As dinâmicas da profissionalização no capitalismo informacional: identidade youtuber em disputa

Abstract

YouTube was one of the biggest cultural industries on the internet in 2021. With the transformations of the web and its stabilization on platforms controlled by large companies, masses of viewers started to form, and this caused, in a way, that some people produced content regularly for these audiences. The platform had about two billion active users and its content was produced by them, who became known as youtubers. These new actors started to transmit their social identities in their videos, in a relaxed way, and with that transformed the youtuber identity, which was attributed to them, in their occupation, as they became visible and produced videos in search of income and visibility. They are the focus of this research. What meanings did these subjects attribute to the youtuber identity and at what moments did they identify with it and mobilize it in their trajectories? How did they call themselves and what occupational dynamics emerged from this mobilization? How did these subjects suture their occupational identifications to that identity? The hypothesis of this research is that the youtuber identity, due to the time that the subjects devoted themselves to it and the income they received, gradually became an occupation for its practitioners, focused on converting visibility into gains in an unequal reward distribution platform. The general objective of the work is to understand, from the identifications of these subjects, the extent to which they approached or distanced themselves from that specific point of identification, the youtuber identity, and how these dynamics occurred in the delimitation of the identity boundaries between the subjects regarding the incipient occupation they shared. In the fieldwork, carried out between 2018 and early 2020 in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, mixed methodological resources were used, combining qualitative field observations, face-to-face interactions, with the help of in-depth interviews, and online fieldwork, adding it with secondary data from the platform itself about the subjects and their numbers. This data was partially analysed using the Atlas.ti 8 data analysis software. In unequal conditions, the subjects developed their own culture of content creation to deal with the daily problems of their new work and looked for creative ways to convert visibility in income, using their social identities as differentials in this competitive market to become attractive to audiences and the market, and to produce sufficient autonomy of the platform and its rules to follow with their media projects about themselves.