21,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The widespread uptake of digital platforms - from YouTube and Instagram to Twitch and TikTok - is reconfiguring cultural production in profound, complex, and highly uneven ways. Longstanding media industries are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations - live-streaming, social media influencing, and podcasting, among others - are evolving at breakneck speed. Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy explore both the processes and the implications of platformization across the cultural industries, identifying key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. The authors foreground three particular industries - news, gaming, and social media creation - and also draw upon examples from music, advertising, and more. Diverse in its geographic scope, Platforms and Cultural Production builds on the latest research and accounts from across North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and China to reveal crucial differences and surprising parallels in the trajectories of platformization across the globe. Offering a novel conceptual framework grounded in illuminating case studies, this book is essential for students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are transforming - and what the stakes are for understanding platform power.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 490
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
1 Introduction
Platforms and Platformization
Cultural Producers and Other Complementors
Argument and Plan of the Book
Notes
Part I: Institutional Changes
2 Markets
Introduction
Old and New Regimes of Economic Power
Platform Economics
Platform Evolution and Ecosystems
Becoming a Complementor
Conclusion
Notes
3 Infrastructure
Introduction
Platforms and Infrastructuralization
Platforms as Components-based Data Infrastructures
Infrastructural Integration by Complementors
Conclusion
Notes
4 Governance
Introduction
Platform Governance
Regulation
Curation
Moderation
Navigating Platform Governance
Conclusion
Notes
Part II: Shifting Cultural Practices
5 Labor
Introduction
Platform Precarity
Invisibility
Individuality
Insecurity
Inequality
Conclusion
Notes
6 Creativity
Introduction
Tensions
Nichification
Metrification
Branded Content
Authenticity
Conclusion
Notes
7 Democracy
Introduction
Democratic ideals and tensions
Access
Diversity
Protection
Truthfulness
Conclusion
Notes
8 Conclusion: Power
Institutional Power
Productive Power
Variations
Note
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Pages
iii
iv
vi
vii
viii
ix
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
23
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
107
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
Platforms and Cultural Production
Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy
polity
Copyright © Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy 2022
The right of Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4052-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938633
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
The development and rapid uptake of digital platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and WeChat are profoundly reconfiguring cultural production around the globe. Indeed, recent transformations in the cultural industries are staggering: longstanding – or “legacy” – media organizations are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations – live-streaming, social media entertainment, and podcasting, to name but a few – are evolving at breakneck speed. Platform companies such as Facebook, Google, and Tencent may not impact every industry segment or region equally; some are barely impacted at all, but when they are, changes tend to be swift and drastic. What follows is our attempt to make sense of these changes, while being mindful of the continuities with earlier forms of cultural production.
Although our names appear on its cover, this book is very much the outcome of an ongoing series of conversations with a global network of scholars and students. Collaborating with colleagues in workshops, conferences, and special journal collections made writing the book not just a process of creation, but an equally inspiring means of learning. Hence, it seems only fitting to start by briefly recounting this process.
The project began as an attempt by two of us to develop a conceptual framework to study what we call “the platformization of cultural production” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018). When discussing our respective research on games and news production, we noticed that the uptake of digital platforms like Facebook and Apple’s app store was triggering similar shifts in the creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization practices of these two industries. Yet, we could not find a comprehensive approach that allowed us to study and explain such changes across these industry segments. We could, however, draw relevant insights from three research traditions: software studies, critical political economy, and business studies. By bringing these literatures into conversation with one another, we developed our initial framework to study how cultural producers organize their operations around platforms, foregrounding changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance.
Owing to the substantial institutional variation between different paths of platformization, Thomas and David invited Brooke, Stuart Cunningham, and Robert Prey to join them on a panel dealing with platforms and cultural production at the 2017 Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference in Tartu, Estonia. Sharing their respective research on the influencer economy, social media entertainment, and the music industry, these panelists helped to demonstrate that, while platformization involves similar changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance, there are also marked differences in how cultural producers become – what we started referring to as – platform-dependent (Poell et al., 2017). More importantly, this conversation demonstrated the limits of our initial conceptual framework to account for such variation; in particular, it overlooked the particular labor, creative, and democratic practices that emerge in platform-dependent modes of cultural production.
To broaden the scope of inquiry, Brooke joined the project. The three of us decided to solicit research on a wide variety of industry segments and geographical contexts, as well as on the gendered, classed, and racialized specificity of platform-dependent modes of cultural production. We were fortunate that Zizi Papacharissi, editor-in-chief of Social Media + Society, agreed to host two special collections in the journal, which gave us a productive forum through which to vastly expand the conversation concerning the relationship between platforms and cultural production. The response to our call for papers far exceeded our expectations. Given the diversity of contributing scholars, as well as the urgency of the topic at hand, we sought to bring the authors together to discuss a first full draft of their papers. Hence, in October 2018, we convened at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology in Toronto. In the intimate setting of the Centre’s historical Coach House, surrounded by old images and book covers from Canada’s famed media theorist, we spent two intense days exchanging ideas, soliciting guidance, and providing feedback. These critical discussions proved enormously productive in bringing the papers into conversation with each other. After a year-long process of revisions and external peer review, the twenty-six contributions were published in two special collections of Social Media + Society, in November 2019 and August 2020 (Duffy et al., 2019; Nieborg, Duffy, Poell, 2020).
The collections were specifically focused on the industrial creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization of cultural content. The articles, moreover, spanned a wide range of segments and genres that included live-streaming, booktubing, game and app development, music streaming, podcasting, social media content creation, webtoons, internet-distributed television, public service media, and the digital vintage economy, among others. The geographic terrain covered was similarly diverse and involved instances of cultural production across Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US. Both roused and energized by our interactions with these contributors and their work, we realized that we needed to take this project to its logical conclusion; hence, the idea for this book was born.
