Crying on YouTube

Abstract

In this article, we challenge dominant perceptions of social media as an archive of endlessly positive self-documentation by examining two subgenres of YouTube vlogging predicated on the expression of negative affect. Through analysis of the crying and anxiety vlogs of YouTubers ZoeSugg, Trisha Paytas and Nicole Klein, we recognize the productivity of negative affect, charting the translation of the mediated tears, sobs and struggles of these young female vloggers into affirmations of authenticity, (self-)therapy and strengthened ties of intimacy with followers. While these negative affect vlogs work outside of YouTube’s consumer economy, their popularity points to a booming economy of affective labour, where the exchange of tears for sympathetic ears is in consistently high demand.

Keywords

Anxiety vlogs attention economy crying vlogs intimacy negative affect self-disclosure social media therapy Trisha Paytas YouTube Zoe Sugg

According to popular notions about self-presentation in digital culture, the posts found on social media platforms consist of an endless barrage of happy, beautiful people detailing the fabulous acquisitions and activities that warrant self-reportage by the ‘Me Generation’ (Stein, 2013). This characterization tends to attach to platforms that traffic more in visual than verbal exchanges, but the charge of millennial narcissism blankets all social networking sites (Bergman et al., 2011). As a photo-oriented site, for instance, Instagram has been associated with a new kind of ‘lifestyle envy’ (Prickett, 2013) generated by the practices of the ‘Instafamous’, who, according to Marwick (2015: 139), ‘tend to be conventionally good-looking, to work in “cool” industries…and emulate the tropes and symbols of traditional celebrity culture’. Even on its parent platform Facebook, which is more ubiquitous and less glamorous than Instagram, the unwritten rules of run-of-the-mill posts decree that events, expressions and photos relating to the self should be happy ones. And on the behemoth video-uploading platform YouTube, vloggers’ recipe for success – commonly launched with a chipper ‘Hi guys!’ – favours the make-over, the make-better, the aspirational and the comic. As YouTube vlogger Nicole Klein says to her viewers, ‘I know that you look for videos to smile’ (ObviouslyNicole, 2016, 9:40).

This troping towards positivity can be seen as the affective envelope of what scholars have called the ‘attention economy’ of social media (Fairchild, 2007; Marwick, 2013; Senft, 2013). From the perspective of such an economy, what followers offer in exchange for producers’ content is their own attention, which is readily translatable into metrics of value (e.g. number of subscribers to a YouTube channel); the value of attention in turn drives the monetization potential not only of social media platforms but also of individual posters. Once we integrate affective considerations into the attention economy, however, a crucial variable is added to the basic equation. This enhanced economic formula suggests that one ‘happy’ unit (from the producer) will generate one attention unit (from the user), which in turn will produce a monetary unit (for the producer/platform). Good looks, cool jobs and fun party snaps thus become the affective currency of the Me Generation online. But beyond the question of value metrics and quantification, what is less often interrogated is the presumed positive quality of the affective unit, even while assumptions are made by social media producers and scholars alike that only the upbeat, the fabulous and the aspirational will draw the attention of users. Indeed, the very notion of a ‘Like Economy’, as coined by Gerlitz and Helmond (2013) to describe the thumbs-up practice originated by Facebook of clicking ‘like’, presumes not only that affect can be turned into metrics, but also that this affect is rigorously positive in the first instance.

We would argue, however, that this is too limited an understanding of the complex and variegated affective field of social media, both in terms of the qualitative range of feelings displayed and the varieties of affective labour (Hardt, 1999) that go into producing such displays. As private life and emotional interaction move increasingly online, it is worth asking, where do the negative feelings go? Where and how does one express the underside of that ‘happy self’ supposedly synonymous with social media? In this article, we will address these questions with a focus on vlogging practices on YouTube, in an effort to retain platform specificity and avoid conflating different technical affordances, conventions and habits into an undifferentiated mass called ‘social media’. Personal videos on YouTube strike us as an appropriate site for investigating the flipside of positive affectivity for a number of reasons: they are confessional and intimate, as represented by the ubiquitous visual focus on the face and rhetorical I-you address of the YouTuber, but they also reflect a tension between a developed persona that is aligned with the attention economy and a ‘bare’ face (sometimes literally, as at the start of beauty tutorials) that is individualized enough to allow for non-normative and in many cases self-reflexive practices. In fact, YouTubers’ capacity for self-reflexivity is beginning to turn to the question of affect itself. In a recent twist on a ‘happy new year’ message, the most subscribed user on YouTube, Felix Kjellberg a.k.a. PewDiePie, uploaded a video titled ‘Forced Positivity on YouTube’, which within 2 weeks had accumulated 5.5 million views. In this video about the ‘fake’ happiness of YouTubers, Felix reflects on the relation between forced positivity and the YouTube attention economy: ‘I think a lot of people on YouTube are drawn to positivity, and I think a lot of YouTubers are aware of this, and that’s why they’re forcing positivity on YouTube’ (PewDiePie, 2017, 2:00). Pointing out the ethical and psychological damage of pretending to a happiness that is not ‘true’, he decries YouTubers who make positive ideology a part of their self-branding, not least because of their responsibility to more credulous, younger viewers. In confessional mode, Felix reveals that that it is ‘extremely soul-crushing to do that, to keep that up for a longer [sic] time’ (PewDiePie, 2017, 3:08), and, worse, it ‘doesn’t work, because it’s fake’ (PewDiePie, 2017, 8:15).

