**Abstract**

Vloggers and content producers have become famous by being active on platforms, such as YouTube and Instagram, which are essential components and mainstays of today's internet usage practices. In this context, YouTubers and content producers have become the most striking figures of virtual media in recent years, while beauty phenomena reach many followers and influence large audiences. With these aspects, the phenomena become the subjects of women's entrepreneurship activities and form a new type of virtual/digital entrepreneurship. On the other hand, the labor exerted by the phenomena while applying different practices to aestheticize the body in their videos can be conceptualized as "simulative labor." Based on this argument, this research aims to analyze the way of constructing simulative labor in the activities of beauty vloggers as virtual female entrepreneurs. In the context of the study, the videos of Duygu Özaslan and Danla Bilic, two of the beauty phenomena with the highest number of followers in Turkey, were subjected to content analysis within the scope of the qualitative research method. The main finding of the research is that both entrepreneurial beauty phenomena have become icons by performing simulative labor. However, the female identities represented by the icons produce simulations that differ significantly from each other.

**Keywords:** women entrepreneurship, YouTubers, simulative labor, internet culture, virtual culture

### **1. Introduction**

Castells [1] states that today is a network society and argues that in this type of society, internet technologies shape life and are shaped by life, and create new communication styles. This fact leads to the formation of an Internet Galaxy, which he describes as "a new world of communication" [1]. While the dramatic effect of digitalization on the economy has led to the emergence of the "digital economy" concept [2] in this phenomenon of global capitalism, there is an abundance of digital information/digital meta, being an essential tool for analyzing social media [3]. The types of labor are also transforming, and new income-generating activities have the potential to provide high income to their performers. These activities, including YouTube and

Instagram influencing, which have emerged with the rise in social media usage since the 2000s, are becoming increasingly popular. Moreover, YouTube vlogging has become an online autobiography where people build their identities. In this context, vloggers periodically share their daily lives with their followers [4]. Such practices based on individual commodification and representation intersect with the notion of "spectacle" focused on by Debord [5], who introduced the concept of "society of the spectacle." This intersection creates new forms of work and categories of labor. In conjunction with these developments, academics began to question whether the practices mentioned are professions or have the nature of labor. Thus, social media has started to be studied by many different disciplines today [6].

Adapting the female body to patriarchal capitalist ideals, one of the essential components of the consumer society"s functioning, has increased the interest in vlogs organized around beauty. Thus, videos shared by many amateur women on virtual channels, based on practices that aestheticize the female body, have become gradually popular. As a result of this process, while some women turned into beauty phenomena and met with a large audience, the integrated structure of consumption and production shapes women vloggers' activities. This research argues that income-generating activities, considered a form of labor and realized through social media, are described as "simulative labor" with a Baudrillardian [7] perspective, asserting that vloggers' activities are based on simulation. In parallel with this, it aims to analyze how hierarchical relations between women are reproduced and how different women's identities are constructed through simulative labor. The literature has limited discussions on the relationship between Baudrillard's simulation theory and social media. However, his theory can provide a rich analytical framework for analyzing vloggers. In light of this argument, the research has the potential to be a pioneer as it makes a contribution to the literature on the conceptualization of entrepreneurial labor of beauty phenomena based on Baudrillard's theory. Moreover, the research will question the allegation put forward by third and fourth-wave feminist researchers that consciousness and initiative in beauty practices have functionality in terms of women's liberation.

The paper is organized as follows: First, the study will analyze labor and virtual culture in the simulation era. These discussions will implement a theoretical framework around visuality, visions, micro-celebrities, simulations, and simulative labor. In the field research part of the study, after introducing methodology, the research findings obtained by watching and subjecting to content analysis of the videos of Duygu Özaslan and Danla Bilic within the context of the qualitative research method will be presented. The following chapters will include findings on the relations between simulation and iconization, the dilemma of specialization and non-specialization, the death of sisterhood, and the enjoyment of iconization.

