Document Type
Article
Source of Publication
Social Media and Society
Publication Date
7-1-2023
Abstract
While Dubai, the small emirate in the United Arab Emirates, tends to be associated with luxurious social media images of elite social actors, startling architecture, and consumer status symbols, this study addresses migrant, domestic, and service workers’ everyday digital placemaking. To explore these issues, a global semiotic framework reorientates traditional notions of the geopolitical context in terms of Dubai’s social mediascape. TikTok is taken as a case to explore a corpus of Dubai-related hashtags and content being shared by migrant, domestic, and service workers. The central argument of the article is that, while Dubai’s social media cultures reflect hegemonies of Gulf governance and TikTok’s algorithms, they are also infused by workers’ affective digital-placemaking as a form of neoliberal resilience to communicative capitalism and deterritorialization in the social media age. Overall, the article provides much-needed insights into how social mediashapes and is shaped by transnational social actors’ digital placemaking in the Middle East region.
DOI Link
ISSN
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Volume
9
Issue
3
Disciplines
Communication | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Keywords
affect, algorithms, digital labor, digital placemaking, global semiotics, migrants, social mediascape, TikTok
Scopus ID
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Hurley, Zoe, "#Dubailiving and Digital Placemaking on TikTok: Migrant, Domestic, and Service Workers’ Affective Social Mediascapes" (2023). All Works. 6091.
https://zuscholars.zu.ac.ae/works/6091
Indexed in Scopus
yes
Open Access
yes
Open Access Type
Gold: This publication is openly available in an open access journal/series