With this in mind, we aim to analyse YouTube vlogs that disrupt the rule of positivity by engaging with or displaying negative affect, especially in the form of anxiety, distress and the performance of emotional vulnerability. Countering the predominantly positive attention economy on social media, the existence of negative affect videos – particularly those whose content relies on emotional manifestation such as tears – indicates that affective flows on social media are becoming qualitatively variable. Contrary to the assumption that affective labour on YouTube must be self-affirming in order to support the attention economy, we will argue that affective displays may be negative and yet productive, in the sense that they cement authenticity, offer (self-)therapy and strengthen ties of intimacy between YouTubers and their followers. As people, especially women, increasingly use online video channels in order to expose and simultaneously mitigate their isolation, it is the tears, sobs and struggles of socially mediated feeling that constitute the newest digital terrain of the intimate public.

‘A slightly different video’: Negative affect vlogs

Vlogs expressing negative affect are commonplace across YouTube, ranging in theme from individuals’ struggles with depression (as in the silent note-card format, often labelled ‘sad story’; see Dobson, 2015; Misoch, 2014) to difficulties with eating disorders (see Pereira, et al., 2016; Veer, 2011, 2012) and expressions of grief and bereavement (see Gibson, 2016; Lee, 2011). The growing prevalence of such vlogs is testament to the value of YouTube both as a repository of anecdotal resources in the age of emotional precarity and as a potential community for those seeking support in dealing with their mental well-being. Our interest in this article, however, centres upon two more quotidian and increasingly popular categories of negative affect vlogs, which have yet to attract substantial academic attention. The first and broadest we refer to as ‘crying vlogs’, denoting vlogs which capture spontaneous and overtly tearful outpourings of emotion. Although there are numerous motivations for YouTubers to cry on camera, one popular sub-category of this video type is vlogs which are overtly called, or elaborate on the phrase, ‘I hate myself’. As the title suggests, these vlogs consist of highly emotive, self-deprecating accounts of the subject’s dissatisfaction with themselves and their lives, often – in the case of female vloggers especially – having to do with concerns about looks, weight and body image. Crying vlogs of every ilk typically involve a confessional address to camera, wherein the subject gives voice to the causes and gradations of their feeling-states, usually from the midst of the emotional maelstrom, thereby at once performing, contextualizing and reflexively dissecting their state of distress. By contrast, vlogs from the second category, which we refer to as ‘anxiety vlogs’, are more pedagogical in nature, involving personal accounts of the subject’s struggle with social anxiety and modelling ways to recognize and deal with panic attacks. These anecdotal videos are frequently framed as educational tools, intended both to raise awareness of the realities of living with anxiety and to assure similarly afflicted viewers that they are not alone in their experiences.

In broad terms, the impetus for producing crying and anxiety vlogs can be seen to emerge from two recent, intersecting cultural shifts. The most striking is the rapid normalization of ‘lifestreaming', described by Marwick (2013: 208) as ‘the ongoing sharing of personal information to a networked audience’. Facilitated by the increasing ubiquity of social media platforms that encourage near-constant broadcasting of one’s thoughts, feelings and activities, lifestreaming encourages individuals to feel comfortable with (and validated by) documenting their everyday lives – however exceptional, intimate or mundane. The second shift is the rise of what Silva (2013: 18) calls the ‘mood economy’, wherein, for young adults especially, ‘legitimacy and self-worth are purchased not with traditional currencies such as work or marriage or class solidarity but instead through the ability to organize their emotions into a narrative of self-transformation’. In Silva’s view, the neoliberal zeitgeist favours individuals who assume responsibility for their own emotional well-being, with the attainment of happiness as the therapeutic goal that secures their development as autonomous neoliberal subjects (see also Illouz, 2007). Within the context of these cultural shifts, negative affect vlogs figure as (highly publicized) examples of individuals’ efforts to express, interrogate and attempt to resolve their putative failure in the mood economy. Serving variously as ‘a diary, an autobiography, and a vehicle of communication and social connection’ (Raun, 2012: 167), these videos of emotional distress and confessional excess are normalized within a digital landscape which promotes narrativizing and broadcasting all aspects of one’s day-to-day (emotional) life.