### **2. Theoretical framework**

#### **2.1 The new virtual culture in the simulation age**

The technological part of the internet draws the boundaries of human behavior and is shaped by the social aspect of the internet, based on human relations. Thus, the internet encompasses the technological and social subsystems that make up a technosocial system [8]. Visuality and spectacle are the essential elements that structure the internet culture and the global patriarchal capitalism of our age. In this sense, it is not a coincidence that Debord [5] identifies today's world with the "society of the

#### *Women Entrepreneurs as Vloggers: Turkish Beauty YouTubers in the Context of Simulative Labor DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109501*

spectacle" and Han [9], with the concept of the "society of exhibition." Hence, the virtual technology culture of global capitalism has the character of spreading, massifying, accelerating, and fluidizing the visual more and more. Social networking sites that create network-based communities where the development and evolution process continues [10] are intensified by visual forms supported by technology.

YouTube is a distinctive part of the visual internet culture. In partnership with Google, it is a popular social media application many users prefer [10]. It is increasingly adopting a television broadcast-like structure rather than social networks or group interaction [11]. YouTube and YouTubers' popularity originated from the recent transformation in the internet economy that went through a crisis in 2000. Although finance capital management has increased the market value of many internet companies, it has yet to reach profitability. This situation has resulted in the bankruptcy of many internet companies. Discussions about Web 2.0 and social media being new and different were intended to persuade investors to invest in internet companies after this crisis. Therefore, Web 2.0 and social media emerged as ideological tools to overcome the crisis and ensure the internet economy's capital accumulation [8]. The argument that Web 2.0 technologies will reinforce a participatory culture has also become popular. This concept often used to indicate the participation of users, viewers, consumers, and fans in creating culture and content can be exemplified by coediting an article on Wikipedia, uploading a video to YouTube, or sharing short messages on Twitter. The participatory culture model is the opposite of the broadcasting model, based on mass media, such as newspapers, radio, and television, where there is one sender and many receivers [8]. Based on the fact that users and viewers can actively produce the culture themselves, some scholars state that this process has made culture and society more democratic. However, according to Fuchs, this argument needs to be questioned. An internet environment dominated by companies that accumulate capital by exploiting and commodifying users is far from providing participatory democracy. The cultural meanings inherent in such an internet structure cannot express participation [8].

One of the concepts that started to be discussed as a result of these developments was platform capitalism. This concept is functional to analyze the "platform" defined by a combination of socio-technical and capitalist business practices. The platform is not just a manifestation of transformations in the relations and structures of contemporary capitalism. It should also be seen "as a discrete mode of socio-technical intermediary and capitalist business arrangement" [12]. In social media platforms, many strategies to turn leisure labor into income are followed, transforming cultural capital (taste) and social capital, including friends, admirers, followers, and members, into economic capital [13]. Thus, research on categories such as Instagram influencing, being a YouTuber, and blogging has revealed that creating social media content is a form of labor. The digital labor debate has also emerged within the scope of critical media and communication studies with the rise of social media. This discussion analyzes unpaid user labor required for capital accumulation [8]. "Especially used for social media activities on for-profit platforms" [8], digital labor "is labor that produces information through digital media" [2]. Some studies have found that this form of labor, although new, has similarities to the labor categories inherent in older forms of the media and culture industries [14].

In its early days, the amateur nature of the videos, rather than being daily, mundane, or newsworthy entertaining, was the principal and distinctive characteristic of YouTube [15]. Encouraging people to constantly make their broadcasts, present their representations and commodify themselves, YouTube accelerates the process of becoming famous on the internet [11]. In this process, the internet started to create celebrities as an alternative to mass media, such as television and cinema [8]. As it became popular, vloggers became famous, gaining many followers on other social media platforms, publishing books, and starring in television series [13]. Today, many YouTubers have YouTube pages and channels and release music albums, act in movies and commercials, make their movies, and participate in television programs and even award ceremonies [16].

