Vlogging during the coronavirus crisis

Yi Dahua is a Chinese student in Turin, Italy. Although starting to vlog his overseas study life recently since February 2020, he already made a major breakthrough in viewership after the outbreak of coronavirus in Northern Italy in March. In his viral vlogs, he introduces how Italian citizens are experiencing the coronavirus crisis though videos shot in supermarkets, street corners and from his balcony. These vlogs, published on Dahua’s Weibo account, become an information source for Chinese audiences to “flesh out” the pandemic situation in Italy.

Dahua’s ascendance to micro-celebrity illustrates the “boundary-blurred” public sphere where distinct public actors, different storytelling genres and community dynamics co-construct the public communication about pandemic.

Becoming the witness aof pandemic

Yi Dahua updates his vlogs on multiple Chinese and global social media platforms. These short videos introduce his mundane study live in Turin. Like many Chinese international students in Europe, he holds mixed opinions towards European lifestyle and culture, and tries to play a role of cross-cultural communicator to the audiences of the vlogs. These early videos, however, did not generate much visibility on the internet.

Virality came out of a sudden; when in one video Dahua ran errands in Turin city on the first day of the national lockdown of Italy.  Several newly emerged Weibo hastags were added to the video title including # fighting against the pandemic in Italy, #pandemic in Italy, #pandemic around the globe, #fighting against the pandemic overseas. From these hashtags, we can observe the vlogger’s active design of his communicative context. Overseas study and student lifestyle is an established genre in the Chinese vlogging world and the audience is mainly composed of students. However, Dahua quickly fine-tuned his content production to feature quarantine student life and the hashtags helped him to target wider audiences beyond the student cohort. In other words, the vlogger injected his content into the global and local media hype of coronavirus crisis.  

Another important factor contributing to the virality of Dahua’s vlogs is mainstream news media’s uptake. The news channel of China Central Television (CCTV), the state-owned news outlet, reposted this vlog on Weibo. This is a critical moment for us to observe the boundary-blurred public sphere where news reporting is conducted by both professionals and ordinary citizens.

Sourcing from user-generated content on social media is a significant journalistic practice in today’s converged media landscape. Although we can regard this practice as aiming to amplify the voices from below, or as the empowering effect of digital media, we can also understand it as an unexpected outcome of the management of journalistic infrastructure according to geopolitical concerns.

The timely reportage of international events is relied on the infrastructure arrangement of a news institution, which sets up overseas news desks and dispatches correspondence. Most outlets distribute their technological and human resources like a web, hence a “news web”. The holes on this web are not evenly knitted. The web is tighter, thus more capitals are spent, at places which are assumed to yield more newsworthy events. In this sense, the preparatory journalistic routines reproduce geopolitical concerns.

In continental Europe, we assume events deserving global coverage mostly emerge from metropoles such as Berlin, Paris and Brussels. While it is understandable that news workers follow the agenda of political and economic institutions which are located at those places, natural disasters and the spread of pandemic recognize no geopolitical boundaries. When the earthquake and tsunami hit Indonesia in 2004, reporters of prestigious news outlets failed to bring first-hand footage back to home, simply because most news workers were sent to the Middle East, not Indonesia. Starting from that year, the concepts of citizen journalism and citizen witnessing began to be discussed widely in the public.

The vlog is the surrogate eye of Chinese audiences back home.

Although there are Chinese reporters in Italy, news coverage has been following safety measures and statistics on a general level. Moreover, the pandemic directly affects the mobility and gathering of people, rendering face-to-face journalistic interviews difficult. In this scenario, the aesthetic of “self-disclosure” and “documenting the ordinariness” imbedded in vlogging culture plays a critical informative function in the communication of pandemic.

Yi Dahua’s vlog conveys a sense of authenticity by illustrating how real people are struggling on the ground. CCTV also introduces the video in such way by posting “let’s have a walk on streets in Italy to see how people are fighting against the pandemic”.  The vlogger hence becomes the witness of the pandemic. The vlog is the surrogate eye of Chinese audiences back home.

Here we need to consider the similarity and difference between vlogging and witnessing. Bearing witness is self-reflective and it involves two steps. An individual sensory experience is followed by a speech act to make the experience public for those who were absent from the scene. The urge to tell in witnessing can be motivated by moral obligation, for instance the belief that the public deserves truth. In comparison, a vlogger also tells one’s individual experience, although no one ever asks. The confessional and self-disclosing urge is encouraged by the design of social media platforms to share and to brand oneself.