Our ambition with this book is to advance the theoretical framework we introduced in our initial New Media & Society article published in 2018. This framework is developed further in the first half of the book and is now recast as an institutional perspective on platformization. At the same time, we are committed to doing justice to the wide variety of emerging cultural practices that can be observed across platforms and regions of the world. These emerging practices are just as much part and parcel of the processes of platformization as are institutional changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance. From the perspective developed in the second half of the book, platformization involves vital shifts in practices of labor, creativity, and democracy in the cultural industries. Overall, the book aims to provide researchers and students working at the intersection of platforms and the cultural industries with a comprehensive framework to systematically examine and compare the particular industry segments and practices that they are studying.
We are thankful to the many colleagues and students who made this journey with us. We would like to express our gratitude first and foremost to a number of colleagues who generously helped us with their critical comments and generative ideas: Amanda Lotz, José van Dijck, Bernhard Rieder, and Dwayne Winseck. We are also thankful to our students, especially Maggie MacDonald and Ouejdane Sabbah, who read and commented on the first draft of the manuscript. Furthermore, we would like to thank the contributors to the Social Media + Society special collections, who provided us with new insights and rich case studies on which to draw: Arturo Arriagada, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Sophie Bishop, Tiziano Bonini, Robyn Caplan, Aymar Jean Christian, Samantha Close, David Craig, Stuart Cunningham, Faithe Day, Mark Díaz, Stefanie Duguay, Karin van Es, Maxwell Foxman, Alessandro Gandini, Tarleton Gillespie, Alison Hearn, David Hesmondhalgh, Emily Hund, Francisco Ibáñez, Mark R. Johnson, Ellis Jones, Daniel Joseph, Ji-Hyeon Kim, Jeroen de Kloet, Tamara Kneese, Jian Lin, Jeremy Wade Morris, Annemarie Navar-Gill, Victoria O’Meara, Michael Palm, William Clyde Partin, Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin, Caitlin Petre, Robert Prey, Andreas Rauh, Marc Steinberg, John L. Sullivan, José Miguel Tomasena, Cynthia Wang, Jamie Woodcock, Chris J. Young, and Jun Yu.
Thanks as well go to the tutorial students, whose feedback helped us to enhance the focus of the book at an early stage of its conception: Lukas Beckenbauer, Jueling Hu, Daphne Idiz, Vanessa Richter, and Ziwen Tang. The students of the research master Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, meanwhile, provided rich feedback on the first draft of the manuscript in the course of Research Practices in Media Studies (2020–1). Additionally, we are grateful to Mary Savigar, Sarah Dancy, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, and Stephanie Homer from Polity, who patiently and steadily guided and supported us through the writing and production process. We would also like to acknowledge the generosity of a number of institutions that sponsored this project: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS), the Cornell Center for Social Sciences (CCSS), the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, Queensland University of Technology, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Toronto, and Cornell University. Collectively, such support made for an all the more generative collaborative process by allowing us to work together in person – at least, until most of the world became gripped by COVID-19. To this end, we would like to close by expressing our appreciation to the family members, friends, and colleagues who provided support, encouragement, and patience, especially as the trials of researching and writing a book intensified under the weight of a global pandemic. Heartfelt thanks, in particular, go to Emma, Jonathan, and Raphael Poell, Robert Shea Terrell, and Leslie Pilszak.
Amsterdam, Toronto, Ithaca, 2021
1Introduction
“Big brands fund terror,” read the frontpage of the British daily newspaper The Times on February 9, 2017; below the arresting headline was a screengrab of an online ad that – unbeknownst to the client – appeared in a YouTube video openly endorsing jihadists (Mostrous, 2017). According to The Times investigation, YouTube’s automated system of placing ads had paired promotions for consumer products and charitable organizations with videos championing radical and terrorist groups, including the Islamic State and Combat 18, a pro-Nazi faction. Several weeks later, the Guardian followed up with a report on the six-figure sums that “hate preachers” had generated from YouTube’s unwitting arsenal of ad sponsors – among them household brands like L’Oréal, Sainsbury’s, Nissan, and even the Guardian itself (Neate, 2017). Indeed, the report chronicled a kaleidoscopic range of extremist content funded through the platform: anti-Western propaganda from a Salafi Muslim preacher, videos by former Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard David Duke, and anti-LGBTQ and anti-Semitic sentiments expressed by a fundamentalist pastor.
Asked to respond to the high-profile social media scandal, Ronan Harris, a representative for YouTube’s parent company Google, offered: “We believe strongly in the freedom of speech and expression on the web – even when that means we don’t agree with the views expressed” (Neate, 2017). While Harris went on to clarify that Google’s policies prohibit “videos with hate speech, gory or offensive content” from appearing adjacent to ads, he conceded that “we don’t always get it right.” Dissatisfied with Google’s rhetorical deflection, the Guardian – along with the BBC and the UK government – subsequently pulled all advertising from the video-sharing platform.
This move was among the catalysts for the so-called 2017 “Adpocalypse” – a term invoked by YouTube creators to describe the concerted efforts of brands to boycott YouTube advertising. In total, as many as 250 brands from the US and the UK threatened to halt their digital advertising campaigns. Confronted with such collective pushback, Google quickly changed YouTube’s policies to be more “advertiser-friendly” (Kumar, 2019). Among the changes in YouTube’s governance framework was an option for advertisers to exclude broad categories of content from appearing alongside their ads. These categories ranged from the descriptive – “live-streaming video” – to the eminently subjective “sensitive social issues,” defined as “discrimination and identity relations, scandals and investigations, reproductive rights, firearms and weapons, and more” (YouTube, 2020a).
While these changes appeased advertisers – at least temporarily – they introduced considerable angst and uncertainty into the professional lives of cultural producers, in particular those creators vying with one another to earn income from the oft-elusive YouTube Partner Program. Many creators abruptly found their content “demonetized,” meaning they would receive limited or no ad revenue in exchange for audience attention (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020). Creators who provided mere commentary on “sensitive” social issues were especially susceptible to financial retribution. The same applied to creators whose content contained “strong profanity used multiple times … even if bleeped or for comedy, documentary, news, or educational purposes” (YouTube, 2020b).