Activities such as content production on the internet or being a YouTuber gradually have become so profitable that the economic boom created by the income generated by these activities is called "wanghong jingji" (internet celebrity economy) in Chinese [17]. It is even claimed that internet celebrities and influencers create a new class. This development in social media is nourished by platform logic and visibility labor [18]. The emergence of the concept of fame labor, defined as emotional labor for the pressure of conforming to the micro-celebrity culture [19] reveals the significance of micro-celebrities in the new capitalism. Being a social reality that emerges in such a context, micro-celebrity [8], defined as the mentality and practices focusing on the private life of the micro-celebrity [20], incorporates strategies in which privacy and originality are the main components [11]. Micro-celebrity is a perception of reality that expresses the narratives and privacy of micro-celebrities in an accessible way [20]. The fact that privacy is such a foundation for micro-celebrity coincides with the argument in Bauman and Lyon's [21] analysis of social media that they emphasize the fluid character of today's surveillance practices and that privacy is violated by consent. It is possible to consider the relationship between micro-celebrity and privacy within Han's [9] conceptualization of the "exhibitionist society." The characteristics of the exhibitionist society are that each subject is "its advertising object," everything is measured by exhibition value, and everything is turned out, exposed, bared, stripped, and exposed [9]. On the other hand, in the context of fluid surveillance, where the characteristics of panopticism have disappeared, Bauman and Lyon assert that today's prisoners, unlike the prisoners in the panopticon, violate their privacy voluntarily via social media [21]. In the case of a YouTuber, this "consent violation" gains an exchange value and turns into an income-generating activity. On the other hand, the concept of "subcultural micro-celebrity" is suggested to define the concept and practices of vloggers called "micro-celebrity" [11]. In this framework, YouTube, which is increasingly commercialized, creates a culture that affects the individual representation of vloggers [11]. Hence, the internet makes its subculture, and simulative labor composes an essential pillar in this formation.

Media and popular culture are essential in disseminating myths and discourses about the positive aspects of careers shaped online [22]. Turned into a luxury career option, being a YouTuber offers many people a space of freedom with advantages, such as the comfort of working at home, the absence of long working hours, or the opportunity to work without being tied to an employer [23]. Internet celebrities also spread several myths about their existence and careers by "constructing their work as a mixture of pleasure, authentic self-expression, and autonomy." This situation allows them to hide the negative features of creative labor and create images with the quality of "model subject" [22]. Indeed, some scholars argue that YouTube creators are alienated from their jobs because of their exploitation by YouTube. For instance, tools, such as cameras, sound recorders, and computers, used by content creators are not provided by YouTube. Although creators can make videos voluntarily without coercion, there is no guarantee that many viewers will watch every video. Indeed, the fact that only a few viewers watch many YouTube channels causes content *Women Entrepreneurs as Vloggers: Turkish Beauty YouTubers in the Context of Simulative Labor DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109501*

creators to be unable to invite advertisers and not earn income through their videos [2]. Some approaches also emphasize the gap between the idealization of the social media entrepreneurship career and the precarious labor in the digital economy [22]. For example, a study revealed that experiencing unpredictable working conditions, platformed creative workers follow strategies to increase their likes, views, favorites, and shares to eliminate the threat of being invisible [14]. Although contradicting the fact that YouTube facilitates collaboration between other creators, content creators are also alienated from other people. Since the spirit of capitalism is based on individual competition, cooperation between content producers is far from the intention of building class solidarity [2].

#### **2.2 A new form of women entrepreneurship and labor: beauty vlogging**

Women's entrepreneurship has historically been considered a remedy for the increasing feminization of poverty and unemployment, with a gender-sensitive development perspective. Since the 1980s, women's entrepreneurship has started to be promoted by organizations, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Union, as a primary means of combating women's poverty and unemployment. In addition, women's entrepreneurship has become the focus of attention around the world, as it has the potential to enable women to overcome patriarchal barriers and participate in economic life [24]. Instead of being in paid employment, women's entrepreneurship activities are considered a more accessible goal in promoting gender equality [25]. In developing countries, there is a social structure, where society does not readily accept the role of women as family supporters due to the gender roles that are sometimes profoundly embraced even by women themselves. Although some women can become entrepreneurs by combating these factors that hinder their entrepreneurial activities, they are still expected to fulfill their household obligations, creating a severe work–family conflict [26]. Therefore, policies encouraging entrepreneurship are the most effective means of preventing women's unemployment and poverty in developing countries [27].

