Janice Utomo Prompt #4

Michelle Choi’s Living Alone Diaries: Relatable, Realistic and Intimate


Calling New York City your home during your 20s is a whole vibe for youngsters today. New York radiates excitement, independence, self growth and discovery. In a city filled with a diverse range of values, races, movements and nations, there is an unending list of things to learn – the people, culture, art, food and career. The media has constantly reinforced the idea that New York is the place to be, romanticizing it as a place where imaginations and dreams are brought to life on screen. The glamorized image of New York is shown by traditional celebrities, who “embrace social media to create direct, unmediated relationships with fans, or at least the illusion of such” (Marwick, 2015, p.18). Traditional media portrays the city’s most affluent and successful lives, following the narrative that the city adheres to the worldly values of achievement and advancement. We see the Met Gala, with celebrities and red carpets, or the Gossip Girl’s Upper East Side lifestyle, all of which are excluded from the commoners.

As traditional media fails to portray the real and unfiltered life in New York, influencers enter the picture. Influencers are “everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles” (Abidin, 2015). One of my favorite influencers based in New York is Michelle Choi, a youtuber who documents her experiences navigating her 20s in New York. Michelle was born and raised in California, graduated from college in Seoul and moved to NYC alone for the first time. She narrates her story through the lens of a New Yorker in their 20s, creating relatable content that has accumulated over 89 million views and 1 million subscribers on youtube and more than 400,000 followers on Instagram. Much of Michelle’s youtube channel depicts her day-to-day life in New York through her Living Alone Diaries series. Occasionally, Michelle would post videos exclusively dedicated to wellness, what she eats in a day as well as beauty makeup tutorials. The majority of Michelle’s follower base are people in their 20s in New York City and beyond, as she also has a strong following in Asia. Her success can be attributed to how relatable and real she is as she talks about the tiniest details of her day, her struggles and mental health.

To better understand her content, let’s take a look at one of her recent Living Alone Diaries vlog titled “Getting my life together, trying new things, nervous breakdowns and pep talks” (Choi, 2021). Right off the bat, Michelle starts out the video talking about how she did nothing during the weekend as all her plans got cancelled and showed us the aftermath of her lazy weekend, characterized by her unwashed dishes and messy apartment. She points out that although people perceive her to have her life together 24/7, she emphasizes how real she is by demonstrating how dull her days can be. Crystal Abidin’s (2015), an anthropologist and ethnographer of digital culture in Curtin University, explains that “a key feature of lifestyle influencers is documenting the trivial and mundane aspects of everyday life”. By doing so, they are able to relate to their followers in dialogue. Influencers are “more interesting than actors because they are perceived to represent commonality” (Abidin, 2015). By utilizing disclosive intimacies, Michelle is able to engage with her followers to give the impression of an exclusive and intimate exchange, especially as she constantly refers to her followers as “you guys” throughout the video. In fact, she asks her subscribers to “comment down below” for their thoughts on lazy weekends to build perceived interconnectedness.







After picking up a package and mopping her apartment, she proceeds to talk about the company that sponsored this video. Advertorials, which is a pastiche of “advertisements” and “editorial” are “highly personalised, opinion-laden promotions of products/services that influencers personally experience and endorse for a fee” (Abidin, 2015). In this video, Michelle was sponsored by Brooklinen, a company that she describes to offer high quality bed sheets at a reasonable price point. She also gave her subscribers a specialized code “MichelleC” to get $20 off their orders over $100. We also see her put on her freshly washed sheets on her bed, lay on it and provide highly detailed descriptions of how “it feels so good on the skin and has a little bit of weight on it” as well as how it “gets softer and comfier after every wash” (Choi, 2021). As Michelle has built such an intimate relationship with her followers, advertorials are highly successful as Michelle’s subscribers believe in her more due to how real and relatable she is. While Michelle seems genuinely raw and intimate with her viewers, some may argue that “influencers are ultimately motivated by underlying commercial interests and expend effort to maintain impressions of intimacies with followers” (Abidin & Thompson, 2012, p.472).






Later on the video, Michelle shows a clip of her best friend in Korea trying to make her feel better after her week of nervous breakdowns that week. Here, we see Michelle shows her vulnerability and struggles as she talks about how she really cares about what people think of her, especially when it comes to her personality and how hate comments on youtube affects her greatly. Abidin’s research shows how “perceived interconnectedness has resulted in social tensions in influencers’ personal lives”, resulting in some influencers to cope by “disregarding haters, publicly shaming haters, adapting to readers’ demands, drawing topical boundaries, and demarcating work and leisure hours” (Abidin, 2015). Although Michelle seems to accept these tensions as part of her job, we see that her mental health is affected by these comments.







All in all, Michelle Choi’s youtube videos give us a glimpse of her realistic life in New York City as a young adult in her 20s. As she builds intimacy and perceived connectedness with her audience, her continued success depends on her ability to stay true and genuine, working with brands she actually believes in and giving her audience her honest opinion on things.




Work Cited

Abidin, C. (2015). Communicative <3 intimacies: Influencers and perceived interconnectedness. A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology. https://adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/

Abidin, C., Thompson, E.C. (2012). “Buymylife.com: Cyberfemininities and Commercial Intimacy in Blogshops”, Women’s Studies International Forum 35:467-477.

Choi, Michelle. (2021, September 19). Living Alone Diaries | Getting my life together, trying new things, nervous breakdowns, pep talks [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzxjaY2kWnM

Marwick, A. (2015). You may know me from YouTube: (Micro)-celebrity in social media. Pp. 333-350 in A Companion to Celebrity, edited by P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc.