Ian Kochinski, known popularly as Vaush, is a sensational Leftist content creator best known for his incendiary political content. Since joining platforms like YouTube and Twitch in early 2019, the millennial personality has amassed a startling following through videos which focus almost exclusively on the specifics of American progressivism and Marxist thought. The media scholar Joshua Meyrowitz outlined 3 different types of para-social relationships in an era before the internet. These relationships are one-sided and are formed when an audience member begins to feel a connection to a media figure they follow. According to Meyrowitz, there are media friends, heroes and villains. In the digital era, media figures operate in a unique space which allows more audience interaction and feedback than ever before and much of the burgeoning political figures online lean into this discourse more heavily than figures from prior eras. It is because of this unique hypermodern engagement that a YouTuber like Vaush can occupy all 3 modes of Meyrowitz’ media relationship: the friend, the hero and the villain.
Like many popular video creators, Vaush presents nearly all his content with his face front and center. The primary screen setup for a Vaush stream or video places his face in the center of a camera at about webcam distance, with his background of anime memorabilia, gamer rgb lights and cats framing his body. When reviewing a video or reading an article, Vaush will move his camera to the bottom righthand quadrant. This maneuver allows the material to become the primary focus, but also allows viewers to see Vaush’s face at any given time. This is a similar method used by vloggers and lifestyle YouTubers to create a sense of intimacy. By displaying the creator’s face so prominently, we as an audience feel as if we’re in constant conversation with them. This is just one of multiple techniques which allow Vaush to become a media friend for much of his audience.
The term itself simply refers to a media figure whom an audience feels a friendly, para-social connection to. The viewer might view their media friend as another aspect of their social circle and feel generally endeared to them. The persistent vlog-style of Vaush’s videos help to achieve this effect, but so does his rhetoric and general manner of delivery. Over the course of his regular 4–5 hour streams, Vaush presents himself as a free-wheeling, funny and knowledgeable younger millennial with thoughtful and well-reasoned positions on humanitarian and social issues. Vaush covers a great deal of sordid subject matter relating to the less favorable aspects of American politics, yet he delivers it all in a tongue-in-cheek manner which helps to diffuse the dower subject topics. In the same breath, Vaush may touch upon the bleakness of a minority-controlled conservative government and then crack a joke involving gaming and anime references or ridiculous internet terms like “nussy.” On this note, the positions Vaush takes on political issues are almost always incredibly agreeable to any left-leaning audience. Where some lefties might have too harsh of a stance on certain issues or vice versa, Vaush seems to always land upon the most agreeable of progressive viewpoints. This and the fact that he constantly advocates for marginalized people daily make it easy for his audience to see him as a media friend.
Meyrowtiz’ media hero occupies a similar position to that of the media friend, in the sense that the viewer will usually hold a certain level of reverence for the media figure. In the case of the media hero, this idolization overtakes the sense of mutual respect an audience might feel with their media friend, and they begin to see them as something inherently greater. In the arena of online political debates, Vaush becomes more than a friend to his audience.
During the early and mid-2010s, there was a massive influx of far-right rhetoric on the internet which sought to popularize a great deal of abhorrent, conservative ideologies. Figures from this boom gained much of their audience by posting “debate” videos, where they would recite a list of reactionary talking points against generally unprepared college students and pick the best of these segments to upload. It cultivated a dishonest sense that American conservatives were on the side of “facts and logic” while anyone remotely to the left of Reagan was an unjust snowflake who only cared about pointless social issues. As a direct response to this movement, media figures like Vaush would appear to combat these false perceptions.
As a so called “debate bro,” Vaush has hosted hundreds of verbal fisticuffs on his channel where he pits himself against virtually anybody whom he is ideologically opposed to. The bread and butter of this content, however, is when Vaush argues directly with figures from the far right and pushes back against their prevailing media narrative cultivated this decade. Debates with internet conservative figures like Tim Pool, Charlie Kirk, Sargan of Akaad, Jesse Lee Peterson and many more offer a unique sense of catharsis for audience members who are tired of seeing these faulty media framings hailed as objective truth. Vaush himself is incredibly rhetorical efficient — able to counter his opponent’s factual errors with comprehensive studies of his own, catch them in ideological traps and come across as a reasonable individual who just wants America to be a better place for everyone; all while delivering his own leftist framings in a comprehensive manner. It is this combination of conversational proficiency and ability to push back against prevailing internet hegemonies which transforms him from a media friend to media hero in the realm of verbal debates.
