7 - YouTube and Beyond
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2023
Summary
Abstract
This chapter summarises the book's key arguments and contentions on Philippine digital cultures, foregrounded by the brokering of feminised subjectivity, intimate relations, world-class labour, and partisan politics on YouTube. It recaps the study's proposed conceptual frame of digital brokering, as well as its key dimensions, reiterating the operations and implications of digital brokering in the everyday digital lives of Filipinos within postcolonial and neoliberal spheres. This final chapter leaves the readers with some future research directions, including ways of approaching and investigating YouTubing as a form of platformisation of everyday life in the Global South. It provides a space for critical reflection on understanding the impact and implications of emerging and rapidly evolving platforms on the intimate, informal, and everyday lives of individuals who constantly negotiate existing structural inequalities in a global and digital society.
Keywords: digital brokerage, affective aspiration, neoliberal globalisation, paradoxical reconfiguration, Global South, YouTube
Social media platforms have been pivotal in redefining the conduct of contemporary society. More specifically, we have shown in the previous chapters the role of YouTube not just as a space for people's performance of everyday life, but as a platform where diverse social transactions and aspirations of the Filipino people are enacted, curated, commodified, and brokered. Taking the case of the Philippines, one of the tech-savviest countries in the world, this book unpacks how Filipino YouTubers and YouTube represent and mediate subjectivity, intimate relations, labour practices, as well as personalised political agenda. It also presents a critical stance in approaching YouTube as a platform that is constitutive in the brokering of profitable and relatable persona, lifestyle imaginaries, social mobility tactics, as well as sustained political affiliation in a neoliberal and postcolonial sphere.
As we have presented, no longer just a passive audience, users are enabled by the contemporary media environment to produce content in a DIY fashion or alternatively curate the media that they wish to consume. Celebrating creativity in content creation and discovery through shared knowledge and participation, this pervasive culture ushered by social media has also smoothed the way for micro-celebrities to emerge with their own networks of followers, many of whom are active on YouTube (Burgess & Green, 2018).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Philippine Digital CulturesBrokerage Dynamics on YouTube, pp. 195 - 212Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022