How To: Create Value : The Work and Economic and Social Value Creation of YouTube Crafting Channels

Sammanfattning: This master’s thesis examines the digital work performed on video-sharing platform YouTube. This study aims to analyse the business model of Web 2.0 social media platforms, by using the methodologies of interface affordances, Marxist labour theory, and perspectives on participatory culture, along with interpretations of the economic and social value production of the users (i.e. viewers and video makers). Through a case study of three channels within the crafting community, focusing on “how-to” tutorials, the affordances of the user interface are analysed to show how the users perform cognitive, communicative, and co-operate work. This study concludes that users perform activities in each of the categories, which type of work is performed is to some degree manipulated by the affordances of the platform and the state of the community where the work is performed. The workers have relative autonomy in creating social use-values. However, in their work, the users accumulate capital through the mining of their data, creating an economic surplus-value from which they are estranged. In monetising the work of the platform, YouTube also transforms their free time into productive time, which a theme problematised and discussed in this study.