This article explores the affordances of negative affect vlogs for connection and self-understanding through consideration of a handful of videos uploaded by three female YouTubers: beauty, fashion and lifestyle vlogger Zoe Sugg (zoella280390, over eleven million subscribers), controversial vlogging personality Trisha Paytas (blndsundoll4mj, over two and a half million subscribers) and aspiring YouTuber Nicole Klein (ObviouslyNicole, over five thousand subscribers). Though these YouTubers differ significantly in popularity, they each share a proclivity for vlogging as a means of expressing moments of emotional excess and vulnerability, even while their primary commitment is to posting the polished ‘content videos’ for which they have become known (see Berryman and Kavka, 2017) and which reaffirm YouTube’s unwritten positive ethos. The continued focus on content videos is indicated not only by the smaller ratio of negative affect vlogs present on each of these YouTubers’ channels, but also by the verbal or visual disclaimers which routinely preface negative affect vlogs, overtly signalling the video’s deviation from the YouTuber’s more positive style of uploaded content.

At the beginning of Zoe Sugg’s crying vlog ‘Sometimes It All Gets a Bit Too Much’, for example, a pink title card appears, which reads:

Disclaimer

If you have clicked this for 5 minutes of happy time, you will be disappointed. This is hard for me to upload, and I’m sorry it won’t bring you any joy, come back tomorrow for a more upbeat video if you would rather skip this one.

Love you. (Zoella, 2014)

Acknowledging her viewers’ expectations of vlogs that are uplifting and lighthearted in tone, Zoe’s title card prefaces her crying vlog with an apology for the dispirited content which is to follow. When the title card disappears, we fade in on a close-up of Zoe sitting in bed, inhaling shakily as she wipes tears from her mascara-stained eyes. ‘I’m not too sure why I’m filming this,’ Zoe begins, her address to the camera punctuated by sobs; ‘I think [it’s] maybe because…this is part of my day, and I want you guys to know that…I’m a real person, and I’m not perfect, and my life isn’t perfect, and sometimes this all gets too much’ (Zoella, 2014, 0:10). A similar disclaimer frames Trisha Paytas’ crying vlog ‘I’m Sorry’, which begins with an assurance to the viewers that ‘this is the last video you’re going to see of me, like, crying and being crazy, I swear’ (blindsundoll4mj, 2016a, 0:11). While the falsity of Trisha’s statement is thrown into sharp relief by the significant number of crying vlogs she has since uploaded to her channel, ‘I’m Sorry’ is nonetheless framed by Trisha’s pledge to produce future vlogs that will be more positive in content and tone – after, it is implied, the negative affect video has served its purpose. In both of these examples, Zoe and Trisha employ overt disclaimers to draw attention to the exceptionality of the negative affect featured in their vlogs – even while the very existence of these videos suggests the value of negative affect vlogging for YouTubers whose content otherwise fulfils the platform’s implicit promise to provide ‘happy’ entertainment.

This self-reflexivity is also present in anxiety vlogs, where it is common for YouTubers to comment on the difficulty of detailing their private, intimate experiences in front of their online audience. In Zoe’s popular video ‘Dealing with Panic Attacks & Anxiety’, which at the time of writing had almost four million views, she begins by admitting that ‘this is a slightly different video than you are probably used to, but I do hope that this is beneficial for a lot of you in a completely different way’ (Zoella, 2012, 0:02). She soon reveals that she has struggled with anxiety and panic attacks since she was 14 years old and, following the positive response to a blog post she penned on the topic, she is inspired to share her knowledge in ‘a very personal video’ (Zoella, 2012, 0:42). However, regardless of her admission ‘that it makes me feel extremely uncomfortable, and it’s not something I really enjoy discussing with hundreds of thousands of people’, Zoe resolves that she will ‘do it anyway’ (Zoella, 2012, 2:28). Differing in theme but similar in tone, Trisha’s ‘My Eating Disorder’ video also begins with a confession to the audience that she does not enjoy making videos about truly personal topics ‘because they’re not exactly comfortable, [and] they’re not exactly fun for me’ (blindsundoll4mj, 2014a, 0:40). In each case, these YouTubers proclaim that their uneasiness at discussing such personal information will be ‘worth it’ if the message of their videos resonates with their viewers. As Zoe comments, ‘If this helps at least one of you watching this—just one of you—then it’s totally worth it, and I’m one hundred percent happy that I’ve managed to help’ (Zoella, 2012, 0:54; [original emphasis]).

