Researching the Narrative Construction of Mommy Vlogger Influencers

The concept of microcelebrity was coined by Senft to describe how young women around the millennium started drawing on the affordances of early social media to broadcast their lives online through still images, video, and blogging. Senft observed that these women, often referred to as “camgirls,” put great care into performing for their fans coherent, branded selves.¹ As attested by a substantial body of work by critical media scholars since then, practices of microcelebrity are key to understanding not only these presentations of self online but contemporary social media participation broadly. This literature claims that in the second half of the 2000s, when everyday life became increasingly media- and information-saturated, logics of postmodern consumer capitalism “trickled down” to ordinary people.² Since then, it has become a guiding principle underlying ordinary people’s self presentation in social media that attention equals value: to stand out in the attention economy of social media, which rewards visibility, mediation, and attention, they must carefully curate and promote an online identity as if it were a branded good.^{3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11}

Mommy vloggers are one type of social media microcelebrity.¹² (In my PhD I use the UK English term mummy.) They have emerged alongside mommy bloggers, family vloggers,¹³ and family influencers whose public identities, status, and, in some cases, careers are constituted around highly publicized social media performances of parenting and family life.^14,15,16

Along with other contemporary incarnations of family-centered social media microcelebrity, mommy vloggers capitalize on new models of media entrepreneurialism to accumulate audiences, who are invested in following their everyday family life and, by engaging with their content, help establish them as influencers.^{17,18,19,20,21} Influencers, also referred to as internet celebrities,²² are commonly understood as third-party endorsers, or opinion leaders, who can influence large groups of people by virtue of being able to attract and keep their attention and gain their trust and loyalty.²³

My research shows that consistent with the practices of other internet celebrities,²⁴ mommy vloggers maintain a following across social media platforms and increasingly extend their reach to traditional media platforms. They position themselves and are oriented to by their followers as a particular type of public figure that is associated with specific practices, roles, rights, and sentiments. These have been developed and become relatively sedimented since the first mommy vlogs began appearing around 2006.

Specifically, mommy vloggers are a type of YouTuber: microcelebrities whose main social media presence is on, and following is organized around, their YouTube channel, which is where they share their mommy vlogs. Mommy vlogging is the key practice around which participants, practices, and sites, central to the construction of mummy vloggers’ identities and statuses, are organized.

Mommy vlogs are a subgenre of YouTube vlogs in which women perform motherhood through recorded, edited enactments of everyday life as a mother and which showcase domestic family life from a mother’s perspective. They are a type of gendered life-streaming practice²⁵ that has gained popularity on social media alongside other forms of gendered creative production that claim to show women’s experiences of practices related to traditional feminine domains of parenting, domesticity, beauty, and craft.^26,27,28,29 The vlogs are usually under fifteen minutes long and, once uploaded to YouTube, are circulated across social media by the women who explicitly claim the role of mommy vloggers.

Mommy vlogging shares generic features with home video-making. These earlier amateur practices of recording domestic life boomed in the 1950s and were traditionally carried out by men, giving them a “patriarchal character.” ³⁰ However, it is a key characteristic of mommy vlogs that they are recorded, edited, and shared on social media by women. And, in contrast to traditional home videos, mommy vlogs are connective and multiparticipatory. They arise from, and are woven into, intricate networks of networked individuals, digital technologies, devices, and commercial parties all of whom in various ways and to varying degrees can assert influence on their form, meaning, and social media trajectory. Thus, mommy vlogging is a practice of social media participation and a form of social media production that is characterized by a multiplication and diversification of participants involved in their production, circulation, and uptake.

Additionally, due to the editability of social media content and the elusive producer-recipient dynamics involved in vlogging, mommy vlogs, in contrast to earlier practices of home video-making, are capable of being morphable. In my research, I extend José van Dijck’s notion of media morphing, which describes multimedia digital technologies’ capacity to accommodate makeovers and remixes,³¹ to think of morphability as the fluidity of meaning and form of mommy vlogs.

The last quality of mommy vlogging that distinguishes it from earlier practices of home video-making relates to temporality. Sharing home videos or family photographs has long been considered a meaningful social act because these materials can serve as memory artifacts that give the impression of preserving a moment in time that can be evoked later – bringing scenes from the past into the present. Thus traditional home videos and family photographs were, and still are, produced in anticipation of future viewings.³² Mommy vlogging, on the other hand, involves additional layers of temporality.

While mommy vlogs can be archived to be watched later, they also are characterized by ongoingness and immediacy: the affordances of digital technologies allow the temporal distance between the recorded event and the circulation of, and engagement with, these vlogs to be far shorter than in traditional forms and practices of documenting family life. As in other social media content, there may be little or no perceived temporal gap between and segregation of the “now” of viewing from the “then” of the event depicted. My research shows that a central claim made in and for mommy vlogs is that they allow followers to experience events in mommy vloggers’ lives close to their occurrence: letting followers live alongside the mommy vlogger and share in her immediate perspective on ongoing life as a mother.

