing how they have been experiencing the quarantine. The pandemic shifted how people use social media and perceive the content shared on social media platforms. As data reporter Rani Molla (2021) notes, while social media brought people together on the basis of their shared experiences, the performativity of social media posts had a negative effect on many users. As a result, “openness” and “authenticity” gained even more importance (Molla, 2021) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Quarantine vlogs show that YouTubers who were already experienced in performing authenticity and forming a sense of intimacy with the viewers before the pandemic used this practical knowledge to openly share how the pandemic experience made them feel. In that respect, it is important to recognize that performances of vulnerability, especially, become a bigger part of creators’ performative repertoire during the pandemic, often coinciding with neoliberal logics of self-care and resilience (Banet-Weiser, 2021; Duffy et al., 2023).

YouTubers disclose their feelings and thoughts related to the pandemic in the quarantine vlogs. That includes talk about mental health, and more specifically the experience of loneliness, confusion, anxiety, and grief associated with the pandemic. Disorientation is a common side effect of the pandemic for YouTubers; phrases such as “my brain has been all over the place” (Wear I Live) or “if you ask me what I did yesterday, I wouldn’t even remember” (Claudia Sulewski) are used by different content creators to emphasize the experience of losing grip of their life. For instance, Rous brings in the discussion of mental health and grief to explain the impact of the pandemic on her everyday life:

so my mental health has been a little bit all over the place the past couple of weeks. Ever since the big Rona ³ started I feel like I’d been through the seven stages of grief, except it’s the seven stages of a worldwide pandemic.

Similarly, she states that she started “freaking out” and feeling “simultaneously anxious” as New York started lockdown restrictions. Paige Kaiser also states that she has been “feeling really just kind of lonely, sad” and “unmotivated.”

The expression of negative feelings may seem to conflict with the predominantly positive content in lifestyle channels. As previous research suggests, influencers and micro-celebrities usually benefit from positive “self-branding” strategies (Duffy & Hund, 2015; Khamis et al., 2017), which requires performing happiness, beauty, health, success through a detailed “self-reportage” (Berryman & Kavka, 2018). However, the discussion of anxiety and grief has been a part of YouTube vlogging practices for a long time. Filming “negative affect videos” that are based on shared “anxiety and tears” are as efficient as positive affect videos in terms of community building (Berryman & Kavka, 2018). Similarly, sharing grief can open channels of emotional support between individuals who are going through similar experiences (Gibson, 2016). Sharing vulnerability in quarantine vlogs is thus another way for content creators to brand themselves as being “relatable” so that audiences can “identify” with them (Abidin, 2015).

Yet, the “negative affect” (Berryman & Kavka, 2018) in quarantine vlogs is partial, as videos contain an overall positivity and carry the aspirational nature of influencer content on YouTube. Unlike crying and anxiety videos, which are defined by Berryman and Kavka (2018) as centered on the “negative affect,” quarantine vlogs are not fully predicated on the production of negative emotions and sharing of negative experiences. Instead, the performances of vulnerability in quarantine vlogs serve a strategic purpose to balance the discourse of productivity and an ideal representation of the self. Kelly Stamp’s statement right at the beginning of her video is a great example of this. She mockingly says: “I am slowly going crazy in my quarantine. It’s not because I can’t socialize” and she adds she feels “as if [she] is going crazy because [she does not] have access to tiramisu.” In this excerpt, Kelly Stamps recognizes the mental toll of the pandemic, but she uses humor to underplay it. In the remaining part of the video, she spends a productive day by cleaning and exercising, and she advises her audience on how to be more productive and encourages them to do things that they would not normally have time for, such as learning a new language or starting up their own YouTube channel. In this way, productivity is offered as a healthy alternative, an almost self-care for the despair brought by the pandemic, as in the case of Paige Kaiser, who states that she decided to make to-do lists as a coping mechanism against the pandemic lifestyle.

While quarantine vlogs spread positivity and distraction to the viewers, YouTubers recognize the negative impact of the pandemic on their daily rituals and overall mood. This is a significant element in quarantine vlogs, and as discussed in the following section, it can be read as a mitigation strategy before YouTubers engage in a neoliberal narrative of productivity and personal growth. It also shows that YouTubers need to shift their self-presentation and balance the aspirational content in their videos by emphasizing their relatability and presenting their vulnerabilities as an ordinary person who is struggling with the pandemic just like everybody else. In the following section, I demonstrate how creators perform vulnerability through the affordances of the quarantine vlog genre, and specifically by the use of particular temporal and discursive strategies that construct the resilient self.

Governing the Resilient Self Through Time in Quarantine Vlogs

I use the term neoliberal “resilience” to address how productivity is a part of content creators’ self-construction by referring to Gill and Orgad’s (2018) work on the topic, which contends that the logic of resilience expanded from austerity politics to postfeminist self-help literature and social media culture about the power of positive thinking. The authors explain this concept as a mindset that ignores negative experiences and replaces them with positive affirmations, thus reproducing middle-class women as “bounce-backable” subjects. The logic of resilience often goes hand in hand with performances of vulnerability on social media, and specifically on YouTube, where creators frame vulnerability as a precondition of being resilient (Ciccone, 2020; Duffy et al., 2023).

