Linking privatised large-family domestic space with a public audience: An analysis of housewives who are YouTube vloggers

Amateur vlogs on YouTube provide a glimpse of everyday life and reveal things one might not normally show in public. This paper explored two case studies, female-run YouTube accounts Jamerrill Stewart, Large Family Table and Parsnips and Parsimony, and focused on how both accounts blurred the boundaries between private and public lives as they invited the audience to know about their domestic lives. It aimed at exploring how these female vloggers constructed a particular self-presentation while using YouTube as a personal online diary to archive their everyday lives. The study, however, avoided depicting vlogs as "reality" because vlogs, just like any other audio-visual medium, could be edited. The research findings revealed that in constructing their self-presentation, both women offered an unstructured portrayal of large-family lives in comparison to the representation of American family lives in other mainstream media, such as television (TV) reality shows. By showing the audience incidental and chaotic everyday occurrences for instance, children arguing, messy living rooms, or what they called "real life", these vlogs were redefining what was understood as "reality" in audio-visual material.