The Commodification of Domesticity and Scopophiliac Consumerism through YouTube Vlogs

Abstract

The world is now experiencing a boom time of global capitalism that entirely is rooted in large-scale investments worldwide. The word, capital, however, is no more confined to the material or monetary category; instead, it has started analyzing cultural as well as social realities to find out new forms of profit-making investment sources. Interestingly, capitalism is nowadays devoted to dig out human interests and to present commodities according to those desires. To understand this matter more clearly, here few contents from YouTube are going to be analyzed to show how social scopophilia (a pleasure principle) has been targeted as a space for investment. These contents are uploads of some women who share their daily life with the world around on which this study has launched a thorough qualitative analysis. In order to find an answer to the question why the selected YouTubers have made their everyday life public and, on the other hand, why viewers get interested in others' life, this study has mainly focused on commodity culture of contemporary world that, resultantly, has brought into view how everything irrespective of their materiality and immateriality gets commodified. To conclude, the most determining factor behind the commodification of everyday domestic life has been a sort of scopophiliac consumerism that this particular study has earnestly attempted to establish.