Performance: Paralinguistic Cues, Metadata, and Identity

Dauterman’s shift from vlog-performance into recollection-focused performance is also indicated through other movements captured in her video. Dauterman’s narrative begins silently with the familiar motions associated with turning on a webcam and adjusting its angle to produce a satisfactory close-up of her face. While taking care of these production details, Dauterman gazes down at her screen, apparently looking into the window where the webcam’s real-time recording is displayed. Only after setting up her recording equipment does Dauterman begin her narrative with a wave and an introduction. During this introduction, Dauterman’s gaze shifts to look into the webcam lens, which allows her to make direct eye contact with the viewer, reflecting the audience engagement Christian argues that vloggers strive to cultivate. The gestures associated with setting up a webcam are also familiar to viewers of amateur online video, reflecting unrehearsed, unpolished video representation of the video-subject’s lived reality. As Brooke Knight describes in her analysis of the interplay of performance and production in conventions of webcam use:

On your screen, you see an image of a young woman staring intently to the right of the camera, presumably looking at her monitor. Behind her are a bookshelf and some computers. A minute later, she shifts her position slightly, and another image is captured and sent to you via her website. (21)

The kinds of small, evident production details that Dauterman’s narrative includes and that Knight comments on have come to be part of the conventions for self-produced, amateur online videos. However, as Dauterman begins to sink into the recollection of her story—breaking out of performance, in a sense, as she shifts out of the vlog genre—she increasingly breaks eye contact with the audience by looking away from the webcam lens and down at her own face in the webcam display on her computer screen or at her desktop as she pauses to think .