Two tales of digital self-entrepreneurship

Abstract

While video blogging (vlogging) has become one of the new generation’s top career choices, less is understood about how class origins shape the career pathways and future aspirations of youth vloggers, particularly amidst times of platform precarity and future uncertainty. This study sets out to examine the various ways in which digitally savvy young people coming from different socio-economic and family backgrounds engage in vlogging as a career. Extending the Bourdieusian framework, it explicates how a divergence in the everyday experiences and practices arose among differently situated digital aspirants. Drawing on in-depth interviews with professional YouTubers in Hong Kong, where neoliberalism and social inequality prevail, the analysis offers a nuanced account of the class-inflected work–life dynamics, whereby differences in material constraints and opportunity costs engender various orientations and attitudes internalised by the middle-/upper-class and working-/lower-class vloggers towards digital self-entrepreneurship. Revealing the diverging ramifications of the development of digital habitus for the youth vloggers’ creative labour and future aspiration, the study expands sociological understandings of how social inequality is reproduced at digital creative work, while illuminating the understudied linkages between social class and platform work in the new creative industry of digital content creation and entertainment.