In so doing, both YouTubers frame their videos by reflecting on what we might call the negative affective labour that informs their production. In using the phrase ‘affective labour’, we draw on Hardt’s (1999) analysis of the shift from material labour under industrialization, resulting in tangible products, to the ‘immaterial’ labour under the current economic paradigm that ‘produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge or communication’ (p. 94). In addition to the communicational labour of computer systems, Hardt argues that the other face of immaterial labour is ‘the affective labor of human contact and interaction’ (p. 95; original emphasis), which he holds to be ‘immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible: a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion – even a sense of connectedness and community’ (p. 96). Crying videos, in which negative affect appears as both raw material (e.g. tears) and produced outcome (the vlog itself), exemplify Hardt’s affective labour of human interaction, which Arcy (2016) resituates as a feminized immaterial labour in the digital sphere by connecting women’s putative ‘natural expertise in expressing and managing emotions’ (p. 366) with the digital labour of performing ‘microact[s] of “liking”’ (p. 367). And yet crying vlogs perform a different kind of affective labour than ‘liking’, not least because they directly repudiate Hardt’s assumption that ‘a sense of connectedness and community’ can only arise from positive feelings of ease, well-being and so on. On the contrary, YouTubers such as Zoe and Trisha create a sense of connectedness with and among their viewers precisely through the emotional production of discomfort, unease and distress.

While it may seem counter-intuitive to claim that negative affect can generate a positive immaterial product, the missing term in this production line is authenticity, which in the age of social media interaction has become the value added by affect to the communicational labour of computer systems. Just as Zoe explains that she is ‘a real person’ whose life is not perfect (Zoella, 2012), so Trisha, in ‘My Eating Disorder’, distinguishes between liking ‘to have fun’ on her channel and ‘these more “real” videos, as people call them’ (blindsundoll4mj, 0:36). These ‘more real’ (read: negative) videos, however uncomfortable they may be to make and distressing to watch, are justified precisely because the producers claim to be showing an authentic side of themselves, which exposes the darker reality edited out of the collective fantasy that YouTubers ‘have absolutely no self-esteem issues, have no real-life problems, they’re always happy, they’re always jolly’ (Zoella, 2012, 1:22; [original emphasis]). The insistence on the real, moreover, is integral to the production of ‘connectedness and community’ (Hardt, 1999: 96) through negative affective labour on YouTube. Attempting to explain why she is foregoing the ‘fun’ and ‘creativity’ of her main output in order to talk about her eating disorder, Trisha insists,

it’s really real to me, and I’m sure really real to other people out there, and I just wanted to make this video, to share my story with you guys to sort of help, and, um, make you feel like maybe you’re not alone. (blindsundoll4mj, ‘My Eating Disorder’, 11:26)

Trisha here articulates the logical corollary to Felix Kjellberg’s tirade against ‘forced positivity’: if forced positivity is fake, then unforced negativity must be ‘real’. The validation for engaging in negative affective labour is thus the increased credibility that accompanies self-exposure, to the extent that the more negative the personal material exposed, the more ‘real’ it is taken to be. Unlike the common tactic behind celebrity uses of social media (Marwick, 2013, 2015), however, authenticity in crying and anxiety vlogs is not figured as an end in itself. Rather, it facilitates the productivity of negative affective labour to the extent that sharing what is ‘really real to me’ can ‘really’ help others through the production of a community enacted by and as tears. In Lauren Berlant’s (2008: viii) terms, affective labour – even of the negative sort – is productive because it creates an ‘intimate public [as] an achievement’ through which ‘emotional contact, of a sort, is made’.

Crying, connectedness, community

Viewers’ responses in the comment threads on crying videos, while in no way themselves affectively uniform, indicate that YouTubers’ expectations of ‘helping people’ are to a large extent borne out. It is the ‘personal’ (Zoe) and ‘real’ (Trisha) videos that garner comments of support, self-reflection and assurances that viewers take comfort from the vlog, precisely because of the tears and anxiety on display or under discussion. Fantasmic Faith responds to ‘Dealing with Panic Attacks & Anxiety’ (Zoella, 2012) by confirming Zoe’s justification for making a ‘slightly different video’: ‘Hey, Zoe? So, in the beginning, you said if you helped one person, you’d be happy. I know this is an old video, but this did help me so so so much’. Others reflect on the extent to which they can relate to what they have watched. Hailee Howard, for instance, writes in the comment thread to Trisha’s ‘My Shattered Broken Heart’ (blindsundoll4mj, 2013), ‘I relate so much with this video and with you’, while Sapphire Rose uses similar rhetoric in response to ‘My Eating Disorder’ (blindsundoll4mj, 2014a), ‘I’ve never seen a more relatable video in my whole life. Right now just after I watched this I don’t feel alone anymore’. The message ‘you are not alone’ is both received and recirculated by viewers who leave comments. These comments in turn emphasize that the vlogs function performatively, so that the ‘truth’ of connectedness is performed at the point of its (re) articulation, establishing a paradoxical community of the isolated. When Jasmine Allison, responding to ‘Dealing with Panic Attacks & Anxiety’ (Zoella, 2012), shares symptoms of her severe anxiety attacks and asks whether anyone else gets them, hey_im-hala reassures her, ‘I get that too. You’re not alone’. In the same thread, Gracyn K engages in identification when she writes, ‘SAME!! It’s so horrible!’ Indeed, the comment threads to crying vlogs themselves become sites of negative affect, with the viewers’ own tears enacting a double function of self-consolation and community bonding: ‘Can I just say this video of yours made me cry. Can I just say you are such an awesome human being with such a beautiful soul inside’ (Alana Salas Cruz, blindsundoll4mj, 2013). For some, YouTubers’ tears on screen go so far as to offer the solace of someone to cry with: ‘Honestly when I’m really sad, I go here and I imagine her crying with me’ (Miss Eryn Love, blindsundoll4mj, 2013).

