Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the role of education influencers as emerging experts facilitating market-making in education for platform companies. Specifically, it analyzes the role of their two market devices - 'how-to' YouTube videos and expertise enactment - in shaping the education technology market.

Paper long abstract:

Platformization of education has accelerated in the past decade with major Big Tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon assuming key roles in educational processes. This paper employs a market-making lens to illustrate how Google's deepening presence in education is mediated through the configuration of a new category of experts in education, namely education influencers. Drawing on Callon’s marketization framework (Çalışkan and Callon 2010; Callon 2021), I present a multi-sited netnographic analysis of the digital traces of two prominent education influencers. The empirical analysis elucidates how these influencers create a market for technology companies in education by mobilizing two main market devices: "how-to" YouTube videos, and the enactment of their expertise. The investigation reveals that ‘how-to’ YouTube videos engage in three different levels of framing: firstly, detaching Google products from their corporate identity; secondly, re-entangling these products with educators working in varying institutional contexts; thirdly, attaching these products to other third-party applications commonly used in schools. Furthermore, the analysis shows how the enactment of expertise not only solidifies the expert status of the influencers but also introduces and popularizes new values in education, particularly in the form of a specific kind of platform labor for educators that further entangles their professional practice with the digital products. Finally, the analysis underscores how these framings and devices of education influencers co-constitute the users (students and educators) in relation to Google products by positioning these tools as the de facto solution for educational needs.