Making virtual celebrity: Platformization and intermediation in digital cultural production (original) (raw)
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This article explores how the political economy of the cultural industries changes through platformization: the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content. It pursues this investigation in critical dialogue with current research in business studies, political economy, and software studies. Focusing on the production of news and games, the analysis shows that in economic terms platformization entails the replacement of two-sided market structures with complex multisided platform configurations, dominated by big platform corporations. Cultural content producers have to continuously grapple with seemingly serendipitous changes in platform governance, ranging from content curation to pricing strategies. Simultaneously, these producers are enticed by new platform services and infrastructural changes. In the process, cultural commodities become fundamentally "contingent," that is increasingly modular in design and continuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback.
The platformization of cultural production
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This panel focuses on an emerging set of techno-economic relations reshaping cultural production and networked publics. In a growing number of industry segments—from journalism to games and from music to video and fashion—cultural entrepreneurs are finding audiences and advertisers on and via digital platforms. In response, they are reorienting their production and circulation strategies. This process of platformization appears to fundamentally transform the organization of cultural production, distribution and marketing. Preliminary studies on digital news publishing, for instance, indicate that ‘datafication’—the systematic collection and algorithmic processing of user data—marks a shift from editoriallyto demand-driven modes of production and distribution. These shape-shifting industrial practices seem to render cultural commodities ‘contingent’; that is, they are not only modular in design, but also continuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback (Niebor...
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This introduction to the second special collection of articles on the platformization of the cultural industries foregrounds research methods and practices. Drawing from the 12 articles included in this collection, as well as the 14 articles published in the first collection, we identify commonalities in approaches, consistencies in traditions, and uniform modes of analysis. We argue that approaches that have been deployed in media industry studies for decades—semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis, content analysis, and participant observation—remain productive. At the same time, transformations in the temporalities and curation of cultural production require updated modes of investigation and analysis. As such, we spotlight contributors’ novel methods and innovative theoretical approaches, such as the walkthrough method and multi-sided market theory.
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By providing a review of a number of recent and relevant publications, this paper reconstructs major trends, topics and challenges within the state of the art of scholarly research on the platformization of cultural industries, addressing the crucial role that digital platforms have acquired in recent years in the production and circulation of a variety of cultural contents. More specifically, after offering an introduction on the ways in which the study of digital platforms emerged as strictly intertwined with the evolution of certain cultural industry sectors, such as gaming and video sharing, the paper addresses in-depth three distinctive domains of cultural production and consumption: music, journalism, and photography. In so doing, the paper traces a variety of perspectives beyond the mainstream political economy-oriented focus of platform studies, suggesting emerging paths for future research on these rapidly shifting and increasingly debated issues.
PLATFORMS, POWER, & PRECARITY IN THE CREATOR ECONOMY
This course examines the intersection of media, technology, and society through a critical exploration of the digital creator economy. Though so-called "creators" are astonishingly diverse-spanning TikTok comedians, Instagram influencers, YouTube educators, and Onlyfans streamers, among many others-they share a dependence on digital platforms for access to audiences, advertisers, and/or other financial opportunities. But digital platforms are evermore dependent on creators, too. It is in this vein that Big Tech companies are propping up the image of the creator economy as an entrepreneurial Promised Land-one that promises autonomy, flexibility, and self-actualization. Such optimism, however, belies the less auspicious realities of a creator career, wherein accounts of burnout, exploitation, and precarity are rife. How, then, are we to understand the flows of power and agency in the creator economy? We begin by exploring changes and continuities with earlier modes of cultural production; to do so, we draw upon writings on media industries, sociologies of cultural labor, and studies of celebrity and fame. We then explore key themes in critical scholarship in platforms and cultural production, spanning topics such as labor, visibility, and authenticity. Although the course foregrounds mainstream, largely Western creatorcentric platforms, students are encouraged to pursue original research that interrogates diverse creator cultures, contexts, and communities of practice.
