Exploring the implications of digital convergent media in two recent lifestyle vlogs from Zoe Sugg

 “Valentines Day, Wedding Plans, Home Makeover & Baby 3?”

• A positive representation of family life is cultivated through the use of highly selective editing. For example, no footage of her children throwing tantrums seems to exist, constructing a world where an idealistic version of the family supersedes the reality.  
• Deliberately low production values construct a sense of authenticity. This is highly conventional of the lifestyle vlog. There is very simple editing used, favouring the use of long take and jump cuts, constructing an authentic mode of address. 
• Sugg announces that she has forgotten her phone, an act of incompetence that reinforces Sugg’s authenticity. 
• At one stage, Sugg tries to sneeze in an apparently unscripted and voyeuristic moment. However, by leaving this charming moment, Sugg’s constructs a world where her realistic and relatable life is somehow more perfect because of these flaws. 
• Sugg’s frequently breaks the fourth wall, not only through her constant direct mode of address, but also through referring to how the video is made. She makes two references to the process of montage, suggesting that she has sole authorship of this experience. 
• Sugg’s is an auteur, who has complete control of the product. Yet by constructing such a perfect life, Sugg is also the manipulator. She deliberately anchors and limits the different readings that the audience can make of this product. 
• A hyperreal reconstruction of reality is continually presented in Sugg’s videos. In this video, themes of hyperreality are constructed through the use of editing to select and cherry-pick perfect moments that construct a carefully cultivated ideology of everyday perfection. 
• Sugg presents a clearly aspirational mode of address for her target audience. This target audience appears to be younger women and young mothers who aspire to this particular lifestyle. 
• Sugg presents a consistently consumerist ideology. The opening montage situates the audience in an intimate and voyeuristic mode of address. We see Sugg’s preparation for what should be an intimate and thoughtful moment. However, this moment is constructed through consumer products. Chocolate spread, sprinkle eyes, the matching pyjamas, a frying pan, cooking utensils, ingredients, love heart sweets, the house itself, furnishings, table setting, flowers. This montage constructs a consumerist ideological perspective, where intimate moments can be fulfilled through carefully purchasing products. Reinforcing this ideology is the fact that embedded in the description for the YouTube hosted video are a series of hyperlinks, directing the audience to buy these products. This clear example of commodity fetishism has been included in Sugg’s videos since she was 11, where she codified the conventions of the lifestyle vlog. 
• David Gauntlett argued that we can construct our identities through the consumption of media . Here, Zoella constructs an ideology that she is fashionable, trendy, and yet also down to earth. The target audience aspire to achieve a lifestyle and identity that is similar to Sugg
• By constructing her life through consumer products, and encouraging the audience to do the same, Sugg constructs a postmodern identity, that suggests we can achieve a hyperreal and perfect lifestyle through consumption as opposed to authentic action

“Home Haul, Making Bracelets & Family Days Out”

• Minimal editing constructs a media product with visibly low production values. Clear codes and conventions of the lifestyle vlog. 
• Digitally convergent technologies have not only been used to construct and to distribute this product, but also form the basic for discussion. While walking around the home store Home sense Sugg refers to the music playing in the background, and suggests the video she is filming may have a copyright strike. This assumes a deep and detailed knowledge of digitally convergent media from the target audience 
• She switches off her car engine to allow the audience to hear her voice better. While this footage would previously be cut out using the logic of old media, here including the mistakes cultivates a strong sense of authenticity for the audience. In short, Zoe Sugg is a friend, a real person. 
• However Zoe Sugg is not real. Instead, we see a carefully cultivated representation.
• A wide angle mid shot shows Sugg playing with her daughter. The use of long take and the positioning allowed through the cinematography constructs a voyeuristic mode of address. The sound is notably more quiet and muffled than before, again constructing a voyeuristic mode of address, that is further reinforced through the hyperreal MES of the child’s bedroom. 
• Here we see a representation of a perfect and yet relatable family. The unscripted dialogue is often banal and even boring, yet this too helps to align the target audience, and helps cultivate a sense of authenticity. 
• Sugg directly addresses the camera, in a direct mode of address that breaks the forth wall. However, there was never a fourth wall to break. Sugg’s entire persona is completely based on the connection that exists between her and her viewers
• The video reinforces a consumerist ideology, that links back to her very first video . Haul videos provide audiences with an escapist fantasy. However these videos can be criticised, partly through profiting from consumerism, and provides a shallow lifestyle with no depth. The idea of constructing an identity purely through consumer products is highly postmodern, and reflects a completely different society and way of thinking. 
• By providing such an intimate and voyeuristic look in to Sugg’s life, a postmodern mode of address is constructed, that completely shatters an previous rules and metanarratives. These private and boring moments are now presented as something special, and a new way of living one’s life. 
• Sugg’s refers to her vlogging as her ‘side hustle’, which suggests a total discontent between the ‘authentic fantasy’ that she is constructing, and the ‘material reality’ of her day to day existence. 
• “Mooching” - an informal and relatable mode of address. Sugg is a 33 year old woman who often addresses and appeals to a far younger audience. While her style and address have evolved to become more mature, her outlook is still youthful, making an aspirational mode of address for a younger target audience. 

