Thomas Poell - Platforms and Cultural Production

There is an important backstory to this concern with cultural production in the digital age. Platforms – and online communication more generally – have long been associated with a discourse of democratized cultural production. In the early 2000s, scholars, beguiled by the possibilities of the internet, contended that then-new platforms would engender a shift toward a so-called “participatory culture,” in which every user could potentially express themselves and secure audiences – essentially becoming a producer in their own right (Jenkins, 2006, see also Bruns, 2008; Spurgeon et al., 2009). These scholars pointed out that individuals, from musicians to journalists, could become active participants in cultural production by bypassing traditional gatekeepers such as legacy media organizations. From this perspective, emerging social media and content-sharing platforms, in combination with the widespread adoption of mobile technologies, substantially lowered the bar for individuals to produce and widely distribute cultural content (Shirky, 2008).

This democratization frame has been fueled by the discursive and institutional self-positioning of platform companies. More than a decade ago, Tarleton Gillespie (2010: 353) noticed that YouTube and other platforms situate themselves in relation to different types of actors by carving “out a role and a set of expectations that is acceptable to each and also serves their own financial interests, while resolving or at least eliding the contradictions between them.” Platform executives, such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, are particularly well trained in corporate double-speak, oscillating between hailing Facebook’s users both as empowered individuals and “consumptive audiences” (Hoffmann et al., 2018: 210). As research on social imaginaries shows, this discursive work is done not only by those who work for platform corporations, but also by scholars, pundits, and consultants (van Dijck & Nieborg, 2009). Together, they inform how cultural producers, end-users, and other social actors envision and understand platforms.

In recent years, these imaginaries, what we have elsewhere called “platform imaginaries,” have been thoroughly criticized (van Es & Poell, 2020). Critical media scholars, in particular, have noted the profound unevenness of the relationship between platforms and cultural producers; in particular, the market valuations of platform companies have increased significantly, while platform-dependent cultural producers remain in highly precarious situations (Baym, 2018; Jarrett, 2014; Kumar, 2016). Cultural producers, in their role as platform complementors, can experience the sudden loss of audiences and income any time a platform changes the curation and monetization of content (Cotter, 2019; O’Meara, 2019; Petre et al., 2019).

While our own work subscribes to and – hopefully – contributes to this wave of platform critique, it remains unclear how exactly platformization reshapes cultural creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization. Thus far, researchers have looked at the relationship between platforms and cultural production from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, most prominently media industry studies, software studies, critical political economy, and business studies. Although these traditions produce important insights on which this book builds, these are also partial insights. That is because these research traditions tend to focus on particular elements of what we call platformization: changes in market relations, the development of data infrastructures, new forms of governance, the precarity of labor, the growth of new creative practices, or the impact on democratic politics. Individual studies also tend to focus either on particular platforms or on specific modes of cultural production. This makes it difficult to grasp the variation within and across cultural industries. What is missing is a holistic approach to the platformization of cultural production (Poell, 2020).

This book offers such an approach by demonstrating that changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance are intricately entangled with shifts in labor, creative, and democratic practices. Transformations in one dimension of platformization cannot be properly understood without examining related shifts in other dimensions. By exploring how this process takes shape in different cultural industries, we show that there are substantial variations among and within industry segments. Such variations in platform-dependence have large implications not only for the day-to-day operations of cultural producers, but also for the cultural commodities that get circulated to networked audiences.

In the first half of the book, we examine platformization from an institutional perspective. We argue that this process opens up new opportunities for cultural producers to find audiences and generate revenue, but simultaneously leads to an unprecedented concentration of economic, infrastructural, and political-cultural power among a few platform corporations. Power is understood here not simply as dominance, but rather as mutual, albeit highly unequal, relations of dependency. From such a relational perspective, power is not held by a particular actor, but both emerges from and structures unequal relations between actors (Emirbayer, 1997; Turow, 1997).

Examining the relations of dependence between platforms and cultural producers, Chapter 2demonstrates that platformization proceeds through business model alignment , as cultural producers and other complementors develop economic strategies geared toward platform markets. In turn, Chapter 3discusses how cultural producers integrate their own infrastructures with oft-invisible platform infrastructures. We call this process infrastructural integration. Chapter 4, subsequently, focuses on regulatory standardization as platforms minutely govern how complementors interact with end-users and other sides in the platform market. Hence, we can observe how platformization involves a centralization of economic, infrastructural, and political power.

Analyzing these institutional modes of platformization, these chapters demonstrate that this process involves a multiplicity of institutional relations. Platform companies operate their own internal markets, but they are also always in competition with other platform companies, as well as telecommunication companies, consumer electronics manufacturers, and legacy media companies. These internal and external market relations are closely connected: external market competition has prompted platform companies to increase the scope of their operations by entering or even creating new markets. And, vice versa, the rapid ascent of internal platform markets has spurred the movement of platform companies into dominant positions in a growing number of markets, triggering persistent concerns over market concentration (Moore & Tambini, 2018).

As the chapters in the first half of the book will demonstrate, a similar entanglement of institutional relations and centralization of control can be observed in terms of infrastructures and governance. As with any other business, platform companies rely on public infrastructures, especially internet connectivity (DeNardis & Hackl, 2015; Winseck, 2017). At the same time, they invest heavily in their own infrastructures, for instance (cloud) computing and web servers, and digital distribution outlets such as app stores. Hence, public and platform infrastructures cannot be seen as separated. Yet, the “infrastructuralization of platforms” means that private companies compete with, and partly replace, public infrastructures, potentially controlling key nodes of the web and app ecosystems (Plantin et al., 2018). Finally, national and supranational regulatory frameworks set the legal boundaries of what can be exchanged on platforms and by whom. How platform companies interpret those frameworks is a matter of key concern among scholars, pundits, politicians, and policymakers. As platforms are becoming increasingly central to cultural exchange, governance by platforms increasingly shapes the governance of online spaces more generally (Gillespie, 2018; Gorwa, 2019a; van Dijck et al. 2018).