Vibification is when a particular collection of objects, places, people, actions, or feelings are arranged in such a way as to maximize a cohesive vibe, or aesthetic.
The Aesthetics Wiki[1] has quite a few good examples[2].
It seems like Vibification is particularly prevalent on YouTube[3] (though perhaps that's just because it's the platform I'm most exposed to.) People find a certain sort of aesthetic and adopt it as a style layered atop their videos. After a certain point, the aesthetic seems to often precedence and the videos become built around the aesthetic. This transformation--vibification--turns the videos into a sort of parody of themselves, a kind of feeling that's something generalizable beyond the source material. Something you could write a wiki article about, for example.
Take the YouTuber Kraig Adams[4] for example. He makes hiking vlogs[5] that combine first person camera-at-face style shots with locked tripod landscape shots with drone shots. He'll combine what might be described as process (getting places, eating food, petting dogs, etc etc) with cinematic presentation (wide sweeping views, swelling music, golden hour in the mountains, etc etc.) The aesthetic that emerges is some kind of idealized and romanticized view at both life and the landscape. He's able to merge the aesthetic of eating a snickers bar with Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog[6]. The aesthetic feels cohesive and predictable.
And then he starts making videos like 7 Hours of Relaxing Hiking Videos to Study/Relax/Sleep[7], a seelingly straight-faced response to the legendary never-ending lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to[8]. At this point the vibification is complete. The videos have become entirely consumed by aesthetic, to the point that the narrative is erased and we get a 7 hour compilation of pure, undistilled, vibe. For Kraig to have created anything that sticks out or diverges from this aesthetic would be revealed through this extensive concatenation of his video library; the fact is that since everything was built on top of this vibe sticking it all together into a 7 hour video still worked.
There's so many YouTubers like this, especially those concerned with revealing something of their lifestyle. Any time people engage in something that's sufficiently divergent and sufficiently desirable, you get the danger of vibification, where the videos become a parody of themselves. A particularly good example here is TheCottageFairy[9], whose videos could perhaps be the very definition of the cottagecore aesthetic[10].
. . .
I don't really have much critique here, vibification is just a sort of phenomenon I've noticed quite a few places to the point that felt like it needed a name and definition.
Last updated Sun Mar 13 2022 in Berkeley, CA
1: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Aesthetics_Wiki
2: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Aesthetics
4: https://www.youtube.com/c/KraigAdams
5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3S59EfTfP0
6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog
7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqzTVRazJjM
8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qap5aO4i9A
9: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCottageFairy
10: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cottagecore