Platform Practices in the Cultural Industries: Creativity, Labor, and Citizenship
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The rise of contemporary platforms—from GAFAM in the West to the “three kingdoms” of the Chinese Internet—is reconfiguring the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural content in staggering and complex ways. Given the nature and extent of these transformations, how can we systematically examine the platformization of cultural production? In this introduction, we propose that a comprehensive understanding of this process is as much institutional (markets, governance, and infrastructures), as it is rooted in everyday cultural practices. It is in this vein that we present fourteen original articles that reveal how platformization involves key shifts in practices of labor, creativity, and citizenship. Diverse in their methodological approaches and topical foci, these contributions allow us to see how platformization is unfolding across cultural, geographic, and sectoral-industrial contexts. Despite their breadth and scope, these articles can be mapped along four thematic clusters: continuity and change; diversity and creativity; labor in an age of algorithmic systems; and power, autonomy, and citizenship.
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A new form of digital economic circulation has emerged, wherein ideas, knowledge, labour and use rights for otherwise idle assets move between geographically distributed but connected and interactive online communities. Such circulation is apparent across a number of digital economic ecologies, including social media, online marketplaces, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and other manifestations of the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Prevailing accounts deploy concepts such as ‘co-production’, ‘prosumption’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ to explain digital economic circulation as networked exchange relations characterised by their disintermediated, collaborative and democratizing qualities. Building from the neologism of platform capitalism, we place ‘the platform’ – understood as a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of capitalization – at the centre of the critical analysis of digital economic circulation. To create multi-sided markets and coordinate network effects, platforms enrol users through a participatory economic culture and mobilize code and data analytics to compose immanent infrastructures. Platform intermediation is also nested in the ex-post construction of a replicable business model. Prioritizing rapid up-scaling and extracting revenues from circulations and associated data trails, the model performs the structure of venture capital investment which capitalizes on the potential of platforms to realize monopoly rents.
International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2022
Digital platforms supposedly allow global corporations to exert novel infrastructural power over cultural participation due to platforms' increased centrality as key gatekeepers. Extant theorizations of global capitalism, however, suggest infrastructural power as a longstanding feature of capitalism, especially in media industries. How novel is the infrastructural power of platforms? How does platformization affect cultural participation? Through an ethnographic comparison of conventional and platformized cultural intermediaries (respectively, a music distribution company in 2010 and a multi-channel YouTube network or MCN in 2015), I show continuity in infrastructural power alongside distinctive differences in logics of inclusion/exclusion¾what I call hard and soft gates. Hard gates exclude while the soft gate simultaneously increases participation and heightens circulation inequality. Considered alongside recent research, my findings suggest that policy on participation must consider how value-laden infrastructures impact participation and visibility in digital culture.
Limits of the platform economy: digitalization and marketization in live music
Report to the Hans Boeckler Foundation, 2018
Online platforms have disrupted parts of the capitalist economy, with allegedly severe consequences in the world of work. It is difficult to assess the potential magnitude of this effect, however, because little is known about the conditions under which platforms take over any given market, industry or occupation. This study examines live music in Germany and the UK, where online platforms do not dominate, despite considerable digitalization of market intermediaries. We argue that the live music market frustrates online platforms because (1) assessments of value are qualitative; (2) the task is complex and contingent; and (3) the organizational field is fragmented. Digitalization has varying effects on the organization of work and exchange relationships between musicians, intermediaries and clients. We find that, as the degree of digitalization increases, matching services tend to work less as a workers' representative-which is traditionally the case for live music agents– and more as a force of marketization that disciplines workers by orchestrating price-based competition. 2
Global perspectives on platforms and cultural production
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2024
Research on platforms and cultural production is dominated by studies that take the Anglo-American world and Northwestern Europe as their main points of reference. Central concepts in the field, consequently, bear the imprint of Western institutions, cultural practices, and ideals. Critically responding to this state of affairs, this opening essay of the special issue on Global Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production, consisting of 20 articles, aims to: 1) challenge universalism, 2) provincialize the US, and 3) multiply our frames of reference. Pursuing these objectives, we bring together ideas from postcolonial and decolonial theory and platform studies in a systematic research program. This global perspectives program allows us to: denaturalize and rethink dominant concepts and ideas through research from around the globe; explicitly thematize and examine the global power relations that structure platform economies; and critically interrogate the knowledge production about these economies.