In addition to demonetizing content deemed contentious, YouTube substantially raised the threshold for participation in the Partner Program: only channels with at least 1,000 subscribers that had ratcheted up more than 4,000 public watch hours in the preceding year were allowed to participate (YouTube, 2020c). This policy update made it especially difficult for newcomers to generate income, while barring creators with smaller followings altogether. The exclusionary nature of YouTube’s advertising program was exacerbated by a new rule which stated that demonetized clips were only eligible to be reevaluated by a human reviewer if they had a minimum of 1,000 views within a week (YouTube, 2020c). For context, given the mind-blowing amount of material on YouTube – 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute1 – content categorization and labeling take place through automated, rather than human, systems of content moderation (Covington et al., 2016; see also, Kumar, 2019; Roberts, 2019).
Some of YouTube’s most visible creators publicly vocalized their indignation over the revised guidelines (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020). For instance, Philip DeFranco, Ethan Klein, and Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, who run popular commentary channels catering to more than 115 million subscribers, all claimed to have lost a major part of their advertising earnings (Weiss, 2017a). Adding to their frustration was YouTube’s failure to share information about the demonetization process. As Ethan and Hila Klein of the popular sketch comedy channel h3h3Productions maintained in an interview: “There’s no report like, ‘This video that you made got demonetized because you did this, this, or this’” (Weiss, 2017b).
To be sure, the impact of YouTube’s changed advertising policies and Partner Program guidelines went beyond these vocal superstars. The stricter criteria for joining the Partner Program meant that creators with relatively small audiences were demonetized en masse. Moreover, the automated filtering of anything that the system deemed “advertiser-unfriendly content” put entire categories of videos at risk. All video clips of the popular game series Assassin’s Creed, for instance, were instantly demonetized because they contained the term “assassin” (Cunningham & Craig, 2019: 112). Similarly, The Great War channel, which provides educational videos about the First World War, saw many of its videos flagged for review (Burgess & Green, 2018: 150). An especially fraught dimension is the issue of viewpoint bias, wherein YouTube’s automated filtering unfairly targets creators who produce “culturally progressive content”; in the case of LGBTQ creators, this means that “any representation of their identity could be deemed sexually suggestive and ad-unsafe” (Cunningham & Craig, 2019: 113; see also Duguay, 2019). Similarly, in June 2020, a group of Black creators accused YouTube of racist practices, claiming that the platform uses its automated filtering mechanisms to “restrict, censor and denigrate” Black creators (Solsman & Nieva, 2020; see also Parham, 2020).
With their revenues dwindling before their eyes, some beleaguered YouTubers shifted their time and attention to other platforms. Ethan and Hila Klein, for instance, announced they would redirect their programming to the Amazon-owned live-streaming platform Twitch, which offers creators more dynamic mechanisms of monetizing their content (Johnson & Woodcock, 2019). Others started to use Patreon, which allows fans to support creators directly through subscriptions (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020). But even though some creators managed to generate revenue across multiple platforms, the creator community can scarcely afford to ignore YouTube completely. In terms of reach and revenue, Twitch and other competing video-sharing and live-streaming platforms remain in YouTube’s hulking shadow.
The reason to retell the story of the Adpocalypse is because of both its specificity – that is, it illustrates the evolution of a new industry segment, ostensibly emerging at the interface of Hollywood and Silicon Valley (Cunningham & Craig, 2019) – and its broader import. The case thus testifies to a wider movement wherein cultural producers become dependent on platforms and, consequently, struggle to defend their position and interests. Like many other platforms, YouTube is subject to powerful network effects, meaning that an increase in viewers, advertisers, and creators makes the platform more valuable to each of the other groups, which in turn further inflates the number of viewers, advertisers, and creators. Because of its entrenched position, when YouTube exerts power by unilaterally deciding to reward and/or punish particular types of videos, it directly impacts thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of cultural workers. At the same time, the combination of YouTube’s business model and the implementation of its governance framework are one of a kind. Not all platforms rely on advertising revenue, nor do their systems of moderation adhere to uniform content standards.
In this book, we examine how the relations between platforms and cultural producers emerge and take shape throughout key phases of the production process: namely cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization. Indeed, platform-wrought shifts in cultural production raise many questions, among them: how are the activities of cultural producers – from individual content creators and game app developers to news organizations and record labels – reconfigured when they integrate platforms into their operations? How does alignment and integration with platforms impact the economic sustainability of particular forms of cultural production? What types of content and services can and cannot be created, distributed, and monetized through platforms? What kinds of cultural content are made more or less visible by platforms? How does this affect the horizon of cultural expression – and for whom? And, finally, what are the consequences for the democratic character of cultural production and the distribution of power in the cultural realm?
Addressing these questions, we will show how the interactions between platforms and cultural producers unfold in ways that differ markedly across cultural industry segments and geographic regions. Platformization is not a single process of transformation, but, rather, constitutive of a wide variety of shifts shaped by the interactions between particular platforms and specific cultural producers. This book provides the conceptual tools to both examine these interactions and reflect on their implications. In so doing, we aim to develop a common language for scholars from different disciplines to compare and connect their research on specific instances of platform-based cultural production.
Platforms and Platformization
The interaction between platforms and cultural producers generates a process that Anne Helmond (2015) has described as platformization. In the context of cultural production, platformization can be understood as the penetration of digital platforms’ economic, infrastructural, and governmental extensions into the cultural industries, as well as the organization of cultural practices of labor, creativity, and democracy around these platforms (Nieborg & Poell, 2018).2 This section and the next will discuss how platforms and cultural producers are involved in the shifts in institutional relations and cultural practices at the heart of platformization. We start by focusing on platforms before directing attention to cultural producers and cultural production. The final section of this chapter lays out the central argument of the book and previews its organization.
