Digital child labor in the context of socialization and fame: Child Youtuber

The possibility of communicating independently of the parameters of time and space offered by new communications technologies paves the way for individuals to perform activities on the global plane, obtain new values and acquire new identities. The ties established by children with communications technologies, the new practices unveil and the phenomena they are in a relationship with materialise within the economic-political structure of the social media platforms. The existence of such a structure makes it necessary to scrutinise the activities of both child YouTubers and viewer children on the platform. This study deals with the processes and practices of the socialisation of children, their achievement of fame, their consumption behaviours and their labour and earnings positions through the social media platform YouTube and examines these specifically through the video content they produce on this platform. The aim of this study, where the pattern of qualitative research has been adopted, which is based on the ethnographic method and where the observation technique has been used as the principal provider of data, is to trace the global trends and local aspects of child YouTubers. In line with this, the purposeful sampling method has been used to include 5 YouTube channels from Turkey and 6 YouTube channels from the rest of the world, belonging to children, within the framework of the determined criteria, in the study. The content produced on the channels has been examined using the ethnographic method and the data which has been obtained has been analysed in a depictive manner, under certain themes and conveyed within an integrative theme. As a result of the study, it was seen that the perception of games held by children, their game playing behaviours and their gaming equipment have been transformed; that the career, the construction of which was started by their parents, assumed a structure whereby children continued to construct it on their own, within the process; that YouTubers turned both themselves and the viewer children into the carriers of a consumer ideology and culture within the context of the content which had been produced; and that children, who had started producing content with various motivational factors such as playing games, having fun and accumulating memories, evolved into organised digital workers exhibiting a full-time performance within the YouTube social media platform, during this process.