The pandemic was especially a time when the neoliberal logics of resilience met with performative vulnerability. To demonstrate this, I will draw upon an example from Ashley Rous’ quarantine vlog, where she complains about the pressure to be productive:

I went through that phase where everybody was like “time to use this time productively and write a [ __ ] book and finish your screenplay and make like 500 videos” because people who want to watch YouTube actually use all their time to continue to turn the wheel of capitalism. That freaked me out even more because then I was really harsh on myself for feeling paralyzed (. . .)

In this example, we see that Ashley Rous directs her self-reflexivity to the present moment, which allows her to admit her vulnerability around being productive as a creator. It is even worth noting that she directly blames capitalism while doing so. However, for a person who has seen the rest of the video, this statement may seem to contradict the overall attitude of Rous. She spends a considerable amount of the vlog on redesigning her room and making plans for the future. For that reason, I argue that admitting the overwhelming effects of the pressure of productivity can help content creators to present themselves as authentic and relatable to their viewers, while they can also show an aspirational lifestyle during the quarantine. In other ways, rather than involving actual criticism, these kinds of statements are used to mitigate the discourse of productivity in the videos. The desire to be productive at all times, and feeling guilty when productivity is not achieved, is described as toxic productivity in popular language, and how toxic productivity became a pattern during the pandemic did not miss the attention of the media either (Wong, 2021). Here, I use the term neoliberal resilience to indicate that productivity is ultimately linked to shared vulnerabilities around the pandemic moment, which contributes to constructing quarantine vlogs as a technology of the self.

In quarantine vlogs, creators’ self-governing strategy is informed by the change in the perception of time brought by the pandemic and reproduces the discourses of productivity and self-maximization that are already prevalent in lifestyle vlogging. As such, quarantine vlogs show similarities with Giddens’s observations on the reflexive temporal organization in the act of journaling. In that respect, the quarantine moment is redesigned as an opportunity for self-growth, which gives a sense of orientation and motivation to the YouTuber. For instance, while Hailey Sani states that the pandemic reminded her of the basic things she had “missed out” on when she was “so caught up in the fast pace of the world,” Elena Taber states that quarantine made her reflect on how she was spending time before and helped her to “re-evaluate” the way she manages time:

I realized so much of my time was spent . . . either working or jumping from one social event to another without really taking time for myself to sit back and kind of think about what I want moving forward . . . and I feel like I’ve really been re-evaluating how I want to spend my time once I come out of this has been such a reminder how precious our time is, how we spend it, whom we spend it with.

This way, the experience of the pandemic is framed as an opportunity to realize one’s “true” and “authentic self,” to evolve as a human being, apprehend what was missed in the past, and ponder about future steps. The quarantine period is also framed as a positive opportunity to build a better self and future, while it is tied to the perceived value of time, and how “precious” it is. Taber adds to her previous statement that “she feel[s] like [she’s] just gonna leave this quarantine period feeling more energized and excited than ever.” Such claims about productivity sometimes coincide with entrepreneurialism as well, as in the case of Kelly Stamps, who states that the “virus should be reminding” that “life is precious” and her followers “should start [their] little business in [their] room.” Other creators like Claudia Sulewski, Elena Taber, and Linh Truong mention adopting new skills during the pandemic, such as learning Photoshop, how to play the guitar, or making a miniature.

The confirmation of this kind of neoliberal resilience can be found in audience responses. For example, one commenter who responds to Wear I Live calls out to anyone who is reading their comment to reframe the pandemic moment as the right time to “do everything you always wanted but never had time for” and then concludes that “This happens now because the entire world needed a break, we are responsible for this and we are going to survive this. Humanity is not being tested for the first or the last time. Keep being positive!” Such responses demonstrate that when creators perform the resilient self, this performance is relationally acknowledged and confirmed by their viewers. In that respect, some commenters even confess that they find the creator inspiring, as in the case of a commenter who responded to Kelly Stamps’s vlog by stating that she inspired her to start her own YouTube channel.

As I discussed earlier, creators perform vulnerability in quarantine vlogs by acknowledging their privilege and the mental toll of the pandemic. At the same time, another way to show vulnerability is by drawing upon a sense of nostalgia, a common feeling that is enacted during the pandemic. For instance, Ashley Rous compares being in lockdown to feeling like a kid again: “I didn’t go back home to my parents, but I feel like I’m a kid again because I grew up primarily in my room, and I would just like to go to my room and entertain myself.” Another content creator, Linh Truong, says that she has been playing a lot of video games during the pandemic since they were an “integral part” of her childhood, and she has “been getting back into them during quarantine.” There is a nostalgic element in both statements, which is combined with personal disclosures, and this aspect is worth noting considering the prevalence of nostalgic media during the pandemic.