If forcing happiness ‘doesn’t work because it’s fake’, as Felix Kjellberg insists, then the implication is that displaying real unhappiness – or what Nicole Klein calls ‘the true raw me inside’ (ObviouslyNicole, 2016) – will ‘work’ by producing positive effects of connectedness. On the part of both YouTubers and their followers, however, there is a distinction to be made between real feelings and real people. The latter term refers to family and friends ‘in the real world’, that is, people with whom the YouTubers come into face-to-face contact. Again and again, it turns out that the display of negative affect is productive – indeed, is possible – only online, and not in face-to-face relations. Trisha, in the paradigmatic crying video ‘I’m Sorry’, attempts to articulate the conundrum of mediated reality that enables YouTube videos to function as outlets for real (negative) emotions that cannot be expressed ‘in real life’:

I have no emotional outlets in my real life. Yeah, I have friends, and I do have family, but it’s really hard for me to talk about my emotions and to be really open with people face-to-face and in real life. (blindsundoll4mj, 2016a, 0:35)

For Trisha, whose videos commonly deal with the problem of cyberbullying and ‘haters’ in her comment threads, it nonetheless seems that she is more alarmed by negative judgement ‘in the real world’ than online. As she goes on to say in ‘I’m Sorry’:

…it seems like [people face-to-face in real life] are going to judge me, think I’m crazy, think I’m over-emotional, think I’m overattached to people, and I feel like I can’t talk to people about it! And I go on social media and I take advantage of that platform because people listen to me on here, and it makes me feel like I’m being heard, and it’s a way for me to get my emotions out. (blindsundoll4mj, 2016a, 0:49; [original emphasis])

The message is clear, even if the rationale is overdetermined: real-world friends and family are not as appropriate for communities based on negative affect as is the mediated intimate public, described by Berlant (2008: viii) as ‘a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging’. Whereas speaking face-to-face with friends about ‘problems’ is perceived as a taxing demand, on social media it becomes an invitation to a community of the like-minded (see also McKenna et al., 2002; Utz, 2015; Veer, 2011).

Digital intimacy thus trumps real-world intimacy, in part because interlocutors are imaginatively interpellated each time the YouTuber turns on the camera and begins to speak. The performative validation of real feeling requires an imagined viewer-in-waiting who will share the sense of isolation. Real-world people intrude upon isolation and may feel burdened or bored, as vloggers remark, whereas speaking to the camera promises an affective community from the very first ‘Hi guys!’ that calls potential interlocutors into existence. This is the ‘cruel optimism’ of the crying vlogger, whose ‘potential occupation of the same psychic space of others’ is dependent on ‘a silent, affectively present but physically displaced interlocutor’ called into being by the address itself (Berlant, 2011: 26, 25). For the experienced YouTuber with their own channel, the cruelty of this gap narrows because the YouTuber knows the number and approximate profile of their subscribers and hence knows whom they are talking to, which no doubt aids their sense of being heard.

Negative affect vlogs can thus be seen to instigate, and operate within, the kind of digital intimate public Morrison (2011) defines in relation to networks of personal mommy bloggers. At once drawing on and diverging from Berlant’s 2008 conceptualization of the term, Morrison characterizes the intimate public of mommy blogs as being ‘marked by direct emotional reciprocity among its participants, creating strong bonds of trust and support that bloggers characterize as meaningful friendship within a community’ (Morrison 2011: 37; see also Wilson and Yochim, 2017: 115-116). In crying vlogs, this direct emotional reciprocity is confirmed through the currency of tears, which both secure the ‘meaningful friendship’ with digital intimates and index the possibility that optimistic attachment to a community of crying registers a shared ‘impasse’ to ‘fantasies of the good life when the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation’ (Berlant, 2011: 3). As Berlant notes, ‘[c]ruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object’ (2011: 24). When Nicole muses in ‘Why I Hate Myself’, ‘I’m just not happy, and I don’t know what it’s going to take for me to be happy. I’m trying so freakin’ hard to find myself and figure out who I am’ (ObviouslyNicole, 2016, 3:09), she articulates a feeling of hopelessness about ‘just existing…not living’ (ObviouslyNicole, 2016, 3:33) that appeals to a self-selecting YouTube audience who are similarly young, concerned about failing social expectations, and worried about their lack of visible purpose, or indeed their lack of purposeful visibility (such as having 100,000 subscribers or a life changed by America’s Got Talent, as Nicole notes). Struggling to articulate what is wrong, Nicole goes through a list of failures to achieve what would count as success for an American 18-year-old girl – including a million YouTube subscribers, a boyfriend, a thin body and nice hair – culminating with a summary of lack: ‘I don’t have a million dollars in my bank account, I don’t have a bunch of people subscribed, and I don’t have a lot of friends’ (ObviouslyNicole, 2016, 11:54; [original emphasis]). While she is careful to insist that she is neither suicidal nor ‘fishing for compliments’ (ObviouslyNicole, 2016, 4:24), she nonetheless treads a fine line between self-abnegation and appreciation of the ‘insanely supportive messages…you guys send me’ (ObviouslyNicole, 2016, 4:15). It is the latter appeal to and acknowledgement of ‘you guys’ that confirm the ‘strong bonds of trust and support’ (Morrison, 2011: 37) which operate in and through the cruel optimism of crying vlogs.