Given the book’s conceptual focus on the cultural industries, it seems important to first delineate what is and what is not a platform in the context of cultural production. Building on business studies, critical political economy, and software studies, we define platforms as data infrastructures that facilitate, aggregate, monetize, and govern interactions between end-users and content and service providers (Poell et al., 2019).3 Following this conceptualization of platforms, we therefore understand platformization from an institutional perspective as the evolution of platform markets, infrastructures, and governance frameworks.
How platforms operate as institutions can be clearly observed in the case of YouTube, which allows for “frictionless entry,” or “the ability of users to quickly and easily join … and begin participating in the value creation that the platform facilitates” (Parker et al., 2016: 25). In this way, YouTube constitutes a market – one that aggregates and monetizes interactions among content creators, advertisers, and end-users (i.e., viewers). These interactions are, in turn, afforded by YouTube’s data infrastructure, which allows creators to seamlessly upload their content to be hosted on Google’s servers, while simultaneously enabling advertisers to target particular audience segments. This level of openness is distinctly different from the gatekeeping strategies employed by legacy media companies, which, in the words of Clay Shirky (2008: 98), revolve around “filter-then-publish,” as opposed to the platform strategy of “publish-then-filter.” The notion of filtering brings us to the crucial dimension of platform governance. To reduce friction that may emerge from unclear rules and regulations, YouTube has set out a governance framework. In its attempt to control and standardize platform-based interactions, YouTube provides codified rules (e.g., terms of service and creator guidelines) and developer documentation, as well as stipulations over who can access its tools and data infrastructure. YouTube, in other words, meets all the criteria of a platform.
There are also companies in the cultural sector that display characteristics of platforms and have been referred to as such by scholars and journalists; we argue, however, that they should be categorized differently. It is worth bearing in mind that digitization does not equal platformization. While the New York Times, Netflix, and The Walt Disney Company collect endless reams of data and use sophisticated algorithms to curate content, they are not platform companies (Lobato, 2019; Lotz, 2017). Instead, they should be labeled as media or entertainment companies, which primarily produce or license original content and are not directly economically and infrastructurally accessible to third parties. Video producers – whether big or small – cannot freely upload their clips to Netflix; the New York Times primarily uses its own website and apps to distribute its own news content; and The Walt Disney Company uses its vast library of intellectual property – from Mickey Mouse to Marvel superheroes – across its theme parks, TV stations, and digital outlets.
Unlike media companies, platforms give way to what business scholars call multisided markets, acting as “matchmakers” by connecting consumers or “end-users,” a wide variety of businesses (advertisers, content creators, etc.), governments, and nonprofits (Evans & Schmalensee, 2016). Each group of actors, including end-users, represents a “side” in the platform market (Gawer & Cusumano, 2002; Rochet & Tirole, 2003).
Implicit in this economic perspective is the assumption that a platform is necessarily a for-profit institution. Of course, there are plenty of platforms that are not profit-oriented; this includes those owned and operated by governments, co-ops, nonprofits or individuals that are not inevitably based on creating economic value (Sandoval, 2020; Scholz, 2017). However, by virtue of their market valuation, unprecedented profits, large userbase, and transnational footprint, platform companies are widely considered to be “digitally dominant” (Moore & Tambini, 2018). Particularly in the media sector, commercial platforms play a significant role. For this reason, in the remainder of this book we assume platforms to be for-profit businesses. We are primarily interested in the following companies: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, ByteDance, Spotify, and Tencent. And to be even more precise, we pay particular attention to the specific platforms operated by these companies, such as Apple’s and Google’s app stores, Amazon’s Twitch, and Google’s YouTube, as well as the digital advertising ecosystems of Google and Facebook, the social networking and connectivity apps of Facebook (Instagram, Messenger), Tencent (WeChat), and ByteDance (Douyin/TikTok), and the cloud hosting services provided by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.4
Next to the lens of platforms as markets, software and business studies scholars have theorized the unique status of platforms as infrastructures through the notion of “platform boundaries” (Gawer, 2020; Helmond et al., 2019). In line with their for-profit mandate, platform companies invariably seek growth and can do so by opening up the boundaries of their infrastructures. To that end, they have to “resource” external producers by providing tools, allowing for technological integration and, in some cases, the marketing and monetization of content (Eaton et al., 2015; Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013). By providing outsiders access to their data infrastructure, via plug-ins, for example, platform companies enable external producers to extend a platform’s functionality far beyond its own boundaries and into wider web and app ecosystems (Helmond, 2015; Nieborg & Helmond, 2019). At the same time, to retain control over what is distributed and by whom, platform boundaries need to be “secured” (Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013). Platform companies do this through a variety of governance strategies, which we conceptualize in Chapter 4 as regulation, curation, and moderation.
Platformization involves not only what we call institutional shifts in markets, infrastructures, and governance, but also changes in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. Platforms allow cultural workers to find new avenues to audiences and visibility. Yet, like traditional labor markets in the cultural industries, labor in platform markets is also characterized by precarity and inequalities in terms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and more (Christian et al., 2020; Gerrard & Thornham, 2020; Patel, 2020). Moreover, while platforms regularly generate new genres and engender diverse business models, it is also clear that they constrain the creative process in various ways – not the least of which is through the filtering of content and by privileging particular forms of cultural expression. Finally, platformization opens up new spaces for contestation and cultural diversity, but simultaneously exacerbates problems of discrimination, hate speech, and disinformation – all of which undermine democratic politics.
A main contribution of this book is to show how these shifts, continuities, and tensions in cultural practices are intricately entangled with changes in the institutional relations of cultural production. The chapter’s opening example illuminated some of these entanglements. For instance, the abrupt modifications in YouTube’s advertising policies and monetization programs directly impacted creators’ visibility and, consequently, revenue. Here, we can see how cultural producers’ dependence on platforms leaves them at the mercy of the latter’s decision-making, thus enhancing the precarity of their labor. At the same time, the Adpocalypse revealed laborers’ expressions of agency, particularly when they felt incentivized to develop alternative means of content distribution and revenue generation through sponsorship deals or subscriptions. More broadly, the Adpocalypse showed the complex balance cultural producers have to maintain on platforms between self-expression, audience interests, advertiser needs, and platform governance. How exactly the balance between these different forces is organized deeply affects the nature of cultural content and the space for creative expression. And directly related to this is the balancing act that touches on crucial dimensions of democratic politics by shaping public processes of identity construction and representation.