Save the planet, kill yourself feature article

• Regulatory issues - under UK IPSO guidelines, to promote, encourage or otherwise facilitate suicide is illegal
• The entire article presents nothing but walls of text. This is highly unconventional for magazines, where walls of copy would normally be broken up with captions, pull quotes, images and adverts. This article therefore resembles more closely a book. Without any distraction, we are being forced to actively read this article. This conflicts with the style and aesthetic previously established by adbusters, contradicting its own brand identity. 
• However, the composition of the columns themselves themselves is tilted and canted, making the audience anxious and uneasy 
• In the article, we are posited as a shopper in a large American supermarket, a relatable experience. However, for each and every product that we and the narrator consider buying, we are told exactly how we are making the world a worse place
• The lexis is clinical and confusing, using words like aposematic and nucleotide in order to construct a post apocalyptic and depressing sci fi narrative. 
• The article then uses iPhone as an example, discussing the conflict and issues that go in to their manufacture. Rather than engaging in fetishistic disavowal and ignoring issues, the article forces us to confront them
• A hateful, aggressive, upsetting and accusatory article 
• A potentially harmful lexis, especially for vulnerable people. The article flatly asks the audience to consider committing suicide in order to save the planet. This brutal mode of address is designed to force audiences to confront societal issues using extreme tactics. This literally incites the audience to commit suicide breaking OFCOM guidelines
• The article presents a highly affecting and genuinely depressing mode of address. 
• The article instantly positions the audience in a large American supermarket, constructing a highly realistic and relatable mode of address. 
• The article directly addresses the audience directly, repeatedly using the word ‘you’. This constructs a more commanding, instructing tone, connecting the audience directly with the text
• The level of detail of this article is horrifying, and constructs a sense of existential anxiety. This is the horror of being alive. The article is desperately attempting to force the audience to confront reality. 
• “The microbeads in your toothpaste…” the horror of placing plastic inside us, of filling our bodies with microplastics and the health issues this cause… 
• “The worst thing about the meat isn’t the plastic or the pink slime…” constructing a sense of absolute disgust and hatred 

Adbusters - brand identity and ideology

How is the brand identity for Adbusters cultivated in this interview?

Being interviewed by another magazine allows the producer of a magazine to promote the brand identity, and also allows the producer to promote their product. However Adbusters brand identity is based around subverting consumerism. 

In this article, Kalle larson subverts conventional consumerist ideology by taking a subversive mode of address, for example “Adbusters and went head on against the whole fucking industry”. 

Adbuster’s brand identity is progressive, discussing the powers of the internet in mobilising audiences. He cites the occupy wall street movement, a highly influential anticapitalist movement that sought to disrupt the greed and inequality associated with the London stock exchange

The Occupy movement sought to disrupt the symbols of capitalism and draw attention to the inequality that exists in capitalist 

Larsen argues that Adbusters provides a proactive relationship with it’s audience, and it encourages the audience joining in, filming stuff, even writing articles, and protesting and getting involved in direct action

For Curran and Seaton, the audience doesn’t just already exist: it is made by the producer of the media product. In what ways does Adbusters construct it’s audiences?