Women's entrepreneurship activities, shaped within the framework of today's internet world through practices, such as being YouTubers or influencers, have differed considerably from the origin of women's entrepreneurship. This new type of female entrepreneurship is based on the integration of women into virtual entrepreneurship, which provides the opportunity to get income. Like other internet celebrities, beauty vloggers have become part of virtual culture and entrepreneurs [17].

Women vloggers' activities are highly embedded in the visual internet culture. In analyzing the role of visuality in capitalism and gender in virtual culture, it may be appropriate to focus on "seeing" and "being seen" as starting points. In this context, Han [9], who speaks of "the compulsion for display that hands everything over to visibility," says that "value accrues only insofar as objects are seen." By associating his analysis of being seen with capitalism and Marx's theory of value, he constructs the concept of "exhibition value," which he describes as peculiar to the most advanced level of capitalism. Han associates the role of social media in this framework with Facebook. Accordingly, the age of Facebook reduces the human face, characterized by its exhibition value, to a "face." It is in question that the value of the exhibition requires beauty and vigor and is overly identified with them [9].

In the famous work of John Berger [28] entitled "Ways of Seeing," the basic assumptions about "seeing" and "being seen" are shaped by their relation to women in the patriarchal system:

*"A woman must continually watch herself. Her image of herself almost continually accompanies her. …From earliest childhood, she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. …She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life… Men act and women appear" [28].*

Today, vlogging within the framework of the dynamics of entrepreneurship of the self is affirmed. This reality refers to all social media, encompassing YouTube [15]. One of the fields of activity of vloggers and YouTube phenomena is the female body and beauty culture, which are crucial elements of consumer society. Famous for their vlogs, which include many practical themes, such as makeup, fashion, healthy life, and sports, female beauty phenomena, have become icons of virtual popular culture by reaching many followers.1 Many brands have started working with YouTube celebrities to reach a fragmented audience [30]. The lifestyle they represent, which includes entrepreneurship, recognition, and influencing, has a feature desired by the followers. Moreover, some researchers have found that the popularity of beauty bloggers increased the demand for the cosmetic products they use in their videos [10, 17, 31].

The attempts of content producers to aestheticize the female body on virtual platforms have been interpreted by some feminists in the context of reproducing the roles imposed on women by patriarchal capitalism. One of these arguments is that YouTube supports hegemonic femininity forms reproduced by beauty vloggers with social and cultural capital. According to this approach, the YouTube algorithm rewards old teenage magazine culture content, such as consumption, beauty, fashion, friendship, or boyfriends [32]. This critical view coincides with second-wave feminism's analysis of the female body. However, discussions within feminism have risen, questioning the allegation that beauty phenomena contribute to reproducing patriarchal values. Third and fourth-wave feminism discusses that the capacity to make decisions about one's body, sometimes including bodily beautification, could be functional regarding women's liberation. In this context, arguments have risen that the videos of beauty vloggers incidentally combine feminism and beauty practices to create an alternative critical feminist language and that women can resist patriarchal pressures by using cosmetics [33].

Conceptualizing the labor processes based on the fact that beauty YouTubers' activities create value is crucial for vlogger research from a labor perspective. In the videos of beauty vloggers, first of all, the existence of esthetic labor and, in some cases, emotional labor is noticed. In addition, scholars made contributions to the literature with concepts, such as "visibility labor," "aspirational labor" [17], "hidden labor" [34, 35], and "creative labor" [14]. The activities of beauty vloggers should also be considered entrepreneurial labor [36]. Within the framework of this research, the concept of simulative labor, built on Baudrillard's simulation concept, suggested making sense of the effort exerted by YouTube's beauty phenomena. Simulation or hyperreal, defined by Baudrillard [7] as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality," means "the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere" and now replaces reality. According to him, a simulation era has emerged with humanity's disconnection from reality. At this age,

<sup>1</sup> Contrary to the popular wisdom that beauty vloggers usually consist of young people, there are many beauty vloggers over sixty [29].

*Women Entrepreneurs as Vloggers: Turkish Beauty YouTubers in the Context of Simulative Labor DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109501*

*"Never again will the real have to be produced. …A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference" [7].*

As seen, the most crucial function of simulation or hyperreal is to eliminate the difference between the real and the imaginary [7]. This claim is based on the simulative labor that structures YouTube videos of beauty phenomena. The simulative labor process predicates eliminating the meaning of reality by creating simulations.

