Social media platforms have been pivotal in redefining the conduct of contemporary society. More specifically, we have shown in the previous chapters the role of YouTube not just as a space for people's performance of everyday life, but as a platform where diverse social transactions and aspirations of the Filipino people are enacted, curated, commodified, and brokered. Taking the case of the Philippines, one of the tech-savviest countries in the world, this book unpacks how Filipino YouTubers and YouTube represent and mediate subjectivity, intimate relations, labour practices, as well as personalised political agenda. It also presents a critical stance in approaching YouTube as a platform that is constitutive in the brokering of profitable and relatable persona, lifestyle imaginaries, social mobility tactics, as well as sustained political affiliation in a neoliberal and postcolonial sphere.

As we have presented, no longer just a passive audience, users are enabled by the contemporary media environment to produce content in a DIY fashion or alternatively curate the media that they wish to consume. Celebrating creativity in content creation and discovery through shared knowledge and participation, this pervasive culture ushered by social media has also smoothed the way for micro-celebrities to emerge with their own networks of followers, many of whom are active on YouTube (Burgess & Green, 2018).

In recent years, we have witnessed the meteoric rise of influencers. Ordinary individuals expose their most intimate lives, generating massive followers. YouTube, as one of the most popular online platforms in the twenty-first century, has birthed influencers, including Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie and YouTube's youngest millionaire Ryan Kaji as examples. In the Philippines, YouTubers such as the late Lloyd Cadena, Michelle Dy, Zeinab Harake, Ja Mil, Ivana Alawi, and Mimiyuuuh, to name a few, have occupied the platform, with their channels becoming embedded in the Filipinos’ everyday lives. These figures have essentially become constitutive of Filipinos’ appetite for the consumption of informative and entertaining content. Whether based in or outside the Philippines, they are already part and parcel of Filipino households. Notably, their creative take on genres, unique performances, and interactive branding strategies are paving the way for their visibility, popularity, and even amassing fortune within and beyond social media. In a networked space, they produce, distribute, and monetise mundane, intimate, and random content, ranging from exclusive confessions, skills and knowledge enhancement, talent showcase, up to as outrageous as playing a prank on someone. At the other end of the screen, diverse audiences watch, like, or share these contents and can opt to subscribe or follow content creators that resonate with them. It is through this dynamic and networked environment where sociality, aspirations, and profit-making coalesce.

Of late, YouTube's role in the media ecosystem has expanded from catering to lifestyle videos into being somewhat of an “academy,” where we find a broad range of information that build skills and exchange know-how, or what Utz and Wolfers (2020) call “epistemic communities.”

On a YouTube video, Carlo beams with pride as he announces to his thousands of subscribers a new milestone: he has made his second million as an online freelancer. Displaying his monthly dollar earnings, a new car, as well as a modern workstation, Carlo is ecstatic to proclaim that he has made the best decision to leave his full-time call centre job for platform work, challenging his subscribers that they could achieve the same success with the right recipe of hard work, persistence, and entrepreneurialism. He has worked hard to achieve his current state, starting as a book chapter writer for a small client clinched from a labour platform way back in 2011 and now a digital marketing “guru,” working with a number of clients from the popular labour platform Upwork, and recognised as the “coach” for hundreds of Filipino platform workers and aspirants. In 2016, Carlo started to organise training sessions for friends who wanted to learn how to start with online freelancing after noticing and being inspired by a substantial growth in his earnings. Realising that training is a possible mechanism to help aspiring Filipino platform workers and at the same time a potential source of additional income, he began to organise these sessions regularly, initially with a few aspirants.

Unprecedented industrialisation, global expansion of markets, and the rapid development of transport and communication technologies have facilitated new ways for the conduct of individual and family life. Sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991) has identified this arrangement because of individualisation in modern society, highlighting the changing notions and practices of conducting intimate lives. For Giddens (1991), as individuals participate in the labour force, one's life choices, pathways, aspirations, and arrangements have become individualised. Notably, in contemporary times, the emancipation from existing social structures that define partnerships and familial arrangements (Bauman, 2000) has been mobilised by the advent of ubiquitous digital communication technologies and mobile dating applications. Individuals no longer meet their partners within a locality. They are also ushered into what Constable (2005) refers to as “global hypergamy” or union of individuals coming from diverse backgrounds living across countries. The interaction, union, and eventual settlement of proximate or geographically dispersed individuals are facilitated by either cross-border mobility or virtual forms of intimate exchanges (Constable, 2003).