The pandemic was a big shift in people’s lives, which can explain the longing for the past and the desire to find solace in it. As recent research suggests, during the COVID-19 pandemic, nostalgic leisure activities became one of the primary coping mechanisms for people (Gammon & Ramshaw, 2021). In terms of media consumption, Devon Powers (2021) discusses how the pandemic anxiety and need for comfort led people to consume nostalgic media. Powers (2021) refers to this tendency of deliberately seeking nostalgic media, which satisfies the desire to feel safe, as “cocooning.” Some users report that watching quarantine vlogs creates a nostalgic experience for them. For instance, a commenter who responded to Ashley Rous’s video describes their viewing experience in terms of “romanticizing” the time when they did not have to worry about their grades and finding a job amid a global pandemic. Interestingly, due to their cinematic quality, quarantine vlogs can evoke a sense of anticipatory nostalgia. Another commenter responding to Rous’s vlog states that they can imagine the pandemic moment being turned into a film, and that is why they found the vlog emotional: “when people start making movies about this time just in a few years, I certainly can see a lot of this in one of them (. . .) I don’t know why but it was really moving.” In both cases, the reproduction of nostalgia functions relationally between the creators and their audiences, by drawing them both into the safe space and innocence of childhood.

However, it must be noted that the nostalgic longings of the pandemic moment are embedded in consumer culture and aspirational consumption. Claudia Sulewski spends a considerable time in her vlog talking about the Nintendo Switch gaming console and explaining how she initially bought it to have a “real bonding experience” with her partner. Likewise, when Hailey Sali shows her tie-dyed bikini top to her followers, she states that whenever she “sees tie-dye,” she feels that she is “like a mirror” and she “need[s] it.” She connects this urge to buy tie-dye products to not having a camping experience in her childhood and never having done tie-dye. In both cases, the production of nostalgia is also entwined with aspirational consumption as they promote these products to their followers regardless of whether this promotion is a result of sponsorship or not. In both examples, the nostalgia invoked by the pandemic is a commodified nostalgia, further proving how quarantine vlogs function as neoliberal technologies of the self.

Conclusion

During the analysis, I highlighted how content creators try to bring in pandemic into their usual content production, by (1) building intimacy with the viewers through the recognition of vulnerabilities linked to the pandemic moment and (2) using this disclosure to reproduce the neoliberal discourse of productivity to create a resilient persona for themselves and maintain their online visibility.

The three sections of my analysis lay out how creators’ self-fashioning is a temporal and self-reflexive project, which allows quarantine vlogs to function as Foucauldian technologies of the self that are centered around the construction of resilient self, as well as the discourses of productivity and self-growth. The temporal construction of quarantine vlogs implies a need for tending to the engagement with time in digital media genres and creators’ self-fashioning.

At the same time, this temporal construction is a direct response to the pandemic moment, and it should be acknowledged that the pandemic allowed the bridging of neoliberal discourses of vulnerability and resilience. The neoliberal logic of resilience is persistent in vlogs and serves to reframe the pandemic moment as a positive experience despite its discontents. However, it cannot exist without performances of vulnerability as quarantine vlogs are informed by new contextual sensitivities that are created by the pandemic such as mental stress and anxiety. In this sense, by acknowledging vulnerability, content creators not only perform care but also instrumentalize negative affect to build intimacy with their audience. While some creators explain their reason for filming a quarantine vlog as offering distraction for the viewers in a time of difficulty, the existence of commenters who report finding quarantine vlogs soothing for the “feminine” and “safe” community they provide, indicates the gendered affective labor that goes into making of quarantine vlogs.

In addition, this affective labor implies an implicit self-governance strategy that is necessary to build the resilient self. Quarantine vlogs operate as technologies of the self, which allow influencers to maintain their established aspirational persona by constructing themselves as “resilient subjects” (Gill & Orgad, 2018) who can cope with the pandemic through positive thinking and increased productivity. To do that, influencers engage in a “dialogue with time” (Giddens, 2020) which consists of using various temporal strategies, such as reimagining pleasant memories to produce nostalgia, accepting the anxieties and material struggles related to the pandemic, but also highlighting the potential of self-growth and realization in it. This temporal reframing allows the pandemic moment to be represented as the precursor of a better future. As a result, while content creators are engaged in affective labor by performing vulnerability, offering care for their viewers, and providing them soothing content during the pandemic, they also reproduce the neoliberal discourse of resilience.

Thus, this research on quarantine vlogs contributes to previous scholarship on technologies of the self and neoliberal discourse of resilience, by demonstrating how these discourses are enacted through careful temporal strategies that are allowed by the affordances of the genre and how they function relationally between the creators and their audiences. It also demonstrates that despite the valorization of authenticity and intimacy in lifestyle blogging, the affective dimension in quarantine vlogs is not achieved easily, is under the constant surveillance of the audiences, and comes at a cost, especially for women creators, by putting them under a significant pressure to engage in a careful self-governing strategy. While the pandemic increased this pressure and made it more visible, such pressure is already prevalent in creator cultures. Further research can investigate how such surveillance puts creators in a vulnerable position, and how they cope with it as they try to stay visible and relevant in a highly competitive and precarious platform economy.