The phenomenon of prosumption is also an essential component in the content produced by beauty vloggers. Putting firstly forward, Toffler [36] argued that in today's capitalism, consumption and production merge, or the boundaries between the two become blurred. "Third wave civilization begins to heal the historic breach between producer and consumer, giving rise to the 'prosumer economics' of tomorrow" [36]. Ritzer and Rey [37], making a contemporary analysis of the relationship of prosumption with the internet, argue that it is not possible to separate production and consumption in the world of exchange relations intensified by the internet, and they state that the phenomenon of prosumption increasingly fits into today's postmodern era. Indeed, many social media platforms, such as YouTube, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, are based on user-generated prosumption activities [38]. There are assertions that multilayered identities created by prosumption activities encourage the formation of participatory culture in online communities. Prosumer capitalism reveals that sharing private life with others through prosumption activities in online communities has become prevalent [38]. The existence of a new virtual culture, in which prosumption, an essential activity of content producers, supports the consumption society, is in line with Castells' [1] argument that the behavioral practices of internet users create an internet culture. Besides prosumption, social media is "in relation to the blurring of leisure and labor time (play labor)" [39]. The tendency for unpaid labor to become commodity producers in the field of cultural consumption has gained strength with the rise of the internet and social media. Thus, historically, the trend toward the erosion of dualities, such as play and labor, working time and leisure, production and consumption, and factory and home, has been strengthened [39]. The following chapters will analyze how prosumption builds a female identity in the simulation created by micro-celebrities, which are beauty phenomena in today's internet culture.

### **3. Field research**

#### **3.1 Methodology**

Within the scope of the research, a digital ethnographic perspective was adopted. Used in the research of digital tools and the new spaces created by them, it provides rich data in many disciplines [40]. Covering different types, such as "virtual ethnography, cyberspace ethnography, ethnography of new media, online ethnography, and social media/new media ethnography," allows the analysis of social problems in the digital field [41]. Because they are among the beauty YouTubers with the highest number of subscribers in Turkey [42], the five most viewed YouTube videos in which Duygu Özaslan and Danla Bilic show makeup applications were selected as the research sample. The reason for choosing the most viewed videos is to analyze which themes the viewers are mainly influenced by. Videos of both phenomena include

content about their daily lives, wedding preparations, travels, or answering questions about their private lives. However, these videos are about the micro-celebrity experiences of Duygu Özaslan and Danla Bilic, who emerged as beauty vloggers and turned into phenomena after their videos became very popular and are beyond the scope of our topic. Since the main problem of the research is the construction of the prosumer female identity through simulative labor, the videos of the mentioned vloggers' makeup applications were included in the scope of the study. The research's limitation is that the vloggers could not be interviewed.

In order to collect data within the framework of the qualitative research method, the following videos of the two phenomena were watched and subjected to content analysis: "We changed our makeup bags with Danla Bilic"<sup>2</sup> [43], "Instagram makeup | American style makeup"3 [44], "I try the cheapest products-makeup with recommended affordable products"4 [45], "I did makeup with techniques I hate—the thickest makeup I have ever done"5 [46], and "My daily makeup"6 [47] on Duygu Özaslan's YouTube channel; "The makeup of the girl who became popular in a short time"<sup>7</sup> [48], "The makeup themed 'I did not collapse, but I am not surviving'"8 [49], "Yeditepe University<sup>9</sup> 50% scholarship girl makeup"10 [50], "The makeup of a girl who becomes a DJ when she becomes a phenomenon"11 [51], and "The makeup of the high school girl who says 'I applied only mascara' to her teacher"12 [52] on Danla Bilic's YouTube channel. YouTube's videos of famous beauty celebrities feature themes, such as get ready with me, outfit of the day, monthly favorite products, nighttime beauty routines, and makeup tutorials [30]. As is seen, unlike Danla Bilic, Duygu Özaslan's videos are more similar to these themes.

#### **3.2 Findings and discussion**
