What Film and Cultural Histories Can Teach Us about YouTubers

In this brief essay, I limit my commentary to the example of political authority situated in the history of the mediated entertainment persona engaged in political communication. The "part played by people" in communication processes 1 is a well-examined topic re-1 flected in the established but ongoing history of media effects, and more recently, in audience reception and media industry studies. Whether we locate any of these research areas in either "communication" or "media studies" seems to be a banal question, given the growing and generally welcomed interdisciplinarity of the field. One thing about our enterprise seems certain: engaging media, John Nerone tells us, can hardly be avoided for scholars in the humanities and social sciences; thus, many turn to "historical work as a mode of explanation." 2 Studies added Media to its name in 2002, it did so to better reflect the diversity of its members' interdisciplinary research on the moving image affected by convergences across related industries and in History of Media Studies, vol. 1, 2021 what film and cultural histories can teach us about youtubers 2 reception practices, accelerated by digitization. 4 Students of film his-4 Cinema Journal, accordingly, changed its name to the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies in 2018.