Given the nature of debates and ideological clashes, it comes as no surprise that to a great deal of audience members, Vaush can even come across as what Meyrowitz would dub a media villain. Like the prior two terms, a media villain is defined by the para-social relationship between an audience and a media figure. Unlike them, however, the villain represents a negative emotional bond. Whereas media friends and heroes offer positive anthropologic enforcement through likeability and ideological sanctity, the villain embodies the inverse of these things and can become an emblem of archetypal resentment for the viewer (a good example would be how Donald Trump represents nearly everything bad about modern day America to a vast liberal audience.) With Vaush’s immense popularity within the internet political community and the efficacy for which he advocates his views, Vaush’s media villain status is all but guaranteed.
Within conservative internet spaces, there is a near disproportionate level of distaste for Vaush given his relative popularity. Despite not being quite as popular as other leftist figures, he garners an incredible amount of hate. A typical scroll through any anonymous chat forum like 4chan’s /pol or Bitwire’s live discussions will reveal a litany of Vaush hate posts, usually focused on fabricated or arbitrary aspects of his media presence. More “neutral” zones like YouTube comment sections (particularly those on right-leaning channels) also have many inflammatory quips. The same can be said for political Twitter, which somehow manages to get Vaush’s name trending once a week or so with a clip taken out of context or a particularly entertaining dunk from one of his debates. This phenomenon of media heroes functioning as villains for an audience of opposing world views is nothing new, but the visibility of this public split is nearly omnipresent in the internet era. It lends an utterly duplistic nature to Vaush’s media persona as an internet content creator that feels distinct to our hypermodern era.
Originally, Meyrowitz coined his para-social terms to discuss a world defined by mainstream media personalities from television, film and music. It is surprising then, how prescient they feel in our current era and how the terms even deepen with the internet’s capability for broader discourse and cross-cultural communality. In the past, on more traditional forms of media interaction, a figure like Vaush would generally be restricted to the position of media friend and hero to some and villain to those ideologically opposed. Yet, with the near endless stream of internet involvement and the speed with which topics change, Ian Kochinski can embody all three media relationships nearly simultaneously. Even wide swaths of the online left despise Vaush for one reason or another! Vaush, however, is far from alone in this para-social amorphousness. In fact, nearly all popular media figures on the internet operate in this space of friend, hero and villain. Sure, Vaush’s political characterization opens him up to more ideological disagreements, but internet celebrities from all walks of content find themselves embroiled in Meyrowitz’ trinity.
No matter how mundane their content may be, popular YouTubers, Twitch streamers and TikTokers all seem to occupy these media positions for wide swaths of their audience. Personal connections are incredibly easy to foster in an age of increasing impersonality and the widespread usage of vlog-style techniques only helps this factor, bolstering media friendships. On that same note, young people specifically are looking for role models in an era where monumental figures of the past are being exposed to much-needed scrutiny. This, coupled with the prevalence and commodification of internet activism allows for many individuals to see even the most menial of content creators as something more, as media role models and heroes. Finally, with the widespread speed and ease of discourse, more and more unsavory aspects of these internet figures are revealed than ever before, fostering distasteful relationships between audience members and content creators. A process which inevitably turns them into media villains in the eyes of some.
Vaush serves as a fine example of the applicability of Meyrowitz’ theory, but this phenomenon is observable in nearly every mainstream internet star. Our hypermodern era is defined by many things, but chief among them is the unprecedented access to information. This novel media democracy allows for infinitely more interaction with media figures than ever before. Without the carefully-constructed constraints of most traditional media, audiences can engage with their media figures more frequently and experience all aspects of their para-social relationships in ways that simply were not possible even 10 years ago. One could make several loaded prescriptions about the societal implications of this trend, ranging from exceedingly positive to apocalyptically negative, yet a more measured response suggests a happy in-between. Media has always functioned as a simulacrum, as a reflection of the society that birthed it. The figures in media are merely aspects of this relationship and a greater focus on the nuance behind this artist-medium dynamic can at the very least be mildly beneficial. Ultimately, facilitating a greater anthropological bond between the audience and their ever-present talking heads will probably lead to a deeper understanding of the backbone of hypermodern communication.
Meyrowtz’ Article:
