Special Collection 1: Platform Practices in the Cultural Industries: Creativity, Labor, and Citizenship

From Social Media + Society

Platform Practices in the Cultural Industries: Creativity, Labor, and Citizenship

Editors' Introduction to the special issue.

Brooke Erin Duffy, Thomas Poell and David Nieborg. October-December 2019. 
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“And Today’s Top Donator is”: How Live Streamers on Twitch.tv Monetize and Gamify Their Broadcasts

This article examines cultural and economic behavior on live streaming platform Twitch.tv, and the monetization of live streamers’ content production.

Mark R. Johnson and Jamie Woodcock. October-December 2019. 
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The Platforms of Podcasting: Past and Present

This article explores the role of digital platforms in podcasting (both past and present) and their impacts on the emergent podcast industry structure, content, and governance.

John L. Sullivan. October-December 2019. 
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Negotiating Collaborations: BookTubers, The Publishing Industry, and YouTube’s Ecosystem

This article characterizes the challenges the Spanish-language publishing industry is facing in the context of digitalization to attract readers; describes the position that BookTubers have within the YouTube ecosystem, and how they relate with the platform’s actors, politics, and affordances; and analyzes the exchanges that BookTubers establish with publishers—often referred as collaborations—and their implications for their autonomy.

José M. Tomasena. October-December 2019. 
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United We Stand: Platforms, Tools and Innovation With the Unity Game Engine

The skirmish between game engines Unity and Unreal presents a new front in the platformization of cultural production. This article argues that such programs are “platform tools.”

Maxwell Foxman. October-December 2019. 
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Platformizing Webtoons: The Impact on Creative and Digital Labor in South Korea

Taking as a case study, the platformization of the “Webtoon” industry in South Korea, this article addresses such concerns, questioning the potentially detrimental effects of platforms on creative labor and their dominance in the market.

Ji-Hyeon Kim and Jun Yu. October-December 2019. 
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“Running the Numbers”: Modes of Microcelebrity Labor in Queer Women’s Self-Representation on Instagram and Vine

This article examines the microcelebrity labor of everyday queer women who aim to increase their social and economic capital by interweaving personal self-representations with entrepreneurial endeavors on Instagram and Vine.

Stefanie Duguay. October-December 2019
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Platformization of the Unlikely Creative Class: Kuaishou and Chinese Digital Cultural Production

This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific lens of Kuaishou, an algorithm-based video-sharing platform targeting second- and third-tier cities as well as the countryside. It enables the forming of an “unlikely” creative class in contemporary China.

Jian Lin and Jeroen de Kloet. October-December 2019
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Algorithmic Experts: Selling Algorithmic Lore on YouTube

This article considers the growing influence of self-styled algorithmic “experts.” Experts build valuable brands, accumulate notoriety, and piece together careers by selling theorizations of algorithmic visibility on YouTube to aspiring and established creators.

Sophie Bishop. January-March 2020. 
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“Gaming the System”: Platform Paternalism and the Politics of Algorithmic Visibility

This article critically probes discourses and practices of so-called system-gaming by analyzing three key moments when platforms accused cultural producers of algorithmic manipulation.

Caitlin Petre, Brooke Erin Duffy and Emily Hund. October-December 2019. 
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Weapons of the Chic: Instagram Influencer Engagement Pods as Practices of Resistance to Instagram Platform Labor

This article examines the phenomenon of Instagram influencer “engagement pods” as an emergent form of resistance that responds to the reconfigured working conditions of platformized cultural production.

Victoria O’Meara. October-December 2019. 
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“First Week Is Editorial, Second Week Is Algorithmic”: Platform Gatekeepers and the Platformization of Music Curation 

This article investigates the logics that underpin music curation, and particularly the work of music curators, working at digital music streaming platforms.

Tiziano Bonini & Alessandro Gandini. October-December 2019. 
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SoundCloud and Bandcamp as Alternative Music Platforms 

This article examines two “producer-oriented” audio distribution platforms, SoundCloud and Bandcamp, which have been important repositories for the hopes of musicians, commentators, and audiences that digital technologies and cultural platforms might promote democratization of the cultural industries, and compares their achievements and limitations in this respect.

David Hesmondhalgh, Ellis Jones, & Andreas Rauh. October-December 2019. 
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Creator Governance in Social Media Entertainment 

This article addresses the platformization of cultural production by offering a creator-centric account of industrial and governance issues in social media entertainment (SME).

Stuart Cunningham & David Craig. October-December 2019. 
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The Beguiling: Glamour in/as Platformed Cultural Production

Through a case study of popular feminism, the article traces the ways in which glamour, defined as a beguiling affective force linked to promotional capitalist logics, suffuses digital content, metrics, and platforms.

Alison Hearn & Sarah Banet-Weiser. October-December 2019. 
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Special Collection 2: Studying Platforms and Cultural Production: Methods, Institutions, and Practices

Introduction: Studying Platforms and Cultural Production: Methods, Institutions, and Practices

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.

