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This article analyzes how Marxist platform-dependent cultural producers in Brazil - one woman and two drag queens - navigate platform spaces in relation to their identities and everyday work. Struggling with platforms refers to the specific ways in which Marxist cultural producers seek to engage in class struggles, while also grappling with the constraints imposed by platforms. There are paradoxes, tensions and frictions in these efforts. In analytical terms, the article develops how this 'struggling with platforms' occurs in two main dimensions: (1) struggling with identities – including the implications of being a Marxist cultural producer on platforms and how one's identity is shaped and commodified in this space, and (2) struggling with everyday work – considering how the pursuit of social change is both constrained and enabled on platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on platforms and cultural production is dominated by studies that take the Anglo-American world and Northwestern Europe as their main points of reference. Central concepts in the field, consequently, bear the imprint of Western institutions, cultural practices, and ideals. Critically responding to this state of affairs, this opening essay of the special issue on Global Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production, consisting of 20 articles, aims to: 1) challenge universalism, 2) provincialize the US, and 3) multiply our frames of reference. Pursuing these objectives, we bring together ideas from postcolonial and decolonial theory and platform studies in a systematic research program. This global perspectives program allows us to: denaturalize and rethink dominant concepts and ideas through research from around the globe; explicitly thematize and examine the global power relations that structure platform economies; and critically interrogate the knowledge production about these economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines emerging rural creator cultures in South India. Specifically, it focuses on the uptake and production of YouTube videos by village creators, a relatively understudied but increasingly important phenomenon given the rapid spread of social media entertainment in rural India. Through a case study on My Village Show, a YouTube media collective, this article shows how rural cultural producers transformed into 'media workers', 'creators', and 'influencers'. The South Indian YouTubing landscape, with a multitude of village-centric social media entertainment channels, reveals a new dynamic of cultural production in the Global South, distinguished by collective, collaborative, and formalizing creator labor practices. Drawing upon ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with rural cultural producers, this article analyzes and conceptualizes rural creator cultures within particular socio-cultural, vernacular, and regional dynamics in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Has China become a neo-colonizer, exporting its cultural and economic power to the world based on its agenda of building soft power? Existing scholarship on neocolonialism and data colonialism largely focuses on how China's infrastructural expansion and increasingly platformised cultural sectors can achieve its ambitious platformised cultural sectors overseas. Yet, how China's cultural power is manifested, negotiated, or resisted in people's daily lives in a South–South setting remains under-researched and under-theorised. This article uses everyday fashion in Kenya as a case study to investigate China's cultural and