Cultural Producers and Other Complementors
As the preceding section suggests, platformization is not merely a top-down process dictated by platforms. It is also steered and driven by the tactics of cultural producers, both individually and in networked formations. The Adpocalypse illustrates how creators were able to contest platform policies by publicly and collectively voicing their discontent, seeking alternative forms of income, or simply abandoning the platform altogether. Within platform ecosystems such as YouTube’s, different stakeholders – cultural producers, advertisers, and data intermediaries, among others – struggle to defend or promote their interests, pushing the platform operator – Google in this case – to adapt its infrastructures and governance framework accordingly.
Examining these kinds of interactions, the relationships that are most relevant to us are those between platform companies, cultural producers, advertisers, intermediaries, and the billions of end-users who consume, share, and engage with cultural products through platforms. We will define these actors in relational terms, allowing us to explore how platform power is challenged and negotiated, and how cultural producers gain agency in relation to platforms. Developing such a relational perspective, this section starts by defining cultural producers and cultural industries, followed by introducing other stakeholders. After that, we will look at the differences between cultural industries and between geographic regions.
Building on David Hesmondhalgh’s (2019: 15) definition of cultural industries, we focus on the “industrial production and circulation of texts.” Traditionally, these industries include, among others, broadcasting, film, music, print publishing, games, and advertising. The industrial mode of cultural production is often distinguished from “vernacular creativity,” which refers to the “everyday practices of material and symbolic creativity” (Burgess, 2007: iii). As the opening example of YouTube creators illustrates, the boundary between industrial and vernacular forms of cultural production is often fluid and difficult to draw on platforms. We will return to this thorny analytical issue at the end of this section.
Cultural producer is a similarly fraught term, but we use it to refer to the broad range of actors and organizations engaged in the creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization of symbolic artefacts (Bourdieu, 1984). An individual can be a cultural producer, but so, too, can traditional, or what we will hereafter refer to as “legacy,” institutions, such as newspapers, film and television producers, record labels, and game publishers. We are mindful of the fact that each of these industry segments has its own histories and institutional practices (Benson & Hallin, 2007; Herbert et al., 2020; Miège, 2011; Holt & Perren, 2011). Traditionally, individual cultural producers or “creative workers” – for example, journalists, musicians, authors – played a vital role in these industrial formations. Platforms potentially enable individual producers to figure even more prominently, as the former furnish new markets for cultural goods, which are not only accessible to legacy institutions, but also to individual cultural entrepreneurs. An example of the latter are, of course, the “creators” who populate YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch.
The book aims to critically examine the implications of platformization for the position and precarity of creative workers. Similarly, we are concerned with the creative autonomy and economic sustainability of legacy industry actors and institutions. What happens to newspapers, record labels, and game publishers as platforms become more dominant? These institutional actors have been considered vital for democracy, enabling cultural, economic, and political participation (Hermes, 2006).
A second category of industry actors active on platforms are cultural intermediaries, a term used to describe the range of participants that broker and facilitate cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization through platforms. As Timothy Havens (2014: 40) points out, cultural intermediaries “serve as one of the prime vehicles through which organizational priorities find their way into representational practices” (see also Lobato, 2016: 350). Some of these intermediaries – such as advertisers, data intermediaries, and talent agencies – existed well before the advent of platforms; others, meanwhile, appear to be new or provide services that are highly specific to platform-based cultural production.
First, there are marketing and monetization intermediaries, including those that support cultural producers’ efforts to generate income via advertising. The digital advertising ecosystem is notoriously complex and features a diverse cast of third party services, including advertisers, advertising agencies, advertising networks, data intermediaries, and media buyers (Crain, 2019; Helles et al., 2020). Such diversity makes it difficult to assess how these different types of companies shape particular marketing and monetization practices. Owing in part to this opacity, creators may turn to revenue streams outside advertising – from subscriptions and microtransactions (e.g., in-app purchases, tips, and donations) or any number of entrepreneurial ventures (Duguay, 2019; Johnson & Woodcock, 2019; Partin, 2020). Each of these revenue models is associated with their own categories of intermediaries, such as payment providers and crowdfunding platforms.
Second, new industrial formations have emerged to help cultural producers optimize their offerings across various platforms. As with marketing and monetization, optimization has a longer history with lineages in legacy media organizations’ efforts to “know the audience” (Ang, 1996; Baym, 2013; Turow, 1997); however, platforms compel cultural producers to anticipate the incessant revision of cultural content (Arriagada & Ibáñez, 2020; Morris et al., 2021). Of particular relevance is a range of companies that employ platform data for search engine and social media optimization (Halavais, 2017; Ziewitz, 2019). Many news organizations, for example, use audience analytics tools provided by companies such as Chartbeat, NewsWhip, Parse.ly, Outbrain Engage, and CrowdTangle, which cull data from the dominant social media platforms and search engines. These tools support editorial decision-making and content distribution strategies by providing detailed insight into how users engage with their content (Cherubini & Nielsen, 2016; Petre, 2018). Also of interest are the many talent management agencies and what were briefly known as “multichannel networks,” which have sprung up around platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to assist creators in organizing content creation and distribution, and managing their contacts with brands and platforms (Abidin, 2018; Lobato, 2016; Stoldt et al., 2019).
This great diversity in institutions and actors is conflated when cultural producers and other third parties become dependent on platforms. From the perspective of platform companies, cultural producers, cultural intermediaries, and advertisers are all considered to be complementors. This term, which we will use throughout this book, has emerged from business studies and refers to “independent providers of complementary products to mutual customers” (McIntyre & Srinivasan, 2017: 143). Delivering content and services to end-users and other third parties means that these actors “complement” the products and services provided by the platform.
