Technologies of the YouTuber Self: Digital Vigilantism, Masculinities and Attention Economy in Neoliberal Japan

• In Event: Perspectives on Non-Criminal Justice Responses to Delinquency

Abstract

This paper explores vigilante YouTubers in contemporary Japan. While Japan’s social control tends to be associated with its group-oriented culture (Braithwaite, 1989; Komiya, 1999), the current study illustrates how the antipathy against the mainstream culture, in conjunction with the growing emergence of attention economy driven by YouTube, has given rise to a new form of grassroots social control in Japan. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, online communications and information circulation increased. Due to isolation and slow economic activities during the pandemic, individuals started engaging in social movements via online social media to “police” communities and exercise moral justice. Some media content shared by vigilantes on YouTube channels includes videos showing “perpetrators” who allegedly engage in fraudulent schemes and groping undergo the processes of private arrests from the perspective of vigilantes to attract powerful empathy from the viewers. Such activities by vigilantes are motivated by the ambition to legitimise their masculinity, moral superiority, and respectable social roles in contemporary Japan, in which hegemonic masculinity, rigid gender-role expectations, and the concept of a well-functioning “proper” society are being challenged and re-negotiated. Based on fieldwork involving interviews and online material, this study delves into the correlation between self-branding, attention economy, and alternative technologies of the self in a neoliberal context. By applying Foucault’s technologies of the self as a theoretical framework, this study contributes to the scholarship of digital vigilantism by zooming in on the conceptualisation of vigilantes’ identities using social media by delving into the notions of masculinity and entrepreneurship in neoliberal Japan.

Authors

• Yoko Demelius, Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku

• Yutaka Yoshida, Cardiff University