Nineteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

One of the most popular forms of travel “literature” today is the travel-vlog. YouTube is awash in these travelers, who can even make a career out of their travels through monetization of their content. While very few are particularly informative or groundbreaking at first glance, the way in which the medium frames and packages their content is both fascinating and unsettling. While the vast majority of these vlogs employ a style of immersive documentary realism and profess to educate their viewers about maligned corners of the world, this veneer often peels away under critical inquiry, revealing entitlement, exploitation, and ignorance. My project is a three-fold investigation into the nature of this genre, the first two of which are genealogical and diagnostic, the third of which is speculative and potentially transformative. The first examines the crossroads of travel literature and empire that have led to the present moment as well as the ideological implications of the representations. I then develop on the “post-cinematic” medium itself, namely its spatiotemporal and economic dynamics. Drawing on critical approaches to cartography, I pivot to an analysis that takes into account a potentially oppositional reading of this genre resulting from an unstable “polyscopic” spectatorship. Through a close reading of several vloggers, I ultimately ask whether this potential modality can ever be realized within the confines of a genre characterized by shallow cosmopolitanism, a commodification of destination, and the fabrication of parasocial intimacy.