Bidav, Tugce
(2022)
Global Platform, Local Labour: Precarious
YouTubing in Ireland and Turkey.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
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.
Repository Staff Only(login required)
 |
Item control page |
Downloads per month over past year
Origin of downloads
Altmetric
Altmetric