In this sense, the negative affect vlogging of these young female YouTubers attaches viewers not only to their plight but also to YouTube, in line with Arcy’s (2016: 366) claim that ‘[o]n digital platforms, women invest their emotional energy to engage with and generate content that in turn adds value to branded platforms’. At the same time, however, it is unlikely that these videos will generate much (monetary) value for the YouTubers themselves. In both theme and appearance, negative affect vlogs evoke an aesthetic of rawness that opposes the increasingly professional standards demanded by the YouTuber consumer economy, challenging their alignment with the monetization avenues typically available to content creators. At odds with the YouTube Partner Policy updated in late August 2016, these vlogs run the risk of being judged ‘not advertiser-friendly’ should they involve profanities or discuss ‘sensitive subjects’ (YouTube, n.d.), in turn preventing vloggers registered with the Partner Program from generating revenue through the adverts placed before, during and around these videos. Negative affect vlogs are also unlikely to secure alternative means of financial compensation, such as brand sponsorships or affiliate programs (see Berryman and Kavka, 2017), further restricting the ability for vloggers to monetize content which deviates from the platform’s philosophy of positive, polished entertainment.

Although the negative affect of such vlogging is the very quality which renders it incompatible with YouTube’s consumer economy, it is also that which maximizes the currency of these videos within the site’s connected economy. Prioritizing the formation of affective ties over the prospect of monetary reimbursement, negative affect vlogs operate within an economy of affective labour which promises, in exchange for the production of mediated tears, sobs and struggles, the attentive and sympathetic ears of the digital intimate public.

Kitchen floor videos

True to the ambivalence of negative affect vlogging and the cruel optimism it engenders, much of Trisha Paytas’ YouTube celebrity is predicated upon bold displays of emotional vulnerability. Though her channel also features an array of self-produced music videos, dance routines, fashion showcases, sex advice and muk-bang (eating) videos, Trisha is best known for her prolific catalogue of ‘storytime’ videos, wherein she recounts dramatic experiences from her past, and her crying vlogs, in which she takes to YouTube to express her feelings about the developments happening in her life right now. As Trisha tearfully summarizes in one of her most popular crying vlogs,

I’m twenty-seven years old, and I’m…I’m a mess. I can’t keep a relationship together, I can’t control my feelings and emotions, I just can’t. I’ve worked so hard, but…I’ve gotta work harder to…channel all of my emotions in a healthy way. (blindsundoll4mj, 2016a, 2:11)

Trisha has since found a dependable emotional outlet in YouTube, where she has uploaded crying vlogs with increasing frequency since mid-2016, largely prompted by tumultuous personal relationships and her fluctuating mental health. With few exceptions, these videos are filmed in the kitchen of Trisha’s apartment, her camera propped on a tripod as she sits cross-legged on the floor. This set-up has become well known to Trisha’s regular viewers, with thumbnails of Trisha sitting on her kitchen floor immediately signalling the emotionally charged content of the video. Indeed, one commentator on Trisha’s videos even suggested that ‘there should be a series called “crying on the kitchen floor”‘, making explicit the genre which has been consolidated by Trisha’s affinity for videos of this type.

