The era of Vlogging

In Alice Marwick’s book Status Update she talks about lifestreaming in the chapter “Lifestreaming: We Live in Public”. Lifestreaming is sharing information constantly to an audience and this creates a digital network about one’s thoughts and actions. Lifestreaming may seem fun and easy but it is far from that. Lifestreaming requires lots of thought and labour. Lifestreamers constantly have to think about what their viewers want to see that also matches and fits with the persona that they have created online. The audience is a main part of lifestreaming as they are able to interact with the lifestreamer as well by posting comments or liking the video/picture.

An example of lifestreamers that I follow were Jesse Wellens and Jeana Smith. They are youtubers for the channels BFvsGF and PrankvsPrank. PrankvsPrank is a channel about them pulling pranks on each other and BFvsGF is a channel where they do daily vlogs. Vlogs are blogs which are displayed in videos. They have been dating for 10 years and just recently split up. They posted one last video together where they talked about the reasons on why they broke up and one of them was because of vlogging. They said that vlogging put a lot of pressure and stress on them because they had to find creative and fun things to post about every day and they became consumed about their public image and did not have time to focus on each other.

Here is a video where they announce their breakup:

My question is “do you think vlogging is ruining lives and why?”