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Commerce, Creativity, and Youth Participation on YouTube Morocco

Sat, May 27, 11:00 to 12:15, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 3, Aqua 307

Abstract

This paper is part of a broader research project on the creative, expressive, and carnivalesque character of activist citizenship on YouTube Morocco. The broader research project examines the role that social media platforms play in enabling youth in the Maghreb region to create spaces for a culture of political dissent. Focusing on popular YouTube creators, I examine the affordances of social media technologies and their use for democratic and political change in post-Arab Spring Morocco. The paper, I would like to contribute to present, however, seeks to understand the economic model that sustains the venture of producing and circulating amateur user-generated content on YouTube in Morocco. The paper explores the contradictions of negotiating commitment to activist and critical participation (resistance) with “the dull compulsion of economic relations” or “the mills of necessity, of consumption and digestion”. In other words, as many YouTube creators are finding ways to monetize their participatory media content, this paper is an exploration into the microeconomics of creative and carnivalesque enactments of youth citizenship.

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