Mimic vlogs – that is, a form of fictional web series that tell stories utilising a vlog format – draw on audience expectations to elicit a particular response. Mimic vlogs use the conventions of an authentic format to tell a story in a way that resembles a genre audiences know and trust, much like mockumentaries and other forms of parodies. It is integral to understand how viewers approach and understand these videos, particularly on a platform such as YouTube which hosts both amateur, professional, usergenerated, and professionally-produced content. Mimic vlogs constitute a small part of a much larger phenomenon of replica content online, such as deep fakes, cheap fakes, fake news, misinformation and disinformation. This exploratory paper draws on primary data from YouTube viewers to investigate what methods audience members use to identify video content. Participants watched and responded to a series of eight videos made up of both user-generated vlogs and fictional mimic vlogs to determine the elements viewers considered while categorising the videos. The approaches participants employed were frequently unreliable, with participants coming to different conclusions based on the same piece of information. Contributing factors to this effect included the viewers’ perceptions around authenticity, plausibility, and markers of quality in each video. The results of this research illustrate the ways in which audiences read texts in different ways. This is in line with Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding theory (1980) and broader audience reception studies which suggest that audiences play a vital role in interpreting texts and their meaning. Consequently, this research shows how audiences are vulnerable to even low-stakes replica content online, in part, because of their decoding of textual elements.
The category of ‘transmedia story’ is generally assumed to be static. That is, once a multi-platform story world has been classified as transmedia, it is assumed that this classification applies on an ongoing basis. However, these classifications may in fact need to be revisited, particularly when a story is told in ‘real time’ across social platforms that privilege immediacy. In this paper, we examine the relationship between diegetic social media paratexts and the core text they connect to, using the example of in online transmedia story The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. We argue that once the narrative has concluded, the transmedia status of the story becomes problematic, given the effort required to stitch together the different transmedial components. Utilising qualitative and quantitative content analysis, the show is analysed to determine the relationship between the different elements of the text as presented on YouTube and Twitter. The diegetic paratexts distributed through social media site Twitter contribute to the narrative by expanding upon the events of the core text conveyed on YouTube, and providing context – but never resolution – to the plot. The Twitter paratexts are inherently dependent on the core text but are also directional in that audience members must move from one platform to another in order to engage with the full story. Additionally, the temporal model of release for the core text changes the impact of the diegetic paratexts, while limiting the longevity of the transmedia aspects to the text as a result of dispersed narrative and dependency created by the relationship between textual elements. This analysis helps to extend understandings of transmedia storytelling as we propose the concept of ‘transmedia artefacts’, a category for narratives that transform once they are no longer able to be engaged with as live online objects.
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