In a boundary-blurred public sphere, labelling every netizen as a journalist would be stretching the concept of citizen journalism too far. The camera equipped smart phones and digital media make it habitual for users to document events in routinary lives.  When emergency public events like pandemic happen, the imagery from ordinary people also plays an informative role, complementing to mainstream news reports.

Distant suffering, home understanding

Journalistic reports on distant suffering can be tricky, as it engages with both closeness and distance. On the one hand, journalists need to bring audiences close to the experience that is geographically and culturally distant. On the other hand, such experience need to be clarified, made logical and understandable through a home conceptual model.  Vlogging has a similar logic. Self-disclosure and self-representation center on “me”, a personal interpretation of the world.

Interestingly, the overseas student’s vlog implements similar contextualization cues with that of Chinese mainstream news reports on coronavirus in Europe. What happened in Italy is not only considered as distant suffering, but also a familiar plot that already been played out in China. On 10th March, the first day of the national lockdown of Italy, Yi Dahua walked out of his student house. In the video, he headed to an Apple Story in Turin and bought an iPhone for filming better quality videos. Along the way, he introduced that fewer people were on the street due to the safety policies.

A central theme of the vlog is to complain, in a humorous manner, that people on the street do not wear mouth masks. Yi Dahua believes that citizens in Turin have not yet realized the severe condition of the pandemic. Protecting oneself by mask is a conceptual model of how Chinese news reports and public opinions understand the pandemic safety measures. In early February, massive anecdotal news stories in China featured innovative ways to implement mouth mask policies in public places. Drones were hovering above street corners, surveilling and reminding anybody without a mask. Public announcement within communities and villages were shouted out through gigantic loudspeakers, asking people to wear masks. Under public communication as such, the image of “no mask in the public” is easily interpreted as ignorance, arrogance, lack of discipline and danger.

Therefore, the overseas student’s vlog and wider Chinese reports on coronavirus in Europe are infused with a sense of blame and anxiety. The crisis in Italy is understood from a Chinese way, not only because the pandemic has developed earlier in Chinese cities, but also because audiences cast the capability and possibility of domestic safety measures onto foreign countries.  However, the efficacy of mask protection belongs to highly contested medical knowledge that is explained drastically different from country to country.

A community of “no mask anxiety”

Mass media create what Benedict Anderson calls imagined communities. For example, although we may have never spoken to our neighbors next door, we feel comradeship of living in Brabant. This is because Omroep Brabant makes news out of local happenings, addressing us with the images of familiar street corners and happy carnival celebrators.

It is a community of anxious feeling and the members communicate through digital practices to sooth and relieve the anxiety.

Vlogging culture also creates communities. Yi Dahua’s vlog receives wide publicity and helps him to accumulate fan bases on different social media platforms. The design of Weibo easily affords community building through fan group chat. Now there are more than 1200 fans of the vlogger exchanging their opinions and experiences with the corona crisis. Many of them are overseas students who feel helpless and less protected by the safety measures in the countries of their study.

Yi Dahua’s fan base is a light community of the digital age par excellence. Celebrity following seems to be anying but light. Fans usually attach intense emotion to a star and conduct intensive media consumption. However, Dahua’s fans only come into groupness because of their frustrated experience with coronavirus policies in foreign countries. It is a community of anxious feeling and the members communicate through digital practices to sooth and relieve the anxiety. The intangible affect and the tangible communicative practices constitute the fiber and dynamic of this digital community.

How are we informed in a boundary-blurred public sphere ?

The topic of coronavirus crisis has developed into a media hype, whereby long lasting and high frequent information flows flood into our media landscape. The information is generated from distinct public actors, narrated with different storytelling structures and shapes varied community dynamics.

However, we may also be cautious that not every piece of information aims at clarifying the current pandemic scenario. Politicians, as elite communicators with established media visibility, can bypass the gatekeeping role of journalism, abuse the public health communication to advance their own political agenda. Vloggers are newly emerging gatekeepers. For one, they are able to report authentic lived experiences. For another, the personal and self-representational approach to a public event filters through the human impact and filters out the structural forces associated with that event.

The coronavirus crisis urge us to reflect on the boundary-blurred public sphere. Statistic modelling, contested medical knowledge, economic decisions, political concerns and personal stories all claim for their own validity. It is also no longer easy to separate facts from affects. In this scenario, the publics are informed more, but not necessarily informed well with accuracy and objectivity.