Adbusters constructs an activist audience: an audience who goes out and disrupts capitalism. Ways to resist capitalism include protest, boycotts (for example Israeli produce), rejecting consumerism by not buying from major manufacturers, or even anything at all! Also vandalism, destruction of property and other disruptive and illegal events

Quotes

• With thousands of loyal subscribers and an online network of over 100,000 followers, the magazine is one big resounding fuck-you to corporate advertising and consumer culture - indicates a dedicated, yet niche target audience who actively purchase the magazine
• Yes. Right from the start we called ourselves Adbusters and went head on against the whole fucking industry - provides a somewhat shocking and edgy mode of address, and situates Adbusters as an edgy and subversive magazine . However, the ideology is actually somewhat simple and straightforward
• Now we’re excited about [developing] a new magazine aesthetic that can somehow come to grips with the internet crisis that all print magazines are in. […] We’re totally dedicated to staying hard copy and pioneering this new aesthetic - Adbusters business model is based on an old fashioned and even conservative mode of addressing audiences
• it’s hard to beat a hard-copy magazine that feels good in your hand. This is a complementary model that people like us can pioneer - is this commodity fetishism? Is this a confused version of anti-capitalism? How convincing is Adbuster’s brand identity? 
• We have this culture jammers network, and almost 100,000 people have signed up. We’re in constant communication with those people – we send them stuff and they send us stuff. We let them know what the next issue will be about, and people send ideas for what the next issue could be about, and if they shoot some wonderful magical photo on their iPhone then they’ll send it to us - Adbusters encourages the audience to engage with, but more importantly produce the magazine through an open submission policy. This is a perfect example of Clay Shirky’s end of audience theory
• Revolutions don’t happen until things get really personal. […] [And now] we have the tools, we have the social media, the internet, and we are able to mobilise ourselves really quickly and create a flash mob somewhere if we want to - encouraging the audience to build a community to take direct action, and even instigate a revolution
• Adbusters talk a lot to the converted, but you have a whole bunch of interesting unconverted people so fuck it, convert them - acknowledges that adbusters relies on a pre-existing audience of people who already align with their values. Yet he explicates that the real value of Adbusters is to encourage the audience to convert the ideology of their friends and coworkers. Encourages an active audience response

Ways of disrupting capitalism (examples only…)

• Choosing independent businesses over huge multinationals 
• Rejecting being paid… 
• Stop consuming mainstream media, or at least paying for it
• Pirating, stealing, shoplifting
• [Redacted]
• Disrupting businesses through protests and sit in
• Working to rule, being a jobsworth

The occupy wall street movement 

Rage Against The Machine - Sleep Now In The Fire

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a left-wing populist movement against economic inequality, corporate greed, big finance, and the influence of money in politics that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Financial District, and lasted for fifty-nine days—from September 17 to November 15, 2011.[7]

Deliberate disruption to the stock exchange, and draws attention and publicity towards the immense poverty and inequality that free market unrestrained capitalism causes. From another perspective, the movement constructed an aesthetic and an ideology for it’s supporters to follow. In short,. It encourages active audience participation.

Rather than encouraging a capitalist ideology, adbuster’s encourages it’s audience to actively live an activist lifestyle and to challenge capitalism

District 9 - Genre, abjection, discussion

Initial discussion - how can we compare District 9 to Battle of Algiers?

• Themes of segregation, ghettoization and apartheid 
• Wide shots/LSs of destruction
• Themes of brutality and the horrors of war
• Flashbacks and discontinuous/ non-linear narrative 
• Mocumentary/'real footage'/newsreel style footage
• MES of damage, destruction, real people, real places 
• The Casbah and The Township - ghettos for specific racial groups
• Parallels between aliens and Arabs as displaced people
• Scenes of graphic and abject torture
• Us of derogatory terms - prawns
• Different languages construct binary oppositions between different groups (alien and English, French and Arabic)
• Themes of colonisation and cultural imperialism, cultural appropriation 

District 9 - viral pre-release marketing

Click here to view the videos

How do these viral videos position the potential audience?

• The viral videos force the spectator to take an ideological perspective, and to side with the humans producing this clear ideological propaganda
• Aliens are othered through their hideous appearance and criminal behaviour
• These viral videos and teaser trailers are highly unconventional as they are diegetically situated
• We the spectator are positioned with the MNU. However, the iconography of the all-white family and the lexis of 'separate' communicates themes of racism 
• The audience are diegetically situated within the world of District 9, which is highly immersive

Genre – what genre is District 9 anyway? Generic conventions

• Aliens 
• Energy weapons 
• Greebling - adding elements to props - set dressing, adding elements to guns and so on
• Spaceships
• Tractor beams 
• An alien language
• Extensive CGI
• Scientists, experiments and a laboratory 
• An alien invasion!
• An allegory of real world issues 

In this sense, D9 is a highly conventional science fiction film, yet it also, unconventionally, includes elements from many other genres.

