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 discusses the new cultural and commercial forms and formats that can be observed in platform-based cultural production. We examine how the autonomy of cultural producers comes under further pressure, as the boundary between creativity and (self-)promotion becomes fundamentally blurred. Similar to the previous chapters, the challenge is to understand how these emerging platform practices and norms are connected with broader historical trends. Research on the cultural industries shows that cultural production has, over the past decades, been characterized by continuous creative upheaval and has become increasingly tied to capitalist logics of marketing and monetization. To gain insight into the specific trajectories of creative platform practices, we explore the tensions observed along the axes of (1) mass versus niche audiences, (2) qualification versus quantification, (3) editorial versus advertising, and (4) authenticity versus self-promotion. Analyzing these tensions, the chapter shows the role that platformization plays in both enabling and constraining creative expression.
Chapter 7 examines how platformization involves particular democratic practices and tensions. We analyze the frictions between the sociocultural and economic realities of platform-dependent cultural production and the democratic ideals historically associated with the cultural industries. The chapter specifically focuses on (1) equality of access, (2) diversity, (3) protection from harm, and (4) truthfulness. While platforms have been associated with a democratization of cultural production, we argue that wider societal inequalities and problems are often reproduced in platform-dependent cultural production. We thus examine how – despite the relative openness of platform markets and infrastructures – cultural producers lacking substantial resources and organizational support continue to face barriers that preclude them from fully contributing to public and civic life. What is more, the ability of cultural workers to participate in platform-based cultural production remains unequally divided in terms of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity. While lack of diversity is a well-worn threat to democracy, we also note how the lack of platform governance often enables hate, harassment, and inaccurate information to run rampant in digital public spheres. Taken together, as has become painfully clear over the past years, and particularly in the context of the global pandemic, the increasingly central role of platforms in cultural production presents a major democratic challenge.
Notes
1 1. See https://www.statista.com/statistics/259477/hours-of-video-uploaded-to-youtube-every-minute/.
2 2. We are not the first to use the notion of platformization. Helmond conceptualized platformization as “the extension of social media platforms into the rest of the web and their drive to make external web data ‘platform ready’” (2015: 1). In this book, our understanding is both broader and more specific. It is broader because we make an argument that platformization is not only a techno-economic phenomenon. It is narrower because we specifically focus on the cultural industries. For a more extensive discussion of the concept of platformization, see Poell et al. (2019).
3 3. For the sake of readability and simplicity, throughout this book we use business studies, critical political economy, and software studies as a shorthand for broader bodies of work. Whereas critical political economy of communications has a long history (Winseck & Jin, 2011), software studies includes an amalgam of the – arguably emerging – fields of software and critical code studies (e.g., Bucher, 2018; Helmond, 2015; Mackenzie, 2006), app studies (e.g., Gerlitz et al., 2019; Morris & Murray, 2018), platforms studies (e.g., Montfort & Bogost, 2009), and what Robert Gorwa (2019a) has dubbed “critical platforms studies” (e.g., van Dijck et al., 2018). Business studies encompasses an even wider group of subdisciplines, which includes orthodox economics, strategic management and entrepreneurship, engineering design, and information systems research.
4 4. We purposely are not including research on platform companies such as Uber, Lyft, or Airbnb, as these are, as of yet, not of economic or technological relevance to cultural production. We do recognize that many of the dynamics we discuss are particular to a broader shift described as “platform capitalism,” which marks the disruption of existing markets by introducing new regimes of power (Srnicek, 2017).
5 5. To be precise, Facebook has started to license intellectual property in order to compete in the markets for live streaming (e.g., sports), and scripted television and film distribution.
2 Markets
Introduction
When, in 2007, a group of tech entrepreneurs developed a plan to launch their game studio Zynga (named after the pet bulldog of one of the co-founders), they opted for a then-novel – and undoubtedly risky – approach to game distribution and marketing. Rather than publishing on an existing gaming platform, such as Steam or the Nintendo Wii, they opted for Facebook. It was a bold move at the time: the social network’s userbase was still relatively small, and most end-users accessed the platform via desktops, rather than through mobile devices. But the founders seemed to sense the platform’s vast potential. More importantly, and crucial for Zynga’s success, Facebook had just launched the Facebook Development Platform, which provided outside companies with “deep integration” to “build a business around your Facebook application” (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019). In practice, this meant that external developers, such as Zynga, could access part of Facebook’s data infrastructure to build “social applications,” which were then accessible within the boundaries of the Facebook.com domain. One of those social applications was Texas Hold’em Poker. As one of the very first games to be played on Facebook, Zynga’s poker game marked the beginning of a new game format: the social game (Kerr, 2017).
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