Platforms and Cultural Production
Описание книги
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.
Оглавление
Thomas Poell. Platforms and Cultural Production
CONTENTS
Guide
Pages
Platforms and Cultural Production
Preface
1 Introduction
Platforms and Platformization
Cultural Producers and Other Complementors
Different industries and regions
Argument and Plan of the Book
Notes
2 Markets. Introduction
Zynga’s rise and fall
Old and New Regimes of Economic Power
Concentration versus digitalization
Platform Economics
Network effects and pricing
Platform Evolution and Ecosystems
The winner takes all?
Becoming a Complementor
Business model alignment
Conclusion
Notes
3 Infrastructure. Introduction
Infrastructural integration
Platforms and Infrastructuralization
Platforms as Components-based Data Infrastructures
Platform instances and ecosystems
Programmability and datafication
Boundary resources
Infrastructural Integration by Complementors
Creation
Distribution
Marketing and monetization
Conclusion
Notes
4 Governance. Introduction
Governing through boundary resources
Governing content
Platform Governance
Copyright
Three strategies of governance by platforms
Regulation
Regulating the cultural industries
Curation
From editorial to algorithmic curation
Moderation
Moderating the cultural industries
Navigating Platform Governance
Adaptation
Negotiations
Conclusion
Notes
5 Labor. Introduction
Platform Precarity
Invisibility
Social (in)visibility
Political (In)visibility
Individuality
Insecurity
Inequality
Conclusion
Notes
6 Creativity. Introduction
New creators, new forms of creativity?
Creativity counts
Tensions
Nichification
Metrification
Branded Content
Authenticity
Conclusion
Notes
7 Democracy. Introduction
Information crisis
Democratic ideals and tensions
Access
Diversity
Protection
Truthfulness
Conclusion
Notes
8 Conclusion: Power
Institutional Power
Openness
Control
Future directions
Productive Power
Individualization and commercialization
Inequalities
Logics and meaning-making
Future directions
Variations
Industry segments
Stages of cultural production
Regional variation
Future directions
Note
References
Index. A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
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Отрывок из книги
Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy
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.
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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.
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