Two sides of the fourth wall: YouTube as modern work and its impact on young people's futures

This research is concerned with new forms of digital work. It focuses on the digital space of YouTube both as a site of work and a source of influence in shaping young people's imaginations of their future working lives. It seeks to document young people's experiences as they engage with income-generating YouTube content as producers and consumers, and ascertain the impact of the digital culture supported by YouTube on young people's future (work) orientations. Despite the strength of its online presence, YouTube is a particularly understudied digital platform (Rieder, 2015). This is a significant gap in the literature given the recognised importance of digital culture in young people's lives and one that this project seeks to address.
First, the research takes as a starting point that income-generating YouTube content creation is a contemporary form of work that has rapidly emerged as a 'normalised' activity for generations of young people. It seeks to explore in what ways the socio-economic activities and relations of YouTube content producers rest on and/or challenge dominant sociological understandings of work, for instance in relation to Castells' (2004) notion of 'selfprogrammable labour' which may capture the adaptability of YouTubers' work and Hardt and Negri's (2000) conceptualisation of 'immaterial labour', especially its 'affective' dimension. The project will document YouTube content creation and map successful trajectories towards income generation as well as the experience of decline of former success and interview YouTubers to understand their world of work. This will include attention to how YouTubers mobilise digital social relations to secure success.
YouTube is taken as an instance of 24/7 networked society, 'always on', always connected or connectable, always available to work or consume (Hassan & Purser, 2007, p.3). This research will investigate the spatio-temporal relations of YouTubers' work and thereby make a contribution to contemporary questions of space-time compression arising from new communication technologies. This strand of the project will generate new insight into both the work practices of YouTube entrepreneurs, the content they produce, and their development of social capital with 'consumers'.
Indeed, a second strand of the project focuses on the YouTubers' audience who engage with content through comment and via video viewing (Burgess & Green, 2009, p.94) to understand young people's perceptions of this activity/work and what this affective labour does to them as they imagine their own futures. In so doing, the project gathers data from both sides of the digital screen (the producer and the consumer) to understand this immaterial labour that 'flags the conflation of production and consumption' (Cote & Pybus, 2007, p. 94).
Overall, this research will investigate how the phenomenon of digital work is (along with other developments, notably in the gig economy) shaping the world of work, particularly through the growth of digital social capital. In addition, it will analyse how this phenomenon is changing perceptions of the world of work for young people, influencing their understanding of this kind of labour and their orientations towards the future. The project will be carried out through a range of qualitative research tools: online observation of live interactions, content analysis of YouTube content, interviews, video diaries (from consumers) and focus groups. It will make an original contribution to the sociology of work and our understanding of digital culture (networks and social capital in particular) through empirical analysis of YouTube as a form of work and its impact on young people and their future orientations.