The Rising of New Anonymous Calming Video in South Korea
Have you ever thought you could get popularity from millions of YouTube views and subscribers even without showing your face? Somehow, YouTube makes anonymous fame more common and possible. Therefore, in this blog post, we will discuss how South Korean YouTubers accomplished that with the ‘anonymous calming’ videos.
When I scroll down my YouTube page, sometimes I wonder what to watch again. One time, while I was scrolling, I found this YouTube account called PlanD. Seeing the aesthetic thumbnail of the video, I started to click and watch the video, and ended up watching a lot of her videos. After digging deeper, I found that many accounts on YouTube, mainly from Japan and South Korea, offer a similar thing.
Overall, these videos show you their daily life in a calming and aesthetic way, without seeing their faces and very few dialogues. Some of the most popular accounts in South Korea are Haegreendal, PlanD, and Hanse (PopAsia, 2020) (Gallantly, 2020). The other unique thing that you will first realize from these YouTubers is all of them are women. With a similar pattern, I will pick one of my favorites which is PlanD.
Within just 2 years, PlanD successfully gained 1.03 million subscribers, with the most viewed video having 4.9 million views: “Homebird Making Clothing for BLACKPINK Cover Dance. Home Meals While Making Jisoo’s Hanbok”. In this video and in her other videos, her primary targeted audience of her videos are Asian women (mostly Korean women) because she mainly speaks in Korean. Additionally, we can see how she tries to expand her audience by adding BLACKPINK, one of the most popular girl bands, in her daily life video title. Therefore, the algorithm will show this video to BLACKPINK fans who come from around the world.
In this video, as in other videos, she first shows the recap of the whole video, so the audience is curious to watch the whole video. Her videos are mainly talking about the life of an independent woman who lives alone in Seoul, South Korea. In this most viewed video, she shows her daily life from cooking to making clothing for one of BLACKPINK members, which is part of her main career.
At first, watching this channel didn't make me think much about the details in it. However, from the brief description I've given, we can see the concept of cult of personality this channel is trying to build uniquely. We can understand the cult of personality from Benjamin's explanation; "The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the "spell of the personality," the phony spell of a commodity" (Benjamin, 1936, p. 57). Applying to Plan D as a YouTuber, we can see the "spell of the personality” she tried to build uniquely.
What I mean by a unique way of building a cult of personality is that she tried to build a relationship with the audience with her content, daily life, and showing the real side of her life. But on the other hand, she tried to not diminish what Benjamin called 'aura' by keeping her face private and less conversational dialogue. She also tries to maintain her aura by always displaying her video aesthetically and showing the beauty of her daily life. Therefore, at the same time the audience can feel close to her from knowing her everyday life, what her hobbies are, what type of work she does, and what she likes, all while still maintaining her aura by having her face unknown and having an aesthetic style of real life. This is by far combining the concept of Benjamin about Aura and Cult of Personality. While he argues that building a cult of personality can diminish the aura of celebrity, this type of vlog, in my opinion, shows that creating a cult of personality and aura can be done at the same time.
This new type of cult of personality built from PlanD and other anonymous daily life channels also shows us the recent rising of entertaining real. When Oullette and Murray said, "What has made reality TV an important generic forum for a range of institutional and cultural developments that include the merger of marketing and real-life entertainment, the convergence of new technologies with programs and their promotion, and an acknowledgment of the manufactured artifice that coexist with truth claims," we can see the same pattern on PlanD (Oouellete & Murray, 2004, p. 3). The authenticity of a natural person is the central theme that PlanD wants to show to the audience. She wants to show her real life is very organized, while we as the audience know that the way she displays her life is not accurate. We, as the audience, know that our daily life can't be that aesthetic and beautiful all the time. We can see a lot of manipulation, such as editing, scenes, and taking several angles. However, we as an audience still enjoy the beauty of her daily life and see her everyday life as very organized. On the other hand, PlanD tries to claim her beautiful daily life as real by building small conversations about her preferences, so we felt close and drown to her real life.
In conclusion, we can see how PlanD appeals to Asian women is not realistic. Other than that, there are also a lot of different channels that try to use the same entertaining real to be as aesthetic as they can to show the organized everyday life. A similar pattern, style, and messages from these videos could appeal to some audiences, but it can lead to certain stereotypes, especially Asian women. It is also possible to build the audiences’ mindset of how real life supposed to be.
References
Benjamin, W. (1936). The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In W. Benjamin, Illumination (pp. 50-70). New York: Schocken Books.
Gallantly. (2020, April 14). Healing Youtube vloggers For When You Need Them Most. Retrieved from gallantylgal.com: https://gallantlygal.com/healing-youtube-vloggers/
Oouellete , L., & Murray, S. (2004). Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. New York: New York University Press.
PopAsia, S. (2020, April 1). 9 relaxing Korean Lifestyle YouTubers. Retrieved from SBS PopAsia: https://www.sbs.com.au/popasia/blog/2020/04/01/9-relaxing-korean-lifestyle-youtubers
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