10 quotes from the book Platforms and Cultural Production

Thomas Poell, David Nieborg and Brooke Erin Duffy have released their new book, Platforms and Cultural Production. The general focus is how platformization affects cultural production, especially with changes in institutions and cultural practices. The authors identify key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance, as well shifts in practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. The book foregrounds three particular industries – news, gaming, and social media creation.

Read 10 quotes from the book:

1. Platformization can be understood as the penetration of digital platforms’ economic, infrastructural, and governmental extensions into the cultural industries, as well as the organization of cultural practices of labor, creativity, and democracy around these platforms.
2. We define platforms as data infrastructures that facilitate, aggregate, monetize, and govern interactions between end-users and content and service providers.
3. Digitization does not equal platformization. While The New York Times, Netflix, The Walt Disney Company collect endless reams of data and use sophisticated algorithms to curate content, they are not platform companies.
4. What motivated us to write this book is to move beyond quantitative indicators of platform dominance—such as revenue and profit—to offer a broader perspective on the flows and relations of power in platform environments.
5. To explore the relations between platforms and cultural producers, we have taken a decidedly interdisciplinary approach, leaning on writings from business studies, critical political economy, software studies, media industry studies, and cultural studies.
6. Cultural producers of any size still face blockbuster dynamics that reward small clusters of winners or stars. These dynamics help explain the staying power of legacy media companies, particularly transnational media conglomerates such as The Walt Disney Company, Bertelsmann, or Vivendi.
7. What makes the position of cultural producers vis-à-vis platforms particularly precarious is the breakneck pace with which platforms change their boundary resources and their regimes of visibility. We have framed such incessant shifts as platform evolution.
8. Platform-dependent cultural workers—even those that are highly visible from a socio-economic perspective—tend to be politically invisible; they lack legal and/or regulatory support. The absence of such protections renders workers further atomized, hence precarious.
9. Platforms harbor the tremendous potential to distribute a wider variety of creative expressions. In practice, however, digital distribution does not equal visibility, as both resources and scale continue to shape distribution trajectories.
10. To develop a truly global perspective, we should treat China-based platform companies and practices of cultural production not as exotic, but as distinctive. Indeed, they follow an idiosyncratic path, just as US-based platforms and industries do.

Watch talks on DigiLabour Youtube Channel:

• Talk with David Nieborg – Perspectives on Platform Economics
• Talk with Brooke Erin Duffy – The Promise and Precarity of Visibility in Social Media Work