Activist, Artist, Educator or Youtuber? Exploring Breadtube and Hybrid Practices

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 9: Social Media and Digital Culture

Abstract

Breadtube or Lefttube refers to the collection of creators on YouTube who use video essays as a means of political and artistic expression (Kuznetsov & Ismangil, 2020). The niche became a phenomenon in 2016 as a video essay network developed to combat #Gamergate’s influx of radicalizing, alt-right content. Breadtube video essays’ exemplifies what this paper identifies as a hybrid practice: complex collective activities that serve the social goods and normative logics of two or more “ spheres.” Breadtube's relationship to politics, art, education, and commerce exemplifies the vibrant existence and unique tensions that hybrid practices face.

Semi-structure interview research reveals how Breadtubers experience conflict between intent versus efficacy, aesthetics versus ethics, and commerce versus craft. Despite their desire to be politically efficacious, their motivation to create is foremost sustained by their love of video-essay making. This paradoxically distances creators both from for-profit normative logic of Youtube and social goods of civically engaged content creation. Further, to distance themselves from YouTube’s work culture, practitioners display an effortful, conscious commitment to Breadtube’s standards of excellence. Nevertheless, they also feel constrained to make certain "algorithmic friendly” concessions that impact their artistic, education, and political intentions and their enjoyment of the video essay process.

In outlining hybrid practice and attending to experiences of understudied user-generators producers, this study broadens current understanding of digital culture and labour. It explores the constraints imposed by profit-driven digital platforms like Youtube and the threats they pose to the integrity of the practices which they host. It also demonstrates the strategies of resistance employed by practitioners and the value, purpose, and meaning of the practices uniquely enabled by those same digital platforms.

Author

• Madeline Olivia Cranston, University of Waterloo