Abstract

In its constant efforts to attract and retain online audiences, YouTube has introduced various features. These include “YouTube Live” and its accompanying live chats. After initially only allowing selected YouTube partners to stream their content, YouTube now permits all adults with a verified account to “go live.” This has yielded a distinct category of “interactionally produced” YouTube pages in which different modes—including the live streamed video and comments in the live chat—become interrelated. Stemming from the idea that these modes affect each other, this article engages with “Big Tech” YouTube Live chats to demonstrate how the concurrent existence of YouTube Live streams and live chats leads to “collaborative ludiction.” This concept refers to situations in which the insertions and uptake of discourse by multiple participants into a “massive” interactional space receive collaboratively produced prolonged visibility and are subsequently situated to affect interpretations of other discourse that is being produced within (the context of) this space. To demonstrate how collaborative ludiction can be approached in relation to particular “micro-populations” and various human and non-human actors, this article uses the successful insertion—and thus uptake—of the words “made in China” into the live chat that accompanied the “Fox News’ ” live stream of the 2020 “Big Tech” antitrust hearing as an emblematic case study.