De ‘youtubers’ a ‘cultubers’: un fenómeno de divulgación académica, cultural y científica en YouTube

Abstract

The term youtuber label has sometimes been associated with pejorative considerations when it has been reduced only to define YouTube creators linked to the video game and entertainment sector. Parallel to the quantitative success of this type of youtubers, communicators from practically all academic, cultural and scientific fields have emerged on YouTube in recent years. Cultube is a digital community conceived within the Spanish-speaking digital reality that brings together this kind of creators and promotes this increasing model of science communication on the most popular video social media. Based on a grounded theory methodological orientation, this article presents the results of a semiotic-discursive analysis applied to interviews and ethnographic data collected from the three editions of Cultube held to date: 2018, 2019 and 2021. This case study helps to understand the global and growing phenomenon of cultural and science communicators on YouTube, their role in the global democratization of learning and their potential for the future.