This chapter focuses on the brokerage of ideal interracial relationships between Filipino women and their foreign male partners on YouTube. It examines ten videos produced by Filipina YouTubers, with their contents showcasing the collation of personalised stories around their intimate relations with their partners. A critical examination of these selected contents problematises how the aesthetics, rhetoric and platform-specific strategies of gendered, racialised, and classed representations broker, perpetuate as well as challenge pre-existing representations of an intimate interracial partnerships involving Filipinas.

Diverse modes of representing standards of feminine beauty continue to dominate Philippine media. More specifically, creative advertisements designed, produced and distributed by business enterprises and creative agencies encourage Filipino women to achieve a recognisable beauty through the use of a range of skin lightening products. Belo, Loreal, Nivea, and Olay are some of the big brands that endorse the realisation and positive benefits of fairer skin among women and men. These products are promoted and distributed by the beauty and media industry across multiple channels, including online and offline. As creative, compelling and star-studded campaigns communicate and sell whitening products online, profit flows into the processes and systems of the media culture industry, including but not limited to health, fashion, and so forth. In a sense, the production and circulation of celebrity-driven endorsements align with our conception of brokerage, which emphasises the collection, curation and circulation of aspirational contents for certain individuals, groups and markets in diverse media channels. However, brokerage in this context contains the marketability of standard beauty within the imaginaries of individuals in the dominant creative and media industry.

The brokerage of beauty standards – skin practices – is governed by the beauty and media industry and noticeable in the Philippine context. In 2019 alone, two particular ads created a buzz in Philippine history of skin whitening products. Skin White released their “Dark or White, you are beautiful” campaign.

Our interest in the role of YouTube for politics began with a Grab ride around the city of Manila in 2019. Unlike cab drivers of the past who would be tuned in to AM or FM radio stations while they drove for passengers for the day, this Grab driver, Kuya Armand (not his real name), is one of the increasing group of drivers who tune in to YouTube as their ambient source of news, entertainment, and political commentary. With free data connection accompanying his Grab service, Armand told one of the authors, Cheryll, that YouTube has become a valuable source of information for him. He tunes in to YouTube regularly, and in particular, to channels that discuss politics. During the trip, the driver would consistently echo the words of a YouTuber, as if to convince his passenger – “Di ba, si Marcos talaga ang pinakamahusay na Pangulo ng Pilipinas” (See, Marcos really is the best President the country ever had). While waiting for a green light on Gil Puyat Street, he expressed, “Ma’am, kung hindi po sana napaalis si Marcos, siguro po mayaman na bansa na tayo ngayon ano?” (Ma’am, if only Marcos was not ousted from power, maybe we would have been a progressive nation, right?).

This chapter presents “brokerage” as a lens to critically examine how digital narratives, online performativity, and platform-specific strategies reflect how ordinary and marginalised individuals navigate the terrain of neoliberal economies and postcolonial structures in social media platforms such as YouTube. These individuals are afforded with “speaking positions” (Gajjala, 2013) to represent, curate, and broadcast their everyday experiences and harness aspirations and dreams. Yet, making visible these personalised experiences, as shaped by invisible and broader hierarchical structures, reflect anxieties, struggles and constant negotiations in the digital and contemporary society.

This chapter is divided into several sections. First, we discuss the sociological literature on the traditions of brokerage. This approach enables us to engage with the process, politics, and dynamics of brokerage in facilitating social, economic, and political aspirations and interactions. Secondly, we discuss how brokering can be understood in the digital context and highlight how social media influencers enact the process of brokerage. Their presence as “real people” and their performances contribute to affective engagement among audiences, as reflected in user feedback through views, shares, and subscriptions. Further, we situate the discussion in the context of YouTube, noting its key affordances, business model, and data governance mechanisms. This approach allows us to articulate the principles and practices of neoliberal social conditions online. Thirdly, we approach the discussion on digital practices through a postcolonial lens, situating the historical, economic, political, and socio-technological forces that influence performativity in digital spaces. We outline how brokerage takes place in several key areas of investigation – bleached skin, interracial intimacy, world-class labour, and progressive governance.