Since the 2010s, in their role as complementors, cultural producers have played an important role in the growth of many platforms. For instance, newspapers, game publishers, social media creators, and other cultural producers have made platforms more relevant destinations for end-users. Some platforms, such as YouTube, are fully dependent on cultural producers. Yet, for other platforms such as Facebook, the importance of specific cultural industry segments, such as journalism and games, has changed over time (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019). One important lesson coming out of recent analyses of platform economics is that the more dominant a platform company becomes, the less bargaining power cultural producers – game publishers, creators, and news organizations – seem to have (Rietveld et al., 2020).
Crucially, while our central focus remains on cultural production, it is important to acknowledge the role of cultural consumption in the process of platformization. Indeed, one of the unique aspects of multisided markets is that they allow consumers to enter markets as part of seamless “side switching,” or “when those who consume goods or services produced on the platform begin to produce goods and services for others to consume” (Parker et al., 2016: 25). This is by no means a novel practice in the cultural industries; neologisms like “co-creator,” “pro-am,” and “produsage” capture some of the early euphoria surrounding the digitally enabled melding of production and consumption (Banks, 2013; Bruns, 2008). On platforms, the distinction between end-users and cultural producers remains ambiguous, in terms of economics and incentives, as well as in practices of labor, creativity, and democracy.
While such blurred boundaries can in part be attributed to increased access, they can also be understood through the economics of information: digital content is a “public” or “nonrival” good; “its consumption by one person does not make it any less available for consumption by another” (Benkler, 2006: 36). Historically, to monetize content, cultural producers have been quite aggressive in creating artificial scarcity by exerting their copyrights. Platform companies, however, have made the “sharing” of content one of their key features, undermining attempts to maintain scarcity (John, 2016). Second, for all of the novelty ascribed to user-generated content, it is more apt to recognize that the occupational boundary between an amateur and a professional cultural producer has always been rather fuzzy (Hesmondhalgh, 2019). Platforms have only made it easier to switch between these two roles. Today’s TikTok user could, theoretically at least, become tomorrow’s viral sensation. Because the barriers to enter platform markets are considered to be so low, those who find fame online seem to do so overnight. A never-ending stream of aspirational stories feeds into the powerful meritocratic myth that any talented individual who can design an app, create a TikTok dance, or produce a podcast has a chance to become a star (Duffy & Wissinger, 2017).
For platform companies, there is a clear incentive to keep the boundary between unremunerated end-users and paid professionals vague. Platforms such as Instagram and TikTok thrive on user-generated attention and data, while the companies that manage these platforms – Facebook and ByteDance – typically do not pay creators in advance, nor do they license intellectual property.5 Doing so would introduce significant risk and uncertainty into their business models, let alone cut deep into their bottom line. Consequently, users collectively engage in billions of hours of unpaid or “free labor” (Terranova, 2000). Or, put in stark political economics terms, all platform-based activity creates value, and all vernacular creativity is commodified by the platform (van Dijck, 2013). To facilitate this business model, platform corporations systematically collect and process user data, which they selectively feed or sell to complementors or other platforms (Couldry & Mejías, 2019; Turow, 2011). As we will see in following chapters, platforms blur the boundaries between end-users and cultural producers not only in economic terms, but also in an infrastructural and governmental sense.
Different industries and regions
While the relations between platforms, complementors, and end-users can be analyzed in broad terms, the particular ways that platformization unfolds across the various segments comprising the cultural industries, as well as within specific geographic regions, are markedly diverse. This diversity is in part due to the strategic choices of cultural producers, but it also owes much to the “nature” of specific modes of cultural production, including the historical trajectories of particular industry segments in particular cultural contexts (Miège, 2011). Platformization is by no means an all-encompassing logic; nor does it affect all industries equally. The companies that operate major platforms, such as Alphabet Inc., Facebook, and Apple, are among the highest valued in the world, but they still compete with, or in some cases are outmatched by, legacy conglomerates, media companies, and telecommunication companies.
Platform ecosystems, moreover, evolve unevenly, as do the practices of their inhabitants. By providing examples from different industry segments and regions around the globe, this book will illuminate the considerable variation in the relations between platforms and cultural producers. Exploring these relations, we make a basic distinction between platform-dependent and platform-independent cultural producers. Platform-dependent producers rely on platforms in the creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization of content and services. By contrast, platform-independent producers pursue these activities separately from platforms. As will become clear in the following chapters, many cultural producers are positioned on the spectrum somewhere in between platform-dependence and independence. For example, a digital news organization can be dependent on platforms for the distribution and marketing of its content, but they operate independently for the creation and monetization of content. Thus, when we say either platform-dependent or platform-independent, we will work to qualify these labels.
Throughout this book we will use three industry segments – social media, games, and news – to illustrate our analysis and argument. For instance, the social media creators described in the chapter’s opening – YouTubers experiencing career uncertainty amid changed platform guidelines – have tended to be highly platform-dependent. Indeed, as the Adpocalypse case showed, those creators reliant on YouTube’s advertising revenue are integrated with its data infrastructure and subject to its governance frameworks. In this way, many YouTubers are closely tied to the platform on which they found their main audience – similar to live streamers on Twitch, fashion and style influencers on Instagram, and creators on TikTok. Yet there is evidence that such extreme forms of platform-dependence are becoming less common, particularly as content creators seek out new avenues to mitigate the uncertainty of a platform-dependent career (Cunningham & Craig, 2019; Duffy, Pinch, et al., 2021; Glatt, 2021). A few prominent social media creators have even achieved a semblance of platform-independence through cross-platform distribution and monetization strategies, such as working with legacy media companies or talent management agencies (Abidin, 2018).
