Global Platform, Local Labour: Precarious YouTubing in Ireland and Turkey

Abstract

This thesis investigates creative digital labour practices of Irish and Turkish content creators within the hybrid space of YouTube. It frames YouTube creators who generate or aspire to earn income via the platform as cultural workers in the platform economy by acknowledging the similarities in their working conditions with other platform workers. It also addresses how their media production practices are negotiated and shaped in particular underrepresented national contexts that take place in peripheral economies. Rather than macro-level industry-based approaches, the study employs mixed methods to provide micro-level explanations of platformed content creation. First, it employs methods from ethnography such as semi-structured interviews with YouTube creators and observations in their workplaces to trace the dynamics of production as a culture, to listen to the voices of labourers and to capture creators’ own realities in their working lives. Second, it benefits from the walkthrough method to put subjective interpretations of creators into the context of the platform affordances and regulatory frameworks and considers how these factors shape or constrain the activity of creators. This study demonstrates that YouTubing has a precarious nature which shapes creators’ working lives and how they form and maintain their professional identities inside or outside YouTube careers. The thesis examines this precarious nature by contextualising creators’ media production and distribution practices in the platform architecture; more significantly it draws attention to the complexity of the relationships between platforms, content creator labour and local contexts, which influences the precariousness of creative digital labour. Thus, the study contributes to the dominant literature on YouTube which neglects YouTube creators as shaped by specific economic, political, cultural, and linguistic contexts of nation-states, instead of assuming them to be a homogeneous group under a global platform.

Date of Award	2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Maynooth University
Supervisor	Kylie Jarrett (Supervisor) & Sarah Arnold (Supervisor)