Cultural Adaptation on YouTube

Introduction Storytelling enables people to narrate their experiences of adaptation, displacement, and belonging. In the digital age, this process is increasingly visible on platforms such as YouTube. Taiwan has a long migration history including episodes of large-scale immigration, emigration, and internal migration (Lin). YouTube has become an important platform in Taiwan, serving as a key site for cultural negotiation and visibility. Taiwan’s government and cultural institutions actively collaborate with YouTube creators to promote the nation’s international visibility (Su). This article explores how migrant vloggers use digital storytelling on YouTube to transform everyday experiences of living in Taiwan into collective hybrid narratives about cultural adaptation and identity negotiation. Literature Review Digital storytelling offers an insightful approach to understanding how individuals construct and share narratives of experience in online environments. Essentially, it refers to personal stories conveyed through digital tools, combining textual, visual, and auditory elements into multimodal forms of communication (Lambert). Unlike traditional storytelling, digital storytelling functions both as a form of self-expression and as a relational act that invites interaction and meaning-making within communities. As Kay Teehan notes, this contemporary practice responds to the continuing human need to make sense of the world and share experiences with others, representing the most recent stage in a historical tradition that extends back to cave paintings (7). By linking earlier narration practices to contemporary ones, digital storytelling provides a conceptual framework for examining how migrants’ experiences of transition and adaptation are transformed into publicly accessible narratives. Beyond its demographic dimension, migration is also a narrative process through which individuals interpret and communicate their encounters. As Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou observe, migration has long been a constant yet shifting force of human mobility. There are diverse causes including existential, economic, and environmental factors behind it in both regional and global trajectories (2). Crossing borders therefore raises questions about identity, belonging, and adaptation that are often conveyed through personal stories linking individual transformation within the wider cultural and social contexts. While much of the existing research on migration and new media has focussed on identity and integration, Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller note that questions of sociality and intimacy in transnational contexts remain underexplored (7). Since its launch, YouTube has evolved from a casual video-sharing site (Burgess and Green) into a prominent medium for everyday storytelling. As Nancy Baym observes, the platform has expanded the capacity of individuals to produce mediated content on a mass scale, opening opportunities for visibility and recognition beyond traditional cultural industries (4). Henry Jenkins situates YouTube within the logic of participatory culture, where users not only consume but also actively shape and circulate media. This participatory factor positions YouTube as a transnational social media platform that enables the customisation of content production and the ability to attract audiences (Febriyantoro). As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue, such online environments provide powerful spaces for experimenting with selfhood, enabling users to present versions of an “authentic” self (74). While participatory platforms like YouTube enable users to express themselves and share personal narratives, recent scholarship on platform culture reminds us that such participation is also shaped by underlying economic and algorithmic logics that structure visibility and engagement (Gillespie; van Dijck et al.). Taken together, these perspectives highlight how YouTube is both a place for self-expression and creative participation. Vlogging has emerged as one of YouTube’s most significant genres for the circulation of personal narratives. Filmed in ordinary settings and adopting conversational styles, vlogs transform mundane routines into relatable stories while positioning everyday life as a central site of narration. As Ümit Kennedy notes, vlogging functions as a contemporary form of autobiography, documenting experiences through which online identities are relationally formed (“Exploring”; “Becoming”). Tobias Raun’s study of transgender vlogging similarly highlights its transformative potential for producing and exploring the self, while Alberta Adji demonstrates how women vloggers narrate everyday relations with culture and nature. Scholarship further illustrates the diversity of these practices, such as studies of digital religious homemaking among Indonesian migrants (Budiman) and the role of travel vlogs in influencing consumer behavior (Silaban