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recently, it has also become a place for settling them. Many judges and attorneys are beginning to use vlogging as an avenue for legal redress, requiring offenders to publicly apologize for their actions on YouTube.

In 2008, a Florida judge sentenced two teenage pranksters to record and upload an apology on YouTube, a video in which they take responsibility and express regret for throwing a drink at a drive-thru employee (Manjoo). In 2009, a St. Louis police officer sued a local woman who falsely accused him of sexual misconduct. When she couldn’t pay the $100,000 in damages awarded by the judge, the parties settled on a YouTube apology (Garrison). In 2011, the legally mandated YouTube apology became national in scope. Following the terms of a settlement, Senate candidate Charlie Crist uploaded an apology for using music by David Byrne in campaign ads without the songwriter’s permission (Gordon). Following the lead of YouTube users, the legal system seems to be recognizing vlogging’s reach (chapter four), its paradoxical immediacy and permanence (chapter five), its affordances for emotion display (chapter three), and its sense of public vulnerability (chapter one), all of which combine to make vlogging a more

or less ideal 21st _{century version of the stocks—a space where wrongdoers can be}

publicly humbled.

I intentionally use this dated analogy to stress vlogging’s continuity with older forms of expression. Like many studies of new media, this dissertation has perhaps overemphasized the newness of its research object and overstated its potential to transform the art of rhetoric, and with it the public sphere. Reflecting on my four primary case studies, I am most struck by the continuity of vlogging with other, earlier forms of oral and emotional communication, that is, with earlier speech genres. All of the vlogging genres I have explored in these pages

Figure 6.1: Politician Charlie Christ apologizes via vlog. From Law12345100. “Charlie Crist Official Apology to David Byrne for Copyright Infringement.” YouTube. 11 April 2011. Web. 8 May 2012.

carry familiar names and familiar purposes. The apology, like the confession, the reaction, the rant, or the eyewitness testimony, was not invented for YouTube. This dissertation, then, documents not the emergence of radically new forms of expression, but rather the remediation of existing forms of expression into new contexts and new ceremonials.

Vlogging and Remediation

A decade ago, J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin coined the term

remediation to describe how new media composers, rather than revolutionizing or reinventing the ways texts are assembled, actually feed upon and repurpose earlier forms. Focusing on the visual, Bolter and Grusin argue that

New media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media, digital visual media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, and print. (14)

Just as the webpages analyzed by Bolter and Grusin remediated print genres (encyclopedias, newspapers, and so on), vlogs remediate speech genres, including the heavily emotional ones I have called pathetic genres.

Vloggers remediate earlier genres not because they lack ingenuity. Rather, vloggers remediate earlier genres because in doing so they (re)appropriate the social actions associated with those genres. As my second chapter illustrates, Twilight readers composed reaction videos because “reaction” already carried meaning and purpose for the parties involved: for the media producers who desired information on their target markets, for publics with longstanding

fascinations with the emotive excesses of fans, and for Twilight fans already drawn into intense emotional relationships with one another. Vlogging genres remediate not only existing forms but also existing social structures—in the case of Twilight reactions, structures in which producers still produce, fans still react, and publics still watch fan frenzies with a mixture of perplexity, disgust, and delight. Acts of remediation, in this sense, can also be acts of social reproduction.

This does not mean, however, that vlogging is a redundant, stagnant, or vampiric form. Recognizing that one genre remediates another does not mean the two are equivalent: reproduction, after all, is not the same as repetition. On the contrary, as my “confessions” chapter demonstrates, parallel genres can function very differently within different performative settings or ceremonials. The dinner table confession, on the one hand, and the confession vlog, on the other, may have similar rhetorical features, similar emotional registers, and so on. Within two different ceremonials, however, the confession genre functions quite differently. In one ceremonial, the confession may be a private act of defiance, and in the other, a public cry for identification and an invitation to constructive dialogue.

Remediation, then, transforms not only the text but also the “interlocutory positions” it posits, distributing differing roles and relations among those present to the text (Freadman 63). Consequently, remediation alters possibilities for response and uptake. A politician’s public apology, on television or in a public square, may draw scowls and shaking heads, but on YouTube, it draws remixes, parodies, and of course comments both sympathetic and caustic. Remediation, in short, is far more than simple repetition, more than reframing or repackaging,

more even than adaptation or translation. Remediation is an act of rhetorical transfer or reassignment; an act of social reproduction, yes, but one whose progeny may differ considerably from their parents. Transplanted to a changed environment, like a worker transferred to a different workplace, an athlete traded to a new team, or a piece of furniture moved to a different home, remediated genres take on new looks, new roles, and new purposes.

As my chapters have suggested, three affordances of vlogs clearly

differentiate its genres from the speech genres they remediate: vlogging’s reach, replayability, and modularity.

Vlogging’s reach and replayability go hand-and-hand, as the medium of online video sharing allows utterances to be replayed across time and space. As the technology needed to vlog becomes more and more inexpensive and

ubiquitous, rhetors gain new and wide-reaching access to public spheres. As my fourth chapter on witness videos illustrated, the reach and replayability of

vlogging is allowing everyday people to broadly circulate information, ideas, and attitudes.

This rhetorical enfranchisement is complicated, however, by vlogging’s modularity. As my chapter on rants explains, because vlogs are digital, they can be easily duplicated, manipulated, and moved. They can be readily ripped apart, remixed, recontextualized, and redeployed for other rhetorical purposes

(Manovich, Warnick). The “Asians in the Library” rant video demonstrated quite dramatically how vlogs can be rapidly reappropriated, as those who view and pass along these videos endow them with new meanings and purposes that the original vlogger likely never intended or even imagined. The modularity of

“Asians in the Library,” for example, allowed it to circulate more or less ironically, as a parody and nullification of its own explicit message. Through comments, blog posts, social media postings, e-mails, and so on, viewers of “Asians in the Library” thoroughly repackaged the video, situating it within new ceremonials and thereby investing it with new roles, meanings, and purposes. “Asians in the Library” might seem an extreme case, but other viral videos, like

NuttyMadam3575’s reactions (Chapter Three), as well as rants like Paul “Bear” Vasquez’s “Double Rainbow” and Chris Crocker’s “Leave Britney Alone” follow similar patterns of ironic uptake. Furthermore, even when vlogs don’t go viral or suffer from ironic uptake, their easy modularity makes vlogs open to rapid recontextualizations and the transformations (wanted or unwanted, thrilling or chilling) that come along with these movements.

In short, it is not really vlogging’s content, not what we actually see or hear on video, that makes this mode of address potentially revolutionary. After all, we have all witnessed confessions, reactions, rants, testimonials, and apologies many times before. What makes vlogging different and potentially transformative is its reach, replayability, and modularity—and the participatory architecture and culture of online video sharing that makes all this possible. What is new and different about vlogging is not its genres, but rather how online video sharing allows these genres to move and to accrue meanings through the collective activities of their viewers.

Vlogging’s Vital Expressivity

The active participation of viewers is one thing that critics overlook when they condemn vlogging as emptily expressive, egoistic, and emotionally