VIEWERS PERCEPTION ON BEAUTY VLOG: A DOT IN GLOBALIZATION WEB

Abstract

In 2015, women-related videos were noted as one of the most viewed videos in Youtube. This fact triggers the rise of many beauty vloggers. One of them is Elin Ivana who is already known as beauty blogger before. Elin also initiated a chatting group in LINE messenger named Ngobrol Cantik to facilitate her readers and viewers to have a beauty-related conversation. Researcher interviewed five of Ngobrol Cantik Group members about their perception toward the use, content and credibility of Elin Ivana’s beauty vlog to answer a research question: how do viewers perceive beauty vlog in relation to globalization? In this study, researcher use perception theory which explained the steps and factors involved in perception process and then put the results within globalization concept by Arjun Appadurai which talks about technoscape, ideoscape, financescape, ethnoscape and mediascape. Globalization has brought vlog as global trend to Indonesia and influence audience stance about beauty which resulted in audience perception and reaction to certain vlog contents. Result of this research showed that most of the informants perceived Elin Ivana’s vlog as interesting and credible source. Elin Ivana’s vlog also perceived as an important medium to learn about beauty, references and entertainment while product review, beauty tutorial and personality clips were identified as most favorite vlog contents, which all of these reflect the workings of globalization.