Multiculturalistas e interculturalistas

To conclude this chapter, serious leisure career-related research findings of Robert Stebbins, originator of serious leisure, and Jenna Hartel, who translated the concept to the ILS field, are compared to the findings about serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers’ career trajectories just presented. According to Stebbins (1970), the serious leisure career has five possible stages: beginning, development,

establishment, maintenance, and (eventual) decline. He notes, however, that, “boundaries separating these stages are imprecise,” and that individuals “pass largely imperceptibly” between them despite their senses of accomplishment (Stebbins, 2015, p. 20). Serious leisure careers are likely to be blotted by various contingencies and turning points, and may even involve retrogression; still, though, they are, overall, temporally continuous and cumulative, and thus fulfilling (Stebbins, 1970, 2015). This has led Hartel (2010b) to conceptualize the serious leisure career as an upward- and downward-sloping arc. Likening serious leisure careers to Sonnenwald and Iivonen’s (1999) long-term eons, Hartel (2010b) uses her own research anchored in the activity of gourmet hobby cooking to bear down into the interval-length preoccupations and shorter episodes of real-time action of which serious leisure careers are comprised. Intervals are comparable to abovementioned life changes, affecting what topics serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers cover in their videos, while episodes of serious beauty and lifestyle YouTube information creating are discussed in Chapter 7. However, pointing out ways in which changes in serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers’ life trajectories or field trajectory can alter their career courses proffers a more “zoomed out” (Nicolini, 2009), as well as a longitudinal, perspective. It also suggests to researchers the potential value of viewing serious leisure careers within a broader frame of reference, accounting for as many endogenous and exogenous factors as possible, especially when considering information-related phenomena as rapidly evolving and as dynamic as new media.

A major difference to Stebbins’ and Hartel’s generic vision of the serious leisure career arc in the context of serious beauty and lifestyle YouTube is that serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers are careful never to mention denouement. Rather, they describe their careers as more or less straightforward trajectories filled out by several sequential and overlapping periods: taking notice, learning while doing,

routinizing, being validated, and openly owning. During these career courses, serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers’ activity levels remain more or less steady, perhaps with small (temporary, they claim) ebbs. At some point, they will also begin narrativizing. This period is in contrast to the pronounced

decline of generic serious leisure career arcs, when participation tapers out or ceases altogether, whether due to conscious decision-making, unconscious drift, or external forces (Stebbins, 1970); changes in lifestyle, aging, and creative burnout or fads are common reasons for decline (Hartel, 2007, 2010b; Stebbins, 2008). The lack of decline in the serious beauty and lifestyle YouTube career trajectory is not to say it does not occur, only that it is not discussed. This trajectory was pictured above, in Figure 15. It is possible to compare serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers’ career trajectory periods to stages in the serious leisure career arc as well. At the start of their serious leisure career trajectories, serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers are taking notice of others in their category of interest; often, these are eminent early adopters who may become influential figures in aspirational creator networks. They are also shifting their attention from topical content in videos they watch to practice-based concerns that pertain to the creating and sharing of videos they watch. This period does not differ significantly from the beginning stage of a generic serious leisure career, when individuals gain substantial awareness of and are captivated by an activity and/or its ethos, but do not partake in it (Stebbins, 1970).In both, observation is key: the knowing practitioners or professionals in Stebbins’ (1970, 1979) professionals-amateurs-publics triad act as models that aspiring novices emulate, transmitting embodied or corporeal information that shows and teaches them how to practice (Lloyd, 2010a, 2010b).

Serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers, acting on perceived similarity or dissimilarity with those they watch, move on to a period of learning while doing next, wherein they spend time

experimenting with and researching the technical and stylistic aspects of ‘doing’ YouTube themselves. This periodagain has much in common with the development stage of a generic serious leisure career, and with how Hartel (2007, 2010b) has noted gourmet hobby cooks spend their development stages, which is conducting experimentation and research around their chosen activity. Both may be considered times during which individuals begin to actually participate in an activity, and to obtain the fundamental skills that allow them to practise it “with relative ease” (Stebbins, 1970, p. 74). Using the ideas of practice theory, bodily and mental patterns are absorbed and inculcated here (Schatzki, 2001), as individuals begin to link their own physical, corporeal ‘know how’ knowledge to conceptual, epistemic ‘know what’ knowledge (Lloyd, 2006, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). A chief difference between the period of learning while doing in the serious beauty and lifestyle YouTube career trajectory and the stage of development in the universal serious leisure career arc, however, is that, while the latter can be skewed toward private or semi-private acquisition of skills, knowledge, and experience, the nature of serious beauty and lifestyle YouTube as part-performative endeavour means individuals are pushed into public expression of the skills, knowledge, and experience concurrently, as they are acquiring them. Cristin raised the following anecdote during her interview:

“I’ve got a friend who’s been back and forth on ‘doing’ YouTube. She’s got a couple of videos up[loaded], but she keeps saying, ‘I want more people to watch me before I make videos.’ And it doesn’t work like that! You make videos and then people watch you. You don’t get a bunch of subscribers and then start making videos.”

