hello and welcome to my easy-to-understand guide to zoella specifically focusing on a media language and representation zoella is an optional text for the online media unit which is on component 2 of the educast a level exam if you are studying alpha instead of zoella for component 2 this video is probably still quite relevant a lot of the content is going to be the same it's just that you might have to think of your own examples from alphas blogs blogs and website instead but please carry on watching the video because you'll find a lot of the keywords and information is very useful for you as well I will be doing a separate video for zoella about industries as well and probably audiences too although there is some content in this video about audiences that may well be useful as well so we're gonna be looking at social media influences in general whether that is their vlogs on YouTube or their websites and blogs and we're going to be looking at the typical conventions and whether so Ella's products conform to these conventions or not if we start by looking at the kind of vlogs that a lot of social influences do on YouTube you often get the same kind of thing I guess is what you're seeing on my video right now so either person will talk directly to the camera to their audience it's often done on a one camera setup so not you know lots of cameras from different angles but one camera that the person the vlogger operates themselves they will often have some lights so I've got some some lights going on here I in fact I've got three lights so and that's becoming increasingly common with bloggers because lights are so easy to get hold of and I know I've shown lights before in some of my videos I've got two large lights set up but I also have one of these little ring lights which is kind of on a wire and these are quite common now for vloggers you get the kind of quite scary high exposure look but I'll just pop it back where it was but lights are so easy and cheap to get hold of now but actually the lighting can be quite natural but it also can be quite nice and bright and and high key lighting because it tends to look better on for vlogs and draws attention to the person that is vlogging sometimes what will happen is zoella will very clearly be filming on her phone so you get these handheld shots quite close-up clearly not on a tripod clearly not a professional camera and that is designed to again feel very natural very relatable for an audience because everyone has done a video like this before with their own phones and sometimes she even you know flips the camera on her phone so you're seeing her point of view and it sees point of view shots that somehow kind of put us into her shoes and make us feel as though we are her seeing what she is seeing another convention of vloggers and social media online media is that they will often encourage audience interaction in some way even if it's just an illusion of offering the audience something to do so she will often say things like leave a comment below and tell me what you think or don't forget to like and share this video or hit the subscribe button so she will encourage and give instructions to the audience and she will encourage them to be more active in the way that they they deal with her and certainly on her website you can also leave comments as well and you can comment like and share on her social media pages she does include a lot of intertextual 'ti which is quite a common feature of postmodern products she's constantly referring to makeup products and films and music artists both on her website and on her youtube channel and this is a good way of engaging those fans of those products as well and making herself seem quite current and and relevant to her audience her constant collaborations with other social media influences are also into textual references and obviously she's borrowing ideas from them and their cross promoting their channels and so I suppose it's this idea of kind of bricolage and and borrowing texts from other people and borrowing ideas and videos and sharing them across different channels on YouTube so it's this idea that that nothing is really real it's all just copied so she's got she's got videos that are copies of things that Alfie has on his blog as well and so you know there is this idea that perhaps there is something postmodern about her online media products in addition there are some other postmodern conventions that online media has it's very clear she is aware she is a media product you know she we see the camera sometimes she shows us the lights she talks about editing the video she talks directly to the audience so this is self-awareness she's very clear that she she knows she is a vlogger she makes it very obvious that she films and edits her videos herself she's not trying to be a fiction product it's quite fragmented narratives as well so her videos are broken up into short tiny chunks sometimes we go back and forth we're never quite sure what day we're on you might have a small montage from the morning of one day and then she'll go to something else and we'll skip forward a few hours in time so the narratives of her videos are sometimes quite jumbled up and jumpy and that's quite a common feature of postmodern products however there are aspects that challenge the idea of post-modernism she tries to put across this idea of reality so you know there's there's this real emphasis on how real she is to her audience and she tries to kind of show you the real her and so this idea of realism diet is quite contradictory of the idea of post-modernism even if we make a judgement that it's not that real so there are elements of post-modernism in in her work but it's it's not the most overtly postmodern product you could find than what you see in TV programmes is something called continuity editing where you don't really notice the editing at all it's almost designed to be hidden so they will edit a scene from different angles and they will cut to different camera shots to create one smooth motion and it doesn't really jump around on the screen and you often don't notice the editing in TV programmes or films where is actually in vloggers in their videos it's actually really conventional because it's all shot on one camera angle like this it's really hard to cover up the edits you can't just cut to another camera angle and pretend it was one long smooth conversation I'd love to pretend that I do these videos in one like 10 