If the kitchen floor video has become a signifier of emotional excess for Trisha’s viewers, it follows that this is because the kitchen floor has come to figure as a trusted location for emotional expression, processing and catharsis for Trisha herself. Indeed, as self-reflexive video titles such as ‘crying on my kitchen floor (again)’ make clear, creating kitchen floor vlogs has become the first point-of-call for Trisha whenever she is feeling distressed or overwhelmed. This relationship is made explicit in a kitchen floor vlog entitled ‘sean is suing me.’, which begins with Trisha collapsing into view: ‘I don’t even care if I’m in frame,’ she gushes, glancing at herself in the camera’s viewfinder and adjusting her position nonetheless, ‘I don’t care, I walked in, my boots still on, bang, on the floor’ (blindsundoll4mj, 2016a, 0:01). In this instance, Trisha’s first reaction to the bad news she had just received is to vlog from her kitchen floor, precisely because the location is one in which Trisha feels comfortable processing and expressing her emotions. As she reflects in ‘crying on my kitchen floor (again)’,

I don’t know what it is about being on the kitchen floor. It makes me feel more grounded. Um, you know, when I do my makeup and hair and I put myself together for you guys, it’s one thing to be on my couch—but this feels grounded. This feels…It’s as simple as I can get. (blindsundoll4mj, 2016a, 9:57; original emphasis)

This notion of ‘simplicity’ is a distinguishing feature of Trisha’s kitchen floor videos. In stark contrast to the increasingly high production values necessitated by YouTube’s celebrity culture – including stylized room décor, colourful backdrops, semi-professional lighting rigs, snappy editing and professionally produced title sequences (Berryman and Kavka, 2017) – Trisha’s kitchen floor videos evoke an aesthetics of rawness which places centre-stage her relationship with the camera. Trisha’s vlogs are dimly lit, the room’s high ceilings and poor natural lighting casting shadows across her face, and typically unedited, ranging in length from 40 to 45 min of a single close-up. Moreover, unlike the larger-than-life ‘glam’ persona she presents in her content videos, in her crying vlogs, Trisha usually wears loose-fitting clothing and minimal (often smudged) make-up, with her hair messily tied back. Often, Trisha will begin her vlogs by commenting on her unkempt appearance. Her video ‘this is what anxiety looks like.’, for example, opens with the observation:

Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m making a video looking like this. I think this definitely takes the cake as the most disgusting I’ve ever looked in a video. I am, like, breaking out like a crazy person, and I am feeling like a crazy person – my washing machine’s going, hopefully that doesn’t bother you – [but] I just have a lot of emotions and anxiety, and I feel like I just need to express it to someone!’ (blindsundoll4mj, 2016d, 0:01; original emphasis)

Prioritizing self-expression over self-presentation, Trisha’s kitchen floor videos visually reflect the rawness of the self-exposure they document, stripping back the glamour of Trisha’s public persona at the same time as they foreground the revelation of her innermost thoughts and feelings.

This combination of physical and emotional vulnerability meets its climax in the tears which have become emblematic of the kitchen floor video. Each of Trisha’s vlogs tends to follow the same narrative pattern, beginning with a relatively calm reference to whatever has prompted the creation of the video before she dramatically dissolves into a state of distress. This is epitomized in the crying vlog ‘I’m Sorry’, for instance, where Trisha publicly apologizes for impulsively shaming her ex-boyfriends on social media. As the video progresses, Trisha’s voice gets higher in pitch and her words rush together, rendering her monologue almost indecipherable. Her speech is punctuated periodically by sobbing gasps, and large tears fall steadily down her cheeks and neck, undeterred by her absent-minded efforts to wipe them away. While such intense displays of emotion have become characteristic of Trisha’s crying vlogs, they are often cushioned by closing references to the therapeutic effects of the video’s creation. In ‘My Shattered Broken Heart’, for instance, Trisha tearfully details her troubled history with romantic relationships, pausing to comment after 10 min of vlogging, ‘I don’t know why I’m crying, this is actually happy. I feel…I feel better. I feel better’ (blindsundoll4mj, 2013, 9:54). The same refrain is repeated in ‘THE MOST IMPORTANT VIDEO I HAVE EVER DONE.’ where, 45 minutes into the crying vlog, Trisha leans back and exclaims, ‘Wooh! I feel better’ (blindsundoll4mj, 2013, 45:17). Signalled here is the cathartic function of crying vlogs, wherein the process of filming facilitates both the release and reconciliation of extreme emotions.

As well as providing an outlet for Trisha’s emotions, these kitchen floor videos have proved a highly successful video format, consistently attracting hundreds of thousands (and sometimes millions) of views. In ‘crying on my kitchen floor (again)’, Trisha reflects on the popularity of these vlogs, observing that:

I noticed, just in general, [that] my videos where I talk about my personal life actually get more views than a popular trend or a popular tag, and that says something to me, that you guys…you guys do care about me, [for] even more than what I started out YouTube doing, which is – or even what it became, [which] is – being a YouTuber, and doing YouTube things. I realized that that’s not why people are subscribed to me. They’re not subscribed to me for hauls and fashion, which [are] fun, and I love doing [those sorts of videos, but] you guys are subscribed to me because you’ve invested yourselves in me, because I do give everything to you guys. (blindsundoll4mj, 2016c, 7:31)