Mommy vloggers draw audiences into the events shown in vlogs and persuade them to adopt a position alongside them in these events by strategically drawing on the affordances of digital recording and editing tools, the instantaneity of social media publishing, and the preference for what Alexandra Georgakopoulou refers to as sharing-life-in-the-moment. These are logics that centrally underpin the temporalities involved in contemporary forms and practices of social media participation.

I suggest the term telling-by-doing to describe the mode of narration adopted by mommy vloggers in mommy vlogs. Telling-by-doing in YouTube vlogs can be understood as a form of embodied storytelling performance constituted by recorded, edited enactments of events in vloggers’ ongoing everyday life as seen from their personal perspective.

My research shows that mommy vloggers’ construction of themselves as mommy vlogger influencers relies on the work they put into sharing enactments of their daily domestic family life from their – specifically maternal – perspective, and presenting their mommy vlogging channels as spaces for sharing and following this open-ended narration of life as a mother. Furthermore, I identify recurrent choices made by mommy vloggers to encourage interpretations of their life trajectories and identities based on particular plots. Specifically, I show how they do so by reiterating and making strategically visible particular emplotment features (i.e., plot ingredients), across self-presentational sites on their YouTube channels and other social media sites.³³ Additionally, my research shows how advances in camera and software design, and incentives and pressures arising from the commercialization and formalization of social media, have influenced the emergence of distinguishing features of the telling-by-doing mode of narration in YouTube vlogs and its specific manifestation in mommy vlogs.

At the time of writing, around 4,000 women – most of whom started vlogging after 2013 – produce English language mommy vlogs. In the early 2010s, their subscribers typically numbered in the few hundreds or thousands: now the most popular have up to a million subscribers on YouTube and hundreds of thousands of followers on other platforms. Like other entrepreneurial vloggers, who have become YouTube stars, the best known mommy vloggers have successfully “groom[ed] their micro-celebrity into a vocation” as social media influencers.³⁴ Jesssfam is the most subscribed-to mommy vlogging channel on YouTube.³⁵ On May 5, 2019, Jessica (Jess) Skube, the mommy vlogger who runs this channel, won a Shorty Award,³⁶ selecting her as the most important influencer in the Parenting/Family category. Profiles have been made for Jess (as well as for each of her family members) on celebrity indexes such as The Famous People,³⁷ Famous Birthdays,³⁸ and Wiki Celebrities, and JesssFam fan pages exist on social media sites including Instagram³⁹ and Facebook.⁴⁰ Jess and other well established mommy vloggers have large-scale, global reach, maintaining their following across social media and traditional media platforms, their brand and status recognized and amplified by both traditional media and social media algorithms. This enables them to make a living out of practices related to mommy vlogging.

While few mommy vloggers have reached this level of exposure, sharing and following practices surrounding them are embedded and must be analyzed in the context of the “current climate of internet celebrity.”⁴¹ Mommy vlogging both can be, and increasingly is, pursued as a potentially profitable enterprise that can bring money and fame.

Mommy vloggers tend to have vast digital estates.⁴² Their social media presence comprises dynamic webs of interlinked social media content, participants, and sites generated through multiparticipatory, cross-platform activities that serve to keep track of how their lives unfold over time. These social media–afforded infrastructures of content, participants, and sites are constituted around practices of sharing, tracking, scrutinizing, and piecing together material about mommy vloggers’ personal lives in algorithmically regulated and increasingly directive social media environments.

The fact that the practices that go into constructing mommy vloggers’ public identities are focused on the revealing, unveiling, and concealing of information about their family lives is not unusual, nor is it surprising. Preoccupation with celebrities’ private lives and identities, and negotiations and tensions surrounding access to information about them, were key to the communication process by which celebrities were constructed and given increasing prominence in mass culture in the second half of the twentieth century. The identities of celebrities as public, celebrated figures are negotiated by an array of participants. And a growing body of work within sociocultural anthropology and media and communication studies has begun to identify tools, roles, and rights adopted by social media participants, algorithms, and media companies in interaction with which aspirational microcelebrities must negotiate their presentation online.^{43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52}

Drawing on and contributing to this literature, my PhD research provides insight into the strategies used by mommy vloggers to manage the construction of their public identities. I look into how they attempt to control the flow of information about their personal lives: how this material is shared, circulated, and interlinked on social media by them, social media participants, and algorithms. Specifically, my research aims to provide insight into how these strategies can be understood from a narrative interactional perspective. To put it briefly, I attempt to identify key narrative discourse practices, participants, and sites drawn upon by mommy vloggers to manage the construction of their public mommy vlogger influencer identity, and provide insight into the potential gains, entitlements, and risks entailed in claiming this identity.