The digital games industry, meanwhile, might be thought of as a prototype of platform-dependence. Before the advent of digital distribution, platform companies were involved in most aspects of game development and circulation; as software, games are always infrastructurally integrated with the hardware or software platform on which they run (Montfort & Bogost, 2009). Simply put, if you insert a PlayStation disc into an Xbox, you will not be able to play that game. Over time, the relationships between tool developers, game publishers, game developers, and game platform operators changed substantially. In the early 1980s, individuals and small teams had the ability to develop and publish titles. However, game publishing formalized “aggressively” to become a major industry (Keogh, 2019). This transformation was spurred in part by the development of dedicated game consoles, such as the Atari VCS and Nintendo Entertainment System, followed in the 1990s by the PlayStation and Xbox (Kerr, 2017). While dedicated game consoles are still a key pillar of the game industry, a number of other platforms have emerged, enabling the development of entirely new game genres, business models, and audiences. For instance, a decade ago, Facebook enabled the rise of so-called “social games,” such as FarmVille and Texas Hold’em Poker. At the same time, mobile app stores have become an even more lucrative distribution outlet for game developers of all stripes; in fact, they now account for nearly half the global games market.
In comparison with social media and games, the news industry, our third central case, has historically been fully platform-independent. For decades, major news organizations functioned as so-called “two-sided” markets themselves, as they connected readers, on one side, with advertisers, on the other side of the market. In charge of content creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization, as well as controlling their own audience data, news organizations could be considered autonomous (Argentesi & Filistrucchi, 2007). Still, like any other commercial content producer, news organizations were and still are subject to external pressures, including market demands and advertiser expectations. Further – as key intermediaries in public debates – news publishers have been constantly beleaguered by political actors (Bennett et al., 2007; McChesney, 2015). In these ways, autonomy within the news sphere has always been relative. The growth of platforms presents a new challenge to the independence of news organizations. Search engines and social media platforms in particular have taken over the market for digital advertising. At the same time, news organizations have tried to generate advertising revenue and capture readers and viewers through platforms. There are, however, large differences in the level of platform-dependence across the wider news ecology. Born-digital publishers, such as BuzzFeed and HuffPost, are highly dependent on platforms, having fully integrated and aligned their distribution, marketing, and monetization practices with them (van Dijck et al. 2018). Legacy newspapers have a much more fraught relationship with platforms. These differences among news organizations make clear that the relationship between platforms and cultural producers is both highly contingent and profoundly variable.
Finally, considerable variations in the relations between platforms and cultural producers can also be observed across geographic regions. While this book does not systematically explore these variations in depth – if only because we lack the necessary regional expertise – it does draw upon international examples, while also pointing to avenues for further research. Building on our own research, the book primarily focuses on platforms and cultural production in the US, Western Europe, and China. Other regions, especially India, Japan, and Southeast Asia will be brought in to illustrate vital differences and surprising correspondences in how platformization takes shape. The reason to include regional examples is to provide a framework with enough flexibility to develop further case studies and comparisons.
Having defined the key actors at the center of this inquiry, as well as considered the variation in the relationships between them, we can now turn to the book’s core argument. How do the strategies of platform operators and the tactics of cultural producers mutually articulate each other? More specifically, to what extent – and in what ways – are creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization reconfigured when cultural producers integrate platforms in their operations?
Argument and Plan of the Book
There is an important backstory to this concern with cultural production in the digital age. Platforms – and online communication more generally – have long been associated with a discourse of democratized cultural production. In the early 2000s, scholars, beguiled by the possibilities of the internet, contended that then-new platforms would engender a shift toward a so-called “participatory culture,” in which every user could potentially express themselves and secure audiences – essentially becoming a producer in their own right (Jenkins, 2006, see also Bruns, 2008; Spurgeon et al., 2009). These scholars pointed out that individuals, from musicians to journalists, could become active participants in cultural production by bypassing traditional gatekeepers such as legacy media organizations. From this perspective, emerging social media and content-sharing platforms, in combination with the widespread adoption of mobile technologies, substantially lowered the bar for individuals to produce and widely distribute cultural content (Shirky, 2008).
This democratization frame has been fueled by the discursive and institutional self-positioning of platform companies. More than a decade ago, Tarleton Gillespie (2010: 353) noticed that YouTube and other platforms situate themselves in relation to different types of actors by carving “out a role and a set of expectations that is acceptable to each and also serves their own financial interests, while resolving or at least eliding the contradictions between them.” Platform executives, such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, are particularly well trained in corporate double-speak, oscillating between hailing Facebook’s users both as empowered individuals and “consumptive audiences” (Hoffmann et al., 2018: 210). As research on social imaginaries shows, this discursive work is done not only by those who work for platform corporations, but also by scholars, pundits, and consultants (van Dijck & Nieborg, 2009). Together, they inform how cultural producers, end-users, and other social actors envision and understand platforms.
In recent years, these imaginaries, what we have elsewhere called “platform imaginaries,” have been thoroughly criticized (van Es & Poell, 2020). Critical media scholars, in particular, have noted the profound unevenness of the relationship between platforms and cultural producers; in particular, the market valuations of platform companies have increased significantly, while platform-dependent cultural producers remain in highly precarious situations (Baym, 2018; Jarrett, 2014; Kumar, 2016). Cultural producers, in their role as platform complementors, can experience the sudden loss of audiences and income any time a platform changes the curation and monetization of content (Cotter, 2019; O’Meara, 2019; Petre et al., 2019).
While our own work subscribes to and – hopefully – contributes to this wave of platform critique, it remains unclear how exactly platformization reshapes cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization. Thus far, researchers have looked at the relationship between platforms and cultural production from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, most prominently media industry studies, software studies, critical political economy, and business studies. Although these traditions produce important insights on which this book builds, these are also partial insights. That is because these research traditions tend to focus on particular elements of what we call platformization: changes in market relations, the development of data infrastructures, new forms of governance, the precarity of labor, the growth of new creative practices, or the impact on democratic politics. Individual studies also tend to focus either on particular platforms or on specific modes of cultural production. This makes it difficult to grasp the variation within and across cultural industries. What is missing is a holistic approach to the platformization of cultural production (Poell, 2020).
