Introduction: Digital Life Writing, Women Vloggers and Rural Life

The chapter introduces the genre of rural life vlogging and how this book undertakes ecocriticism, the study of the relationship between literature, the natural and cultural heritage that comes from one’s place of living and origin, from an interdisciplinary perspective, and digital life writing as its framework. The book is an attempt to provide both positive and critical outlooks on the possibilities of young women, nature, culture and vlogging, who use it to compose the kind of narratives that they want to best represent their nature-inspired beliefs and situations in the modern world. It discusses how so far young women have created vlogs about beauty and travel content and have rarely done so about their attachments to their cultural traditions and natural surroundings. In the field of life writing, using platforms such as YouTube with a video camera for digital storytelling has marked a significant shift and contributed to peer-to-peer or participatory media making and citizen journalism that generates everyday expressions of personal histories. Since the social media interface has made global access and distribution possible, it is timely to look at the possibilities and roles these technologies can bring in expanding the varieties of automedial practices.