The YouTuber

Abstract

In the age of digital content curation and creation, what happens when the ethnographer unwittingly becomes an internet celebrity? This piece of creative nonfiction follows an anthropologist's fateful meeting with a YouTuber during her fieldwork on digital sociality in Tokyo. The YouTuber agrees to participate in an interview for her dissertation with a catch: she must appear on his YouTube channel, which features foreigners eating Japanese cuisine. What seems to be an innocuous exchange turns into an anxious array of musings, as the anthropologist underestimates the popularity of the YouTuber's channel and finds herself garnering more attention than she had anticipated. “The YouTuber” highlights the shifting terrain of ethnographic encounters and digital hybridity, including the potential nature of “exchange relationships” with interlocutors who engage in digital content creation. This piece contemplates the parameters of “doing” an ethnography of the digital in contemporary Japan, which can be extended to the digital in other contexts. The characters, locations, and encounters are based on the author's ethnographic fieldwork on digital sociality in Japan, which took place in Tokyo between August 2019 and August 2020, and remotely between August 2020 and October 2021.