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This article examines ongoing responses to natural disasters such as bushfires, climate change and COVID-19 as articulated in various videos produced for, and distributed via, YouTube. It focuses on channels and content creators that promote ecologically mindful alternative everyday practices explicitly driven by permaculture principles and accompanying notions of resilience as well as individual and community self-reliance. While many of these videos are ostensibly concerned with instructing viewers in small-scale practical food production at a household or small business level, they also mark a renewed critical interest in everyday practices and domestic space as a site of social and cultural change through alternative ways of living. The research employs analytical approaches and frameworks drawn from the disciplines of cultural and media studies, specifically the former's interest in the notion of 'everyday life' and the latter's engagement with digital platforms such as YouTube. I argue that the permaculture movement's success on YouTube is indicative of the ways in which the environmental concerns of pre-digital social movements might be adapted to the unique affordances and modes of address of platform media like YouTube and, in particular, its signature form of the vlog. Platform media like YouTube accordingly deserve further scholarly research and a similar level of attention as given to more traditional media forms such as print, film and television in terms of how they might positively enable conceptual and practical responses to ecological crisis at both personal and community levels.

This article discusses cultural studies approaches to the role of media and communication technologies in the constitution of place. The discussion emerges out of the author's ongoing study of the Shibuya district of Tokyo. Known for its trendsetting youth cultures and as a site of conspicuous consumption, Shibuya is also marked by an unusually intense proliferation of screen technologies, from the large scale (such as television screens embedded in building structures) to the miniature (individual mobile telephone screens). An examination of the articulation of these ubiquitous media technologies with a range of human and institutional actors in Shibuya provides broader insights into contemporary spatial practices and formations. It is argued that a combination of Law's notion of "punctualization," drawn from actor-network theory, and Hendy's social anthropological concept of "un/wrapping" provides a generative framework for conceptualizing and describing the processual production and experience of Shibuya's mediated place identity.