minutes week without stop but obviously I make mistakes I say things that don't make sense so and I'm much like a vlogger would what they tend to do is they will often leave their mistakes in and sometimes that makes them more relatable if we see them kind of messing up or what they do is they do what's called jump cutting so they will cut like this and it will become completely different and sometimes the sound amp around in that and you notice the editing and sometimes they will use things like what we call a dip to black which looks a little bit like this although use kind of slightly more unusual transitions like fades and dissolve or even wipes if we're going crazy so the editing tends to be a lot more noticeable in vlogs for social media influences because they tend to be doing it themselves you know there isn't a big team working on this normally a lot of social media vloggers you know edit their own videos on their own computers at home just like I'm doing here I'm in work but it means that the editing is often you know jump cuts and or very noticeable errors that they've had to leave in basically to make themselves look more relatable a lot of the time with media products and editors job is to cut out any unnecessary pauses so it doesn't seem like nothing is happening and then it seems to flow quite nicely but actually with zoella sveden leaves in pauses or mistakes or things that are happening that are not necessarily relevant to the video so example in this clip she starts to hear rain on the ceiling of her house or in the roof she looks up she talks about it it makes it feel quite real she keeps stopping her vlog and and stopping what she's talking about and starting to talk about the weather instead so it feels quite unscripted and it feels quite quite real as opposed to kind of glossy and constructed so it adds to this sense of realism for the audience so Ella will employ a very specific tone of voice and choice of verbal language when she's vlogging on YouTube or when she's doing any kind of video or audio based work so she'll talk in a very informal weõll way and that means she might use very informal language sometimes you know she might be a bit silly she might be laughing and she often says things like him oh I really hope you guys enjoy this so she'll kind of directly address the audience as though they're her friends and she will kind of talk about them as though they're her mates and that's very engaging for an audience he will feel like they have a personal relationship with her and as though they really are her friend we often refer to this as parasocial relationship or para social interactions and what that means is that kind of social relationship or interaction that you might have with someone that feels real but isn't it's not a real friendship it's not a real relationship it's just feels like one because of the way she talks to her fans tying in to that idea of informal or colloquial language to appeal to younger people she also often uses things like emojis or graphics added on to videos whether that is videos on her YouTube channel or whether it's videos or images on her website or even on her social media pages you will see a lot of the use of text and emojis because that's become more common graphic or written language for younger people setting is also quite important for vloggers people like that as zoella often feature their videos within their own personal spaces so their cars their homes and even within their homes it's their kind of rooms that you would consider to be quite private and intimate like the bedrooms the bathrooms and so again that feels like we're being invited into her personal space it makes us feel like we're part of her home and often if you look at these settings they're very overtly feminine lots of pastel pinks and purples and golds and glitter and fairy lights it's um it's very feminine it's very fun quite youthful innocent quirky so it kind of adds to the representation of her as a person as well you'll see this media language echoed on her website as well lots of feminine colors lots of glitter lots of gold and the font is very overtly feminine and Sarah for that kind of cold font in her branding and so you know potentially adding to her representation is quite feminine innocent fun quirky young lady but also quite engaging for a young female audience to mozzarella's main focus used to be and you know primarily has been things like hair and makeup you know she started off as a kind of makeup vlogger and it's become more generic life style vlogging over the years but certainly her main focus is and always has been makeup and so there's a lot of references a lot of shots of makeup being used she often does tutorials you'll see videos on her website and also on YouTube as well about how to use certain products how to get certain looks she'll talk you through how she does her makeup and and that's very conventional she also touches her face a lot so when she's doing her makeup and she'll flick her hair around all over the place she'll kind of flick through it like this and it's quite a feminine thing to do it's something that we often associate with young women and about looking good so there's lots of conventions to do with that with hair and makeup and appearances as well a lot of her videos are about normal relatable things whether it is hoovering her house or putting up the Christmas decorations or cooking a meal or doing her makeup they are activities that a lot of people do very regularly at home and that makes her more relatable the fact that we can see her cleaning and cooking and doing her makeup the fact that we see her sometimes with no makeup on it adds to this idea that she's just a normal relatable person we feel like we're seeing behind the scenes when we see her with no makeup on or we see her house messy before she's tidied it it has this idea of slight imperfection and that is quite endearing for an audience because we feel that she's not totally perfect that that somehow makes her more relatable and that we can identify with her more actually so ella is posted several videos on her YouTube channel about things that are often typically considered by the media to be not like the kind of typical or perfect or expected aspects of somebody's personality so for example zona so Ella's done several videos about mental health where she's been crying into the camera and talking about her own experiences with things like depression and