David B. Nieborg, Brooke Erin Duffy, and Thomas Poell. July-September 2020. 
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Bit by (Twitch) Bit: “Platform Capture” and the Evolution of Digital Platforms

This article considers the history of donation management tools on the livestreaming platform Twitch. In particular, it details the technical and economic contexts that led to the development of Twitch Bits, a first-party donation management service introduced in 2016.

William Clyde Partin. July-September 2020. 
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Tiered Governance and Demonetization: The Shifting Terms of Labor and Compensation in the Platform Economy

Social media platforms have profoundly transformed cultural production, in part by restructuring the terms by which culture is distributed and paid for. In this article, we examine the YouTube Partner Program and the controversies around the “demonetization” of videos, to understand these arrangements and what happens when they shift beneath creators’ feet.

Robyn Caplan and Tarleton Gillespie. April-June 2020.
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The Golden Ratio of Algorithms to Artists? Streaming Services and the Platformization of Creativity in American Television Production

In this article, I examine how and why “platformization” was initially made sense of by writers in the American television industry. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews from 2017 as well as a longer ranging analysis of trade press, I identify those features of the production culture established at major streaming platforms that forged the somewhat counterintuitive notion that “being data-driven” created an environment of greater “creative freedom” in the mid-2010s.

Annemarie Navar-Gill. July-September 2020. 
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Brick-and-Platform: Listing Labor in the Digital Vintage Economy

In this article, we argue that listing labor in the digital vintage economy further develops the concept of “platform labor.” We focus on vintage clothes and vinyl records, dominated by women and men, respectively, to help us analyze divisions of listing labor organized by gender, race, age, and class.

Tamara Kneese and Michael Palm. July-September 2020. 
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Platforming Intersectionality: Networked Solidarity and the Limits of Corporate Social Media

How do historically marginalized narratives spread on social media platforms? Developing research in collaboration with intersectional artists and community, or what we call “platforming intersectionality,” can reveal the promise and limitations of social media for bridging disparate, segregated communities, or “networked solidarity.”

Aymar Jean Christian, Faithe Day, Mark Díaz and Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin. July-September 2020. 
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“You Need At Least One Picture Daily, if Not, You’re Dead”: Content Creators and Platform Evolution in the Social Media Ecology

Despite extensive literature on content creators’ identities, strategies, and activities, there remains a gap in understanding how the constantly changing platform environment impacts their brand subjectivities. Against this backdrop, our article explores how evolutions in platforms—including constant updates to their affordances—shape the activities and interpretive processes of content creators.

Arturo Arriagada and Francisco Ibáñez. July-September 2020.
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Platform Imaginaries and Dutch Public Service Media

Over the past decade, public service media (PSM) have increasingly distributed content through digital platforms, most prominently YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This article explores how this process of platformization, the integration of digital platforms in PSM, affects the public service remit of promoting key public values, such as universality, independence, and diversity. Specifically, it interrogates how Dutch PSM imagine platforms and their users, as well as how these imaginaries affect online public service strategies.

Karin van Es and Thomas Poell. April-June 2020. 
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Music Platforms and the Optimization of Culture

Drawing on Mark Katz’s notion of phonographic effects—where musicians, during the advent of early recording technology, altered their style of play to be better captured by microphones—this article explores some of the “platform effects” that arise in the shift to platformization and how cultural goods and user practices are re-formatted in the process.

Jeremy Wade Morris. July-September 2020.
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App Imperialism: The Political Economy of the Canadian App Store

To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this article builds on the concepts of platform capitalism and platform imperialism to situate platforms within wider historical, economic, and spatial trajectories. To investigate if platformization leads to the geographical redistribution of capital and power, we draw on the Canadian instance of Apple’s iOS App Store as a case study.

David B. Nieborg, Chris J. Young and Daniel Joseph. April-June 2020. 
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Locating Power in Platformization: Music Streaming Playlists and Curatorial Power

Where does the “power” of platformization reside? As is widely recognized, platforms are matchmakers which interface between different markets or “sides.” This article analyzes platform power dynamics through three of the most important markets that Spotify—the leading audio streaming platform—is embedded within: the music market; the advertising market; and the finance market.

Robert Prey. April-June 2020. 
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International Platforms, International Prejudice in the Platformization of Crafting

The platformization of crafting in an unequal world encourages discriminatory attitudes toward ethnic Others. Imagining that the “magic circle” of a subcultural platform can insulate users from racism is deeply misguided. We examine this thesis through a mixed-methods approach combining an online survey assessing perceived experiences of racism online and willingness to communicate with people of different ethnicities, discourse analysis of crafters’ online posts, and ethnographic interviews.

Samantha Close and Cynthia Wang. July-September 2020. 
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LINE as Super App: Platformization in East Asia

This article examines the transformative effects of platforms on cultural production through an analysis of the LINE “super app.” Super apps are apps that do-everything; mega-platforms unto themselves. They are particularly prevalent in East Asia.

Marc Steinberg. April-June 2020. 
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