The cultural customization of TikTok: subaltern migrant workers and their digital cultures

Abstract

Migrant construction workers in Singapore produced TikTok videos sharing their structural, social, and health conditions during the pandemic. The platform's user-centered design presents opportunities for marginalized communities to participate in content production and distribution. The TikTok videos created by MCWs richly detailed the precarities they faced during the pandemic. Through the production of short videos, workers made visible their dormitory conditions, stringent medical surveillance of their bodies, the mental health anxieties they faced from confinement and isolation, and discussed the extensive mobility restrictions imposed on them. They also customized the platform's editability features to produce and edit vernacular content for entertainment and information-sharing, and digitally archived their precarities on the platform. Through user-generated content, workers responded to the exclusions they faced in the host country, undoing the mainstream discursive silencing of their lived experiences as subaltern workers in the city-state. Workers’ use of TikTok presents opportunities for activism and organizing that center voice and agency for greater digital mobilities.