YouTube is one of the most globally utilised online content sharing sites, enabling new commercial enterprise, education opportunities and facilities for vernacular creativity (Burgess, 2006). Its user engagement demonstrates significant capacity to develop online communities, alongside its arguably more popular use as a distribution platform to monetise one’s branded self (Senft, 2013). However, as a subset of Alphabet Incorporated, its access is often restricted by governments of Asian Pacific countries who disagree with the ideology of the business. Despite this, online communities thrive in these countries, bringing into question the sorts of augmentations used by its participants. This article reframes the discussion beyond restrictive regulation to focus on the DIY approach (augmentation) of community building through the use of hidden infrastructures (algorithms). This comparative study of key YouTube channels in several Asia Pacific countries highlights the sorts of techniques that bypass limiting infrastructures to boost online community engagement and growth. Lastly, this article reframes the significance of digital intermediation to highlight the opportunities key agents contribute to strengthening social imaginaries within the Asia Pacific region.

1. BLOCKED BY YOUTUBE?
U n s e e n d i g i t a l i n t e r m e d i a t i o n f o r s o c i a l
i m a g i n a r i e s i n t h e A s i a P a c i f i c
Dr Jonathon Hutchinson
The University of Sydney
@dhutchman
The University of Hong Kong and the University of Sydney Joint Symposium:
Cross-border Media Flows, Infrastructures and Imaginaries in a changing Asia-Pacific

2. Work in progress - names still appear
Please don’t Tweet or share these data outside this room today.

3. Unseen digital intermediaries for social
imaginaries in the Asia Pacific:
2. Social
Imaginaries
4. Unseen
Infrastructures
5. Novel Cross-
Border
Communities
6. Results
1. Digital
Intermediation
3. Methods

4. The aims of the project are:
i. to identify countries in Asia Pacific region where YouTube has been blocked;
ii. to identify popular channels, users, and videos within this environment;
iii. to examine how communities of users form and operate around these media;
iv. to understand the technologies that promote/inhibit these community formations; and
v. to provide an understanding of how new media flows challenge, create, destroy, and
recreate geopolitical borders.

5. The Hu
Mongolian World Trad Metal, finding success in international markets through
Western platforms

6. Digital Intermediation

7. Digital intermediation is the combination of these agents within a new
media ecology:
• data: presenting as online content producers with new approaches
towards highly visible content (maybe shareable?) across platforms;
and
• algorithms: singularly and as the combination of algorithmic
decision making, predictive media decisions, machine learning and
possibly artificial intelligence within automated media systems.
Digital intermediation describes the process of and between the
infrastructure for information exchange processes of cultural
intermediation.
Digital intermediation creates new forms of online communities and
knowledge exchange, suggesting new power relations and production
methodologies also emerge within an entrepreneurial social media
ecosystem.

8. Social Imaginaries
• A “social imaginary … is shared by large
groups of people, if not the whole
society” (Taylor, 2003)
• They often manifest through “techniques
and design principles that are used to
create software or to implement networking
protocols [and] cannot be distinguished
from ideas or principles of social and moral
order for these informants” (Kelty, 2005)
• Social imagination, then, is a combination of
individuals and the materialities they use to
create a legitimate process of constructing
and engaging with their surrounding society.

9. Methodology
Identify top ranked
YouTube channels in
blocked AP countries -
SB Rank
Sample popular
channels in
these countries
Scrape data from
channels, videos and
comments
Analyse networks

10. Countries Identified
Country Press Freedom Scale
China 177
North Korea 179
Afghanistan 121
Bangladesh 150
Pakistan 142
Indonesia 124
Malaysia 123
Thailand 136
Press freedom
or limitations of
soft power?

11. Strengthening Cultural Industries
Popular videos, n=40 videos

12. Comment Networks
Country Comments
China 8,624
North
Korea
5,442
Afghanist
an
9,771
Banglade
sh
3,842
Pakistan 26,084
Indonesia 1,595
Malaysia 1,766
Thailand 17,163
Total
comment
74,287 (45,575 nodes & 23,000 edges)

13. Communities
Emerge
• Locations appear as
anonymous or India
primarily

14. Influential Actors
• Increased information flows through these
nodes
• Community ‘starters’
• Conversation leaders
• Encourage increased cultural/economic
value in content and conversation
• ‘Subversive community making’ through
influencers

15. “those individuals who produce digital content for maximum visibility by engaging social influencer publication
strategies that appease platform algorithms” (Hutchinson, 2019).

16. Ordinary to ‘everyday, bro’

18. Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash
unseen infrastructures:
MICROPLATFORMIZATION
Beyond Multichannel Networks and Digital Agencies

19. Micro-platformization suggests a new digital intermediary has emerged who acts as an agency for digital agencies, in many
ways ensuring advertisers receive the most appropriate influencer for their products or services. In a similar way that
platformization makes data platform ready, micro-platformization makes influencers brand ready. While the marketplace of
culture is still the process of providing audiences to advertisers across social media, the introduction of two significant
stakeholder groups have demonstrated the specialist focus of communicating across social media. To send messages
across social media effectively, one needs a unique vantage for their content production, but also requires the distribution
capacity of the digital intermediaries that bring cultural production audiences and producers together.

20. Digital
Intermediation
Subversive
Community
Making
Unseen digital
infrastructures
Micro-
platformization
Lead community influencers
May start with a VPN, but
Becomes an incredibly complex system of
Non-human intermediation
The appearance of new ‘micro-platforms’
that incubate community growth and
development

21. Jonathon
Hutchinson
Lecturer Online Communication and Media
University of Sydney
jonathon.hutchinson@sydney.edu.au
@dhutchman
The University of Hong Kong and the University of Sydney Joint Symposium:
Cross-border Media Flows, Infrastructures and Imaginaries in a changing Asia-Pacific