Body horror, abjection and disgust

Body horror - a subgenre of horror that focuses on the destruction and abjection of the human body

Examples include:

• The Thing 
• The Fly
• The Substance
• Raw
• Videodrome 
• Annihilation 
• Naked Lunch
• Titane
• Saw
• Evil Dead and 2

Julia Kristeva - Abjection - Why is blood and vomit and urine and faeces so disgusting?

• These aspects are associated with disease, and it makes sense to avoid them
• Abjection is to cast off or make different. It allows us to keep existing in a world which is broken and disgusting
• Kristeva wrote about the concept of abjection and how symbolically it can elicit disgust. Abjection refers to something that has been cut off or cast off or made separate. But why is something so natural and normal repulsive when it is separated from the body?
• Kristeva argues that the taboo created through abjection is constructed through cognitive dissonance. Something that should not exist does exist even though we really wish that it did not
• A perfect example is a corpse. What used to be a human is now literally lifeless. In order to make sense of this contradiction we now see it as a ‘thing’ or an other. The cognitive dissonance of death is essentially what the entre horror genre is based on

Abjection, aesthetic and the lab sequence

• Hyperviolent explosions of blood and gore and are constructed through a frantic and extremely fast paced editing style that reinforces a sense of chaos and confusion. This violence is arguably funny and cathartic, an outpouring of emotion. The extreme violence is justified through self defence./ Yet furthermore, the violence in this scene, being over the top and cartoonish, and making intertextual reference to videogames. This process of 'gibbing' makes this sequence resemble an action packed videogame. The horrific violence in this scene is smoothed out by the comedic address, and allows the spectator to align with Wikus even though he is committing mass murder
• Yet, a binary opposition is constructed between the fun videogame violence, and the sudden, emotionally affecting abjection elicited by the MES of the corpse of the alien. The extremely abject, repulsive and upsetting shot of the dissected alien constructs an extreme emotional response from Christopher, whose frozen and static performance anchors the spectator to acknowledge that he shares common values and beliefs with the so-called civilised and human characters

Playing games - writing a feature article

Brief - Create a single page preview in In-Design for a video game magazine about Assassin's Creed: Unity

David Hesmondhalgh argues that the videogame industry, like all media industries, is a specialised industry. The video game industry relies on the highly specialised relationship between it's production, distribution, promotion and marketing. In order to effectively minimise risk and to maximise profit, specialist videogame publications, both online and print based, will be provided with previews of games currently in development, in order to construct a sense of anticipation for the target audience. This relationship is symbiotic: the developer benefits from increased (and hopefully favourable) publicity, while the publication can provide it's audience with the information their target audience desires.

Create a single page preview future for a video game magazine featuring Assassin's Creed: Unity. You will be using Adobe InDesign to do this, however your may use a template to help you if you need it.

Your aim is to write and arrange a preview– similar to a review, but introducing the audience to the game, it’s concepts and why they should get excited

• Production values: draw distance, graphical fidelity, 
• Basic narrative overview
• Repetition and difference – what’s new about this one?
• What platforms it is available on?
• What the game is like to play – how it may appeal to audiences, what stands out about the game experience? Why should they be excited?

It should be approx. 150 words of text with accompanying images, pull quotes, appropriate straplines and headlines

What are you actually doing this session?

• Play the game
• Make notes, on narrative
• Get to know InDesign and its templates (find a magazine psread template should you need it).
• Start laying out images and straplines
• Start drafting your magazine text and structure researching the background to the game
• In this context Assassins Creed Unity is the latest installment ..

Examples of  preview features - additional print examples will be provided

Writing a preview feature

What are the conventions of a preview feature?

Conventions - the aspects that make up a genre or a medium. Magazines, like all media, can be conventional or unconventional 

Large main image - grabs the attention of the audience, to...

Copy (the writing...) explains to the audience what the game is going to be about...

Information: publisher, developer, format, origin, and the release date, to...

Standfirst - explains and summarises thew article, to...

Plain, conventional, and packed with information, particularly about the developers...

Allv these features and conventions encourage the audience to get excited about the upcoming game, ensuring the audience continues to buy the magazine, and contiues to be engaged with the videogame industry. This relationship between the videogame industry and the magazine industry is symbiotic. They both get advantages. 

This blog post was adapted from material made from Sian. Thank you Sian!