This open access book is a nuanced rethinking of sensory experience in digital environments. Through in-depth analyses of case studies that examine the sensory dimensions of YouTube, extending beyond just sight and hearing, it offers a reading of media artefacts in relation to broader cultural dynamics, such as neoliberalism and post-feminism, among others.

This book analyses five different video genres-makeup tutorials, ASMR videos, recipe videos, lifestyle vlogs, and body regimen videos-each engaging with particular sensory stimulation and intensification of vision, sound, taste, touch, and rhythm/temporality, respectively. These sensory appeals are integrated with platform features, such as algorithmic curation, database-watching, feedback loops, monetization, and pre-emptive temporal regimens, to modify user engagement to understand in what mode of sensory mediation reproduces a highly individualized subject that enhances the neoliberal agenda and what alternative mode of sensory experience could introduce more reflective and politically grounded modes of sensibility.

Liu argues that our embodied experience and interaction with media platforms can illuminate sensory-aesthetic patterns, as well as the underlying technological and ideological structures that shape these platforms. These structures pre-emptively project a neoliberal subject that operates within the values of neoliberalism, such as individualism, constant self-(re)marking and self-surveillance, self-optimization, market-driven rationality, and self-entrepreneurship. These pre-emptive engagement strategies integrated into content production reduce human agency to a diminished mode, discouraging necessary ethical and reciprocal engagement with the world.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Auckland.