et al.). These studies show how YouTube fosters hybrid spaces where identity, representation, and economic factors intersect in vlogs. Jean Burgess and Joshua Green identify the vlog as one of YouTube’s central cultural forms, rooted in amateur creativity yet opening private experience to broader publics (43). Migrant vloggers extend this scope, using the ordinariness of daily life as storytelling devices that both express personal experience and mediate cultural adaptation. In this way, vlogging functions as a mode of digital storytelling that is autobiographical and relational, and in which authenticity, belonging, and hybridity are continuously negotiated. Cultural adaptation involves the prolonged negotiation of difference as migrants learn to navigate unfamiliar routines, spaces, and expectations. Storytelling becomes a crucial practice through which migrants construct continuity between past and present while negotiating their sense of place in new surroundings. Young Yun Kim highlights that individuals are not born with the knowledge required to function in society but gradually construct their sense of self and reality through interaction with their cultural “home world”, initially shaped by family and significant others (46). Moreover, scholars such as Jiexiu Chen and Junwen Zhu underline the significance of influencing factors including social networks, cultural distance, and cultural intelligence in shaping adaptation outcomes (11). This perspective resonates with Le-Phuong et al., who demonstrate that social media platforms operate as spaces of storytelling where overlapping identities are made visible and negotiated. Additionally, Earvin Cabalquinto shows how Filipino migrant workers have turned to TikTok to produce counter-narratives contesting official portrayals of overseas life. These dynamics parallel the narratives in migrant vlogs in Taiwan. Building on these works, the analysis examines how migrant vloggers in Taiwan use YouTube to narrate adaptation and belonging, situating their personal accounts within transnational and platform-mediated contexts. It explores Taiwanese audience reception to Western migrant vlogs, and their increasing professionalisation through sponsored content. Finally, it concludes by discussing the imbalanced visibility that Western migrant vlogs receive in Taiwan. Methodology and Analysis Channel Subscribers Joined Videos Origin Life in Taiwan 368,000 2017 517 UK Lukas in Taiwan 355,000 2008 620 Sweden Tristan H. (崔璀璨) 323,000 2012 321 USA WEI HONG (闈鴻) 191,000 2012 77 France Prozzie 159,000 2013 368 Canada Table 1: Overview of the five YouTube channels included in the sample A purposive sampling strategy was employed to capture the narrative diversity and thematic richness of migrant vlogging in Taiwan. The sample consists of five long-term foreign vloggers who regularly produce Taiwan-related content across multiple themes (see Table 1). The selection process began with keyword searches on YouTube related to living in Taiwan, moving to Taiwan, or daily life in Taiwan, followed by algorithmic recommendations that helped identify active vloggers. Five channels were selected based on visibility (over 150,000 subscribers), duration of activity (vlogging consistently for more than three years), and thematic diversity (for instance, covering various aspects of daily life and cultural adaptation in Taiwan). This sample size was designed to balance depth with manageability, following established best practices in qualitative digital media research that privilege thematic saturation over statistical generalisability (Braun and Clarke). To maintain representational balance, the channel Ku’s Dream (with more than two million subscribers) was excluded due to its disproportionate scale compared to others. The final sample thus includes creators from different national backgrounds who have consistently produced Taiwan-focussed content between 2008 and 2025. According to the Foreign Residents by Nationality report published by the Ministry of the Interior, National Immigration Agency, Republic of China (Taiwan) in February 2025, the largest migrant groups in Taiwan originate from Indonesia (108,671 male; 213,763 female), Vietnam (170,603 male; 114,689 female), the Philippines (75,010 male; 100,983 female) and Thailand (65,590 male; 17,605 female). In contrast, the number of long-term residents from Western countries (France: 1,481 male, 575 female; Canada: 1,893 male, 708 female; the United Kingdom: 2,337 male, 556 female; and the United States: 7,869 male, 3,145 female) remains relatively small. Despite the diversity of Taiwan’s migrant population, YouTube’s landscape remains dominated by Western content creators. This disparity reveals a striking imbalance between the demographic realities of migration and the representational visibility afforded by digital platforms. Although the research did not initially aim to focus specifically on Western vlog

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