LITMIR.BIZ

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).

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