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 a breakneck pace. Platforms and Cultural Production explores both the processes and implications of platformization across the cultural industries. Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy identify 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. Though they foreground the implications for three particular industries – news, gaming, and social media creation – the authors also draw upon examples from music, advertising, and more. Diverse in its geographic scope, the book 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 that is grounded in illuminating case studies, this book is essential for students, scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners seeking to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are transforming –and what the stakes are for understandings of platform power.

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.

In this book, Goriunova offers a critical analysis of the processes that produce digital culture. In order to understand these processes, the author introduces the concept of the art platform, a specific configuration of creative passions, codes, events, individuals and works that are propelled by cultural currents and maintained through digitally native means. Goriunova provides a new means of understanding the development of cultural forms on the Internet, placing the phenomenon of participatory and social networks in a conceptual and historical perspective, and offering powerful tools for researching cultural phenomena overlooked by other approaches.

A comprehensive and critical introduction to understanding the Korean Wave (Hallyu) as a transnational media phenomenon. This book provides an accessible introduction to the Korean Wave—the rapid growth of local cultural industries and the global popularity of Korean popular culture over the past 30 years—providing historical, political, economic, and socio-cultural context to its initial rise and enduring popularity. Jin explores the transnational cultural flows of Hallyu across a variety of products and digital technologies—from television dramas, film, and K-pop to online games, and webtoons—and explains the process of cross-media convergence and the socio-political contexts behind the Hallyu phenomenon. He also explores how overseas fans and audiences advance K-pop fandom as social agents in different geo-cultural contexts. The book concludes by discussing if Hallyu can become a sustainable global popular culture beyond a fan-based regional cultural phenomenon. Each chapter features detailed contemporary case studies and discussion questions to enhance student engagement. This is essential reading for students of Media and Communication, Cultural Studies, Korean Studies, and Asian Studies, particularly those taking classes on popular culture and media, media and globalization, Korean popular culture, and East Asian culture.

Virtual Identities and Digital Culture investigates how our online identities and cultures are embedded within the digital practices of our lives, exploring how we form community, how we play, and how we re-imagine traditional media in a digital world. The collection explores a wide range of digital topics – from dating apps, microcelebrity, and hackers to auditory experiences, Netflix algorithms, and live theatre online – and builds on existing work in digital culture and identity by bringing new voices, contemporary examples, and highlighting platforms that are emerging in the field. The book speaks to the modern reality of how our digital lives have been forever altered by our transnational experiences – one of those key experiences is the pandemic, but so too is systemic inequality, questions of digital privacy, and the role of joy in our online lives. A vital contribution at a time of significant social and cultural flux, this book will be highly relevant to those studying digital culture within media, communication, cultural studies, digital humanities, and sociology departments.

This book offers an in-depth academic discourse on the convergence of AI, digital platforms, and popular culture, in order to understand the ways in which the platform and cultural industries have reshaped and developed AI-driven algorithmic cultural production and consumption. At a time of fundamental change for the media and cultural industries, driven by the emergence of big data, algorithms, and AI, the book examines how media ecology and popular culture are evolving to serve the needs of both media and cultural industries and consumers. The analysis documents global governments’ rapid development of AI-relevant policies and identifies key policy issues; examines the ways in which cultural industries firms utilize AI and algorithms to advance the new forms of cultural production and distribution; investigates change in cultural consumption by analyzing the ways in which AI, algorithms, and digital platforms reshape people’s consumption habits; and examines whether governments and corporations have advanced reliable public and corporate policies and ethical codes to secure socio-economic equality. Offering a unique perspective on this timely and vital issue, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in media studies, communication studies, anthropology, globalization studies, sociology, cultural studies, Asian studies, and science and technology studies (STS).

Korea’s Platform Empire explores the evolution of digital platforms in South Korea’s media sphere, and their global political, economic, cultural, and technological influence. With a focus on Korea in the context of the global platform revolution, the book takes a methodical look at the broader social implications and the impact on cultural production. The authors explore various facets of the media and cultural industries—looking beyond social media to news broadcasting and the music industry—and look at the policy and regulations behind this shifting technological advancement. This book will appeal to students and scholars working on media industries, digital media, platform studies, information and technology studies, Korean and East Asian media studies, and the creative and cultural industries.

This book is a first-of-its-kind critical interdisciplinary introduction to the economic, political, cultural, and technological dimensions of work in the rapidly growing digital media and entertainment industries (DMEI). Tanner Mirrlees presents a comprehensive guide to understanding the key contexts, theories, methods, debates, and struggles surrounding work in the DMEI. Packed with current examples and accessible research findings, the book highlights the changing conditions and experiences of work in the DMEI. It surveys the DMEI’s key sectors and occupations and considers the complex intersections between labor and social power relations of class, gender, and race, as well as tensions between creativity and commerce, freedom and control, meritocracy and hierarchy, and precarity and equity, diversity, and inclusivity. Chapters also explore how work in the DMEI is being reshaped by capitalism and corporations, government and policies, management, globalization, platforms, A.I., and worker collectives such as unions and cooperatives. This book is a critical introduction to this growing area of research, teaching, learning, life, labor, and organizing, with an eye to understanding work in the DMEI and changing it, for the better. Offering a broad overview of the field, this textbook is an indispensable resource for instructors, undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars.

This book employs the figure of curation—the selection, arrangement, and display of objects, concepts, and things—to explore the cultures of platform capitalism. Considering its rise in the global art world as an authorial, meaning-making activity and an organizational-entrepreneurial endeavour, it looks at curation as the interweaving of innovative concepts, elaborate storytelling, and trusted experts leaking out from galleries to hashtags. Its logic encompasses diverse spheres ranging from high-brow art and the fashion world to low-brow experience economies and economies of authenticity, from confidence cultures and relationship gurus to algorithmic spectacles. More than an economy, “curate and be curated” is a diffused imperative amidst the disorienting spread of information that digital platforms enable: What to post, what to wear, what to eat, what friends to have, what music to hear, what films to watch, what places to visit, what socks to choose, and what opinion to have about serious issues like climate change, military coups, AI, genetics, space colonization, and cryonics, or everyday issues like football, fashion, and diet. Drawing on critical platform theory, material culture, and multi-sited ethnography, the book examines curated worlds of coolness, authenticity, and inspiration, including the luxury fashion brands Vetements and Balenciaga, Airbnb food experiences, and the figure of the life coach. The book argues that the curatorial imperative endorses an aspirational class imaginary and the idea that handling self-narratives is a strategic means of socialization that can assist upward mobilities as well as neoliberal narratives of well-being, promotion, and success. This book will be of key interest to academics, researchers, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the areas of cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, curating, contemporary art theory, critical management studies, and art history, as well as to more general readers interested in new media, platforms, and digital culture.

This book examines the nexus of East Asian media, culture, and digital technologies in the early 21st century from a Global South perspective. Providing an empirically rich analysis of the emergence of Asian culture, histories, texts, and state policies as they relate to both Asian media and global media, the author discusses relevant theoretical frameworks as East Asian popular culture and media have shifted the contours of globalization. After overviewing Western media/cultural theories and histories, the book explores the ways in which East Asia-focused analytical frameworks are able to shift people’s understanding of globalization and media, drawing upon examples from different East Asian countries to illustrate how current cultural flows have influenced and have been influenced by a handful of dimensions. Offering an important contribution to understanding the historical trajectory and recent developments of East Asia media, this book will interest students and scholars of media, communication, popular culture, cultural studies, Asian studies, politics and sociology.