To identify narrative strategies that serve to construct mommy vloggers’ identities as mommy vlogger influencers, I carried out an ethnographically informed, narrative interactional analysis and an Nvivo assisted manual coding of the flow of publicly available information about mommy vloggers on social media. Specifically, I conducted an “extended case analysis” of activities entailed in constructing the public mommy vlogger identities of seven mommy vloggers.⁵³ These case studies centered on how information about these seven mommy vloggers was shared and configured across social media platforms over an extended time period. Based on focused observations of sharing and following practices surrounding these seven, I identified and closely analyzed what social anthropologist Clyde Mitchell terms “telling cases.”⁵⁴ These are particular configurations of social media material, participants, and sites that provide insight into how general principles manifest under specific circumstances. This allows for a contextualized analysis that shows “how general regularities exist precisely when specific contextual circumstances are taken account of.”⁵⁵ Here, I focus on how I analyzed narrative practices on YouTube mommy vlogging channels.

I cultivated my initial understanding of the emergence of the phenomenon the mommy vlogger influencer and of the configurations of ways of telling, sites, and tellers central to construction of this identity through a loosely organized, cross-platform observation of following and sharing practices surrounding approximately 150 mommy vloggers. I started this in April 2015 and continued until November 2016. Ideas generated during this initial, informal “strolling” phase of my research, informed and were tested and refined through subsequent focused tracking and tracing of the flow of publicly available material about seven mommy vloggers. I started this extended case analysis of how the lives of these seven mommy vloggers are emplotted in social media on November 1, 2016.

My tracking and tracing of storytelling activities related to the construction of the seven mommy vloggers’ identities focused on their channels on YouTube. Contemporary practices of sharing and following mommy vloggers’ lives extend across social and – increasingly – traditional media. Some of these sites are overseen and moderated by mommy vloggers (i.e., their own social media profiles, including their YouTube channel(s)). Others, such as forums and fan pages, rely on the efforts of other people. However, mommy vloggers’ YouTube channels are hubs for the poly-storying practices that go into emplotting their lives. For a definition of poly-storying, see Sharing-Life-in-the-Moment as Small Stories by Alexandra Georgakapoulou. Here, key individuals, sites, and content that go into creating plots about mommy vloggers’ lives come together and the connections forged between them are carried over into and inform practices on other sites.

The significance of mommy vlogging channels for mommy vloggers’ identity construction is predicated on three interrelated aspects of the construction of their public influencer identities:

1. Mommy vloggers explicitly present themselves as such across social media platforms, and orient to mommy vlogging as their main social media practice and to their YouTube channel as their main social media profile. Their followers and social media algorithms collaborate to cement this positioning in various ways. In other words, identity claims made on their mommy vlogging channels are key to the construction of their public identity.
2. The centrality of mommy vloggers’ YouTube channels also derives from the fact that these channels constitute shared sites of interaction where participants who share and follow practices related to mommy vlogging can meet. While these practices do involve many other platforms than YouTube, these other sites are only frequented by subsets of participants. Mommy vloggers’ YouTube channels, on the other hand – like social media profiles broadly – constitute central loci of interaction.⁵⁶ They are sites that their followers broadly are likely to visit and have a shared interest in and knowledge about. Mommy vlogging channels can usefully be understood as bundles of affinity spaces that participants can drift in and out of at different times, can have various motives for visiting, and where they can adopt loosely organized participation roles and relationships.⁵⁷
3. Because mommy vloggers’ position their mommy vlogging channels as their main social media profile, and make these available as more or less transient shared spaces for interaction, mommy vlogging channels constitute “cultural nexuses” among mommy vloggers and their followers. That is, mommy vlogging channels offer key shared sites where participants affiliate with one another based on their shared interest in and commitment to sentiments, practices, roles, and identities related to mommy vlogging that have become more or less sedimented, and act as shared frames of reference and a guiding framework for action. Hence, these channels can be understood to function as affinity spaces that work as orientational foci around which practices in the mommy vlogging community and modes and degrees of participation in them are organized, and shared identities and sentiments are developed.

This is why contributions made to the construction of mommy vloggers’ identities by various participants, across modes, time, and sites can be traced back, and must be understood with reference to, these women’s mommy vlogging channels. This warrants an in-depth analysis of how mommy vloggers engage with YouTube affordances to present themselves as mommy vlogger influencers, and how their claims to these identities are taken up by participants in YouTube interaction and relate to YouTube features and algorithms.