This book offers such an approach by demonstrating that changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance are intricately entangled with shifts in labor, creative, and democratic practices. Transformations in one dimension of platformization cannot be properly understood without examining related shifts in other dimensions. By exploring how this process takes shape in different cultural industries, we show that there are substantial variations among and within industry segments. Such variations in platform-dependence have large implications not only for the day-to-day operations of cultural producers, but also for the cultural commodities that get circulated to networked audiences.
In the first half of the book, we examine platformization from an institutional perspective. We argue that this process opens up new opportunities for cultural producers to find audiences and generate revenue, but simultaneously leads to an unprecedented concentration of economic, infrastructural, and political-cultural power among a few platform corporations. Power is understood here not simply as dominance, but rather as mutual, albeit highly unequal, relations of dependency. From such a relational perspective, power is not held by a particular actor, but both emerges from and structures unequal relations between actors (Emirbayer, 1997; Turow, 1997).
Examining the relations of dependence between platforms and cultural producers, Chapter 2 demonstrates that platformization proceeds through business model alignment, as cultural producers and other complementors develop economic strategies geared toward platform markets. In turn, Chapter 3 discusses how cultural producers integrate their own infrastructures with oft-invisible platform infrastructures. We call this process infrastructural integration.Chapter 4, subsequently, focuses on regulatory standardization as platforms minutely govern how complementors interact with end-users and other sides in the platform market. Hence, we can observe how platformization involves a centralization of economic, infrastructural, and political power.
Analyzing these institutional modes of platformization, these chapters demonstrate that this process involves a multiplicity of institutional relations. Platform companies operate their own internal markets, but they are also always in competition with other platform companies, as well as telecommunication companies, consumer electronics manufacturers, and legacy media companies. These internal and external market relations are closely connected: external market competition has prompted platform companies to increase the scope of their operations by entering or even creating new markets. And, vice versa, the rapid ascent of internal platform markets has spurred the movement of platform companies into dominant positions in a growing number of markets, triggering persistent concerns over market concentration (Moore & Tambini, 2018).
As the chapters in the first half of the book will demonstrate, a similar entanglement of institutional relations and centralization of control can be observed in terms of infrastructures and governance. As with any other business, platform companies rely on public infrastructures, especially internet connectivity (DeNardis & Hackl, 2015; Winseck, 2017). At the same time, they invest heavily in their own infrastructures, for instance (cloud) computing and web servers, and digital distribution outlets such as app stores. Hence, public and platform infrastructures cannot be seen as separated. Yet, the “infrastructuralization of platforms” means that private companies compete with, and partly replace, public infrastructures, potentially controlling key nodes of the web and app ecosystems (Plantin et al., 2018). Finally, national and supranational regulatory frameworks set the legal boundaries of what can be exchanged on platforms and by whom. How platform companies interpret those frameworks is a matter of key concern among scholars, pundits, politicians, and policymakers. As platforms are becoming increasingly central to cultural exchange, governance by platforms increasingly shapes the governance of online spaces more generally (Gillespie, 2018; Gorwa, 2019a; van Dijck et al. 2018).
What adds complexity to the study of these institutional relations is their inherent dynamism. Changes in the composition and activity of complementor populations, for instance, prompt platforms to constantly adapt the organization of their internal markets, infrastructures, and governance strategies (Rietveld et al., 2020). As a result of this adjustment process, which we will refer to as platform evolution, cultural producers have to continuously adjust as well (see, for instance, Arriagada & Ibáñez, 2020). This constant negotiation was clearly demonstrated in the Adpocalypse; the threat of advertisers leaving the platform prompted YouTube to change its Partner Program. Creators, then, had to scramble either to adjust their content, seek out other platforms, find effective ways to challenge abrupt changes in YouTube’s monetization program, or simply accept the new guidelines. Thus, the ever-evolving playing field controlled by platform companies unceasingly produces new opportunities for cultural producers, but also generates sudden shifts and potential losses.
The second half of the book examines platformization as shifting cultural practices, which are deeply enmeshed with the institutional changes discussed in the book’s first half. We analyze how specific labor, creative, and democratic practices develop in the interaction between platforms and cultural producers. Here, power is understood as productive, circulating in the relations among platforms, cultural producers, and a wide variety of other complementors (Foucault, 2012; Rose, 1999). We observe how power produces particular types of responsibility, forms of inequality, regimes of visibility, and modes of meaning-making. In other words, the chapters in the second half of the book explore the normative dimensions of platform-dependent cultural production.
Similar to the institutional dimensions of platformization, considering platform practices requires us to analyze how these practices are simultaneously shaped by the interactions between platforms and cultural producers, as well as by the broader sociocultural contexts in which cultural production is situated. We should be careful not to fall into the trap of platform determinism or platform essentialism, disregarding the larger economic, cultural, political, and historical relations in which cultural industries and platforms are embedded. The challenge before us, then, is to understand how platformization takes shape within and through particular contexts.
Taking up this challenge, Chapter 5 on labor takes as a starting point the changing culture and political economies of cultural work. Over the past decades, various modes of cultural production, like other forms of work, have been transformed through the individualization of responsibility and risk, the rise of the “gig” or “sharing” economy, and pervasive discourses of entrepreneurship (Chan, 2019; Gandini, 2016; Gray & Suri, 2019). These transformations are rooted in the liberalization of markets and the fraying of welfare states in large parts of the world, thereby greatly enhancing the economic insecurity of cultural labor. Such labor, to be sure, was never secure in the first place (Blair, 2001; Gill, 2011; McRobbie, 2016). That said, we will argue that platformization entails a further intensification of these broader trends, generating new sets of tensions. While these tensions can be observed in cultural work more generally, they take on a specific character on platforms. The chapter explores in detail the balance between (1) visibility and invisibility, (2) collective and individual responsibility, (3) job security and precarity, and (4) equality and inequality. Drawing on media industries studies and sociological accounts of creative labor, we discuss how these tensions play out in the lived experiences of platform-based cultural work.
Chapter 6 on creativity
