BETWEEN THE SPECTACULARIZATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE AND WORKING-CLASS PRAGMATISM

theoretical elements for understanding subjectivities on YouTube

Abstract

In this article we investigate theoretical arguments that help us understand the subjectivities involved in YouTube content creation. The increasing spectacularization of everyday life is analyzed as a new phenomenon in digitalized work relations on YouTube, what we might understand as a transition from users to workers generated content (UGC to WGC). Everyday exposure through videos is perceived as a pragmatic strategy of the working class, a process of subjective reconfiguration that occurs in the mobilization of personalities as binding structures of value production in the era of overexposure of intimacy. Rather than following the path of criticism that relates the proliferation of amateur content to a supposed cultural decline, we seek to analyze this expansion as empirical data that might illuminates social phenomena that are constituent of flexible capitalism, in which workers are increasingly urged to become enterpreneurs of themselves, using new digital technologies and exposing their everyday routines through a process of monetizing their images, voices, gestures, ideas and practices conveyed in the videos. Such instrumentalization of subjectivities for value production is investigated in the light of the theories of Charles Taylor, David Riesman, Byung-Chul Han, and Paula Sibilia. We conclude that studies in digital sociology might benefit from the theoretical articulation with the presented authors and that explorations between digital sociology and the sociology of work reveal a promising research agenda.