Platforms and Cultural Production

The widespread uptake of digital platforms – from You

Tube and Instagram to Twitch and Tik

Tok – 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.

Review

“The most impressive and illuminating research yet published on how digital platforms are reshaping the cultural industries.”David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds“The authors expertly explore the ways that platforms have produced opportunities and constraints for media creators. Their account is clear and engaging and will doubtlessly provide a foundation for many conversations about the role of platforms and culture in the coming decade.”Amanda Lotz, Queensland University of Technology“[It] will be [a] valuable reference [book] for students in the field of media and cultural studies. [It] may also inspire researchers and practitioners in related fields to understand how culture is created and modulated on platforms, and how culture can be studied in the platform environment.”Media, Culture & Society"This is a very well written and engaging book which clearly lays out thecritical issues of platform based cultural production. It is essential reading for any re-searchers and students interested in the politics of platforms and social media, con-temporary cultural production and the role of platforms in consumer culture."Journal of Consumer Culture