Stebbins (1970) notes that individuals may make early public appearances or even earn minimal money during the development stage, but that the balance of their attention is not yet on knowledge expression. When an individual’s serious leisure activity is predicated on or based largely in a Web 2.0

Although learning while doing never ends for serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers, it is less emphasized as they progress to a period, routinizing, wherein they desire to invest further time and emotion into their creating and sharing, which they achieve primarily via a schedule for their video uploads. Routinizing is influenced by their strategic awareness that the YouTube algorithm seems to favour frequency and consistency in uploads, as well as (or perhaps more so) by an affective

awareness that viewers—who may by now be starting to form follower sub-communities, discussed in Chapter 6—favour frequency and consistency from serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers too, and will invest reciprocally in and engage reciprocally with those upon whose presence they are able to depend. Routinizing is reminiscent of the generic serious leisure career establishment stage, wherein individuals “have moved beyond the status of learner of the basics” (Stebbins, 1970, p. 82), perhaps begun to specialize (Hartel, 2007, 2010b), and, most tellingly, have made their leisure activity into a regular part of their lives (Stebbins, 1970). Establishment is also known as a stage during which

individuals find networks (Stebbins, 1970), “circles of like-minded foodie friends” for gourmet hobby cooks, for example (Hartel, 2010b, Career arc). Routinizing is for serious beauty and lifestyle

YouTubers a more information management-focused stepping stone, though it does facilitate network-building, which is consequential for the next career period of being validated.

Routinizing evidences commitment, and thus brings chances for serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers to be validated by way of channel metrics, strengthening social world relationships, and/or financial payouts. Being validated makes them more likely to begin openly owning their ‘doing’ of YouTube as well; serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers’ comments suggest that these two periods are closely related in a continual cycle. Stalp’s (2006) research with female amateur quilters illustrates a similar back-and-forth dialectic between product-related measures and outcomes, the “visible proof” (p. 207) of one’s progress in an activity, and one’s willingness and confidence to candidly identify with that activity. Although quilters were aware that process-related outcomes, such as their own

subjective senses of worth, were more important measures of progress than objective benchmarks, they recognized that tangible deliverables were required for others’ assessments of their activity, and that these carried at least some weight in their self-assessments. Serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers’ emotional reactions to outward signs (or lack thereof) of channel growth or career advancement are similar, and suggest that the relationship between the establishment and maintenance stages in the generic serious leisure career arc is more complicated than often portrayed. Stebbins (1970) allows that establishment is “the most stressful of all” times in the serious leisure career arc, a time when gatekeepers are encountered and “the workings” of the leisure social world exposed (p. 88), but that

maintenance is a “heyday” of moderated activity, wherein individuals find their careers “in full bloom, [… and are] able to enjoy the pursuit to its utmost,” experiencing “the maximum number of rewards and the minimum number of costs” (Stebbins, 1970, p. 88). Serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers’ stresses about their social world and their places therein are exacerbated because ‘workings’ of their social world can never be fully grasped and, moreover, cannot be grasped once and for all, because they are always changing. This makes reasoned analyses of continuation and potential futures difficult.

At some point over the previously reviewed five serious leisure career trajectory periods of serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers, narrativizing begins. This involves their retrospective justifying to themselves and to others that the practices of creating and sharing are meant for them. While

narrativizing is about looking to the past more than the present or future, it serves to affirm serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers as they move forward in their ‘doing’ of YouTube. Narrativizing

seems a distinct component of the public-facing and -engaging, new media-hosted serious leisure career trajectory. Thus, neither Stebbins nor Hartel identified a comparable career stage with their research.

As a final point of note, serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers’ career trajectories bear many resemblances to the careers of professionals, and many of the information activities involved in their creating practice described in Chapter 7, such as outlining and storyboarding, cross-promoting, and branding,

seem professional in their manifestations. While serious beauty and lifestyle YouTubers claim everyday (Savolainen, 2008a) and even “accidental” (Neff, 2012) roots for their mixed serious leisure pursuits, to position their information practices and activities within everyday life and leisure realms may seem inaccurate when these are geared toward continual progression and can be coloured by aspirations of validation, ownership, and (pre-)professionalism. To add further complication, interviewees: 1) referenced their serious beauty and lifestyle YouTube tasks as “work,” albeit enjoyable work, even when categorizing these tasks as part of a non-revenue-generating hobby, and 2) often described their own statuses as hobbyists, amateurs, or devotees relative to income rather than inputs of time—the opposite of what Stebbins (1977, 1979, 2014) suggests to researchers. Professional-career resemblances have not escaped Stebbins (1970) either, who notes that serious leisure careers are internally and externally demanding, though in the way of Goffman’s (1959) “moral careers”; moral careers refer broadly to “any social strand of any person’s course through life” (Goffman, 1959, p. 123). Similarly, clear-cut boundaries to separate everyday life from work or school have always been difficult to demarcate (Given, 2002; Savolainen, 1995a). As information outlets like Web 2.0 become more entwined with leisure, giving rise to concepts like “playbor” (Haque, 2010), and simultaneously offer avenues and means for people to craft their own individual versions of ‘work’ using “web-based publishing and self-curated content for an income” (Abidin, 2018, p. xix), distinctions between modern everyday life and modern professionalism continue to blur.

CHAPTER 6: THE SOCIAL WORLD OF SERIOUS