Trisha here interprets the high view counts on her crying videos as indicative of the level of affection and concern her fans have for her. In Trisha’s view, the emotional vulnerability and availability she exhibits on the site – rhetorically framed as a no-holds-barred intimacy of ‘giving everything’ – heighten the sense of investment her viewers feel towards her life and well-being, in turn increasing the likelihood they will return to watch her future videos. This logic, of course, is not consistently supported in the comments sections below her crying vlogs, which include comments varying wildly in tone not only about Trisha herself but also about the content of her crying videos. The top comment for ‘THE MOST IMPORTANT VIDEO I HAVE EVER DONE’, for instance, promises to save ‘you 45:32 minutes of your time’ by summarizing the myriad topics discussed in the vlog (because Trisha, as the commenter observes, ‘can sometime [sic] take forever to get to the juicy part’). But whether viewers cry with Trisha or follow her tears via updates, or more likely a combination of both, the desire of Trisha’s audience to stay abreast of her emotional tribulations indicates the productivity of negative affect vlogs in generating intimacy, investment and connectivity on YouTube.

Conclusion: A pharmacology of exposure

Negative affect vlogs operate as a primary site of the digital intimate public by exhibiting a potential for community-building through (interpersonal) connection and for self-reflection through (affective) self-disclosure. The connections evoked by these negative affect vlogs, however, involve an imbalanced dynamic of visibility. Contrary to the anonymity emblematic of online forums or instant messaging services (see Cáceres Zapatero et al., 2013; Misoch, 2015; Virnoche, 2001), YouTube vlogging is not predisposed to protect the anonymity of its subjects, instead placing a premium both on showcasing one’s physical appearance and disclosing intimate information about the self. Indeed, in light of YouTube’s expanding celebrity culture (Berryman and Kavka, 2017), it is all the more likely that negative affect vlogs will be published by those, like Zoe or Trisha, who have already shared a wealth of personal footage online and who have also attached their real name to their online presence. Thus, in the case of YouTube vlogging, anonymity rests not with the subject but with the audience, rendering inseparable the intimacy of these vlogs from the one-to-many nature of their outreach. Even more so than the mommy blogs that Morrison has studied, crying vlogs involve an affective self-disclosure – indeed, a self-exposure – that ‘circulate[s] according to network rather than broadcast theories of transmission’ (Morrison 2011: 37, original emphasis). Following James Ash, we could even suggest that crying vlogs are ineluctable expressions of the affective dynamics of YouTube as a network, since Ash urges us to consider ‘the whole network as tramsmitting and translating sense itself, which in turn generates affects as these sensations encounter bodies’ (Ash, 2015: 123) – not unlike Trisha hitting the kitchen floor, bang, in order to address her ‘silent, affectively present’ interlocutors (Berlant, 2011: 25).

This imbalanced dynamic of visibility allows a community to coalesce around the affective labour of a particular – and particularly vulnerable – body, which in turn reveals the paradox at the heart of social media exposure. After all, the very content of crying/anxiety vlogs is about exposing one’s vulnerability in an effort to remedy it through further exposure. In order to claim an affective community based on shared anxiety or tears, YouTubers must emotionally expose themselves, even though the exposure itself – whether in the case of social anxiety or a perceived failure to achieve social expectations – is presumably what has caused them to become vulnerable in the first place. Like the pharmakon borrowed from Plato by Derrida (2004) to describe writing as both poison and remedy, or like Stiegler’s (2013) subsequent development of the term ‘pharmacology’ to highlight both the curative and destructive role of the ‘interfaces between the human and the technological’ (Abbinnett, 2015: 66), crying vlogs reveal self-exposure to be both the disease and the cure offered by social media. Pharmacologically speaking, YouTube vloggers’ expressions of anxiety, pain, frustration, and disappointment – all of which register the cruelty of optimistic attachments to fantasies of the ‘good life’ (Berlant, 2011) – are both the symptom of the emotional vulnerability exacerbated by the making-public of private life and its reparative treatment through mediated intimacy with others like ourselves. Self-exposure in both senses of the term – visibility and vulnerability – is thus simultaneously the sacrifice and the salve of our online affective expressions. The disadvantage of the pharmakon as remedy, however, is that one can never stop reproducing the conditions of the disease, which may go some way to explaining the increase in crying vlogs in recent years.

Though negative affect vlogs are no less attention-grabbing than their positive counterparts, the conditions which sustain their circulation differ dramatically. Forgoing the promise of monetary return, creators of negative affect vlogs instead propose a different trade for their affective labour, exchanging their productive tears in return for the ears of silent interlocutors. Through these productions of discomfort, unease and distress, YouTube vloggers are able to cement ties of intimacy with and among their followers, evidence their claims to authenticity, and in some cases, even achieve emotional catharsis through their generation of communities in which they can be heard. Crying and anxiety vlogs thus attest not only to the presence of negative affect in the force field of YouTube positivity but also to its value within the alternative economies of the digital intimate public.

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