anxiety and again these are very current topics things that a lot of young people in particular can relate to and identify where and so that helps us to see her as a real person and as to this illusion of reality as an a-level student you have to question how real this is is this the real honest truth about zoella or all the things that you are seeing is the media language a kind of cleverly constructed hyper real version of her is she a simulacrum or or is she reality you know there is editing that goes on she does have lights she does have makeup she does make choices it's not necessarily the real thing so you have to be quite critical about how real the representations are and you have to be quite critical about how those representations have been constructed through media language choices like the costumes the makeups the props the lights sometimes audiences make assumptions that these kind of videos are real and that what you are getting is reality and actually what you have to do is question everything you know I'm just a teacher and I still make the choice to put the lights on because without the lights it feels much darker and I don't feel that it looks as nice on camera I will fully admit that on the days I know I'm going to film I might put a bit of extra makeup on or I choose my outfit a little bit more carefully than I might do normally I often wipe the whiteboard so that the background looks a little bit less messy I am very much known as a messy teacher and if you could see my desk in front of me I'm not going to turn the camera around because it's actually embarrassing how untidy it is but you don't see that on camera although you do get a little bit of my mess in the background here but you don't really see the real mrs. Fisher you see the constructed mediated version that I put across for you and it's exactly the same with zoella you are seeing a constructed version of her that she has chosen to construct very carefully in a way that makes it seem as real as possible but that you still have to appreciate the amount of construction that has gone in if you think about typical gender stereotypes that you may have studied earlier on in the course you're aware probably that women often represented in quite a domestic or sexualized way and you have to think about whether those things may apply to zoella whether you can see those aspects of representation reflected in her products or not so well there isn't often sexualized in her videos or images there are the odd photo she might post which seems to be a little bit more racy where she might be wearing slightly more revealing clothes but that tends to be quite unusual and actually the most of her videos most of her images of blog posts are quite family friendly perhaps because she has got quite a young target audience also she has to you have to remember that she doesn't really want to cause any bad publicity for herself because that would affect her sponsorship she also needs to make sure that she doesn't say anything that is gonna get flagged up by any of YouTube's moderation software like the algorithms look out for potentially offensive words and also when her website is going through kind of anyone's filters sometimes people's Internet filters scan out or filter out any websites that might include anything particularly offensive so she wants to make sure that her vlogs don't get Dee monetized by YouTube or they don't get deleted entirely and that she wants to make sure that her blog and her website is open to everybody and accessible to everybody as possible and doesn't get filtered out because of any extreme content have a little think about Judith Butler's gender performativity theory I do have a video on this if you would like a little bit more clarification on the theory it is a very complex one but think about all the performances that zoella goes through in her videos that reinforce the ideas of gender the doing of the hair the straightening the makeup the cleaning the cooking tidying the decorating there's lots of performances she goes through on a regular basis that reinforced her feminine identity to the audience so ella also presents quite traditional ideas of masculinity in a lot of her videos where we see alfie and some of our other male friends doing things like going to the gym driving cars in one of her videos it's her that's cleaning the house cooking and decorating and Alfie has just gone out for the day while she does that so kind of reflecting this idea that women are domestic and men are not so the representations of gender of reasonably stereotypical however we do see quite a lot of kind of metrosexuality within the videos that do feature some of her male friends and Alfie as well so we do see them doing face packs together and they do some quite typically feminine activities together so sitting down like kind of having like sleepovers with masks and dressing gowns which we often associate it's being kind of more female activity so perhaps reflecting the growing trend for metrosexuality within men zoella does go to quite a lot of lengths to represent herself and women in general as being quite strong and powerful we see on her website for example that she does try and challenge some of those gender stereotypes and she has some more powerful blogs that you can read if you type in who run the world which is one of her blogs from 2017 you will find this article here which I'm kind of showing you on the screen at the moment it's quite an interesting article where she talks about her friends her family and celebrities that inspire her and she talks about their careers and their successes and and women being brave and strong and determined and and you know very the very kind of play on words about who run the world you know intertextual reference to the Beyonce song and Beyonce's kind of known as a strong powerful female singer and so some quite powerful strong representations that challenge those stupid typical stereotypes of women in the media so that was my video about media language and representation in zoella and I will be doing another video about industries and covering some audiences stuff as well at some point but please do check out my other videos as well there's lots of other things that could help you on my channel don't forget to hit subscribe so that you can be updated every time I add a new video I'm gonna be adding videos all year not just about set texts and theories but also for revision tips as well