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Bethany's Vlogs
MED 5041 Media Culture

Ranjani Ramanathan (s12799778)

MED 5041- Assignment Research Report
What is the cultural significance of Bethanyslife vlogs?

Ranjani Ramanathan s12799778

1 |cultural

significance of Bethanyslife

MED 5041 Media Culture

Ranjani Ramanathan (s12799778)

Contents

Introduction Literature Review -Real or unreal?
-Hyper reality

page 3 page 4

Methodology Findings

page 7 page 9

- The content of vlogs, editing, presentation, observation
- Hyper realism - Context Collapse - Vlogging – ‘The reality’

Conclusion Bibliography Appendices

page 14 page 16 page 19

2 |cultural

significance of Bethanyslife

MED 5041 Media Culture

Ranjani Ramanathan (s12799778)

Introduction
In this research report, I shall consider the cultural significance of BethanysLife vlogs by using post modernist approaches of Jean Baudrillard on hyper realism. Vlogs are short video clips that are shared via the internet. YouTube one of the major online video sharing websites that hosts a lot of these videos called vlogs. By combining the grassroots of blogging with richness of expression, these video blogs are known as vlogs. Development in recent years has led to this widespread popularity of ‘clip culture’. Vlogs create dominant messages since it consists of distinct visual elements attached to it and is more of an interpersonal communication. BethanysLife is a YouTube channel started on 2010 which now has about 693,278 subscribers and 23,670,162 video views (see appendix B) owned by a seventeen year old teen Bethany Mota. Over the years her vlogs has grown a strong cult following among the other vloggers. There are several Facebook fan pages and dedicated Twitter accounts titled as ‘Motavator’, ‘Bethanators_07’, ‘Macbarbie07fans’ (twitter handles- see appendix C) which describes the level of intimacy that holds the audience back. This is a contemporary media text as these vlogs have a global viewership and there is an

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