It was one of those uneventful afternoons on the set of the ‘live’ Reality TV show I was interning for. Everyone went about their usual business. Stationed next to the Camera Director in the front-end of the panel room, I sat quietly staring at the dozens of monitors that observed the Reality TV show contestants around the clock in Big Brother style. Five metres behind me, the censor on duty watched the ‘live’ broadcast conscientiously on a separate monitor for anything that needed immediate censoring. A woman in her early twenties, she was one of the dozens of part-timers who were hired on an hourly rate to act as censors for the ‘live’ programme. The instructions given to her when she was hired were simple: blur or mute what you deem problematic; and record what you censored in a logbook. Outside the panel room, the Production Manager monitored our work by watching what the audiences would see – the post-censored ‘live’ broadcast on television.

The mood in the panel room was relaxed, almost sleepy. This was one of those afternoons when the contestants had no designated activities and were free to rest. With nothing in particular to focus our attention on, the Camera Director switched around the different cameras to capture what the different contestants were doing.

There is broad consensus among Reality TV scholars and critics that the genre relies on producing scandals, controversies and moral panics to create dramatic spectacles (Biltereyst 2004). In particular, there are many works that discuss Reality TV's reproduction of racial, gender and class stereotypes as part of portraying ‘the real’ (Wood and Skeggs 2008). So how does a Reality TV production in an illiberal state like Singapore court and manage controversy? This was the question that I brought with me when I started my ethnography of the reality show discussed in this chapter. I initially imagined that I would be observing a production team cleverly manipulating social discourse while skilfully avoiding censorship. These expectations were quickly side railed as my days – and my fieldwork diary – became consumed by the daily chaos that ensued on set.

In many ways, this was the hardest ethnography for me to write up. This was in part due to the fact that this ethnography was exceptional in many aspects. Unlike the more routinized production processes I experienced in the other case studies, this production involved a larger than usual number of producers working together on a new ‘live’ reality programme format with little established work structure. As a result, a large portion of the daily grind on set involved constant, sometimes confrontational, arguments among producers about how best to do things. The general atmosphere of this production was very different from and much more affectively charged compared to the rest of the productions I would work on.

I barely saw the boss of the production company in the first phases of my fieldwork there, during which I worked more on variety programmes. That changed dramatically in the latter phases of my stay at that company when I worked on several dramas back to back. My daily observations during my time there suggest that he spent much of his time in the office participating in pre-production creative meetings for the company's prime time dramas. This observation did not go unnoticed by others working at the company. Producers working on the variety or infotainment programmes would sometimes comment on the relatively lesser attention the boss showed to their work compared to the dramas. In an explanatory but also frustrated tone, one of the Assistant Producers specializing in variety shows at the time explained to me that this was because the prime time dramas served as the brand of the company for audiences. From an early point in my fieldwork, I had realized that the amount of time the boss of the company dedicated to the writing of its prime time dramas speak to the importance the company placed on them. In some ways, this is not surprising. Despite changes in Singaporean television over the years, ‘it is the Mandarin dramas and comedies that continue till today to produce the highest ratings’ (Tan 2008: 47).

Compared to the constraints of variety and infotainment programmes, drama productions’ higher budgets, bigger teams, longer turnover time, and importantly, their attraction of more viewer attention also often mean their producers have to take more into consideration during their preproduction phases.

What goes into the ideological sustenance of an illiberal capitalist democracy? The struggles of representational work articulated by the two producers quoted above point to the difficulties of such an endeavour for media producers in an illiberal capitalist democracy like Singapore. So what are the tensions that underlie producers’ seemingly impossible strive for high viewership without triggering political sensitivities or negative audience feedback? This chapter approaches the question from the perspective of the myths that producers are supposed to constitute in their daily work that formulate the Singaporean state's construction of its social imaginary(s).

Ivan was one of the most passionate directors I had ever met. Having been highly recommended by two informants on separate occasions, his name came to my mind when my Executive Producer asked me if I knew any new directors for a potential project for MediaCorp's online platform. The project, Loving Art, was a government funded short-form drama series about the arts in Singapore. Even though Ivan mostly directed English-language dramas, he decided to join the team on his first Chinese-language production because the theme, arts in Singapore, was something he felt strongly about. As we got to know each other better through the pre-production process, I increasingly marvelled at his grand ambitions to model his work after global productions like Game of Thrones, his vision to ‘lead the audience’, and his genuine desire to change the media landscape in Singapore. This was not an easy feat for someone working in an industry plagued by inertia and perpetually low budgets.

Throughout the production process, Ivan repeatedly expressed his wish to challenge the status quo in Singapore through his work. However, that weighed heavily on his mind every time he asked me to join him for smoke breaks after clashing with colleagues. Different working styles and his entry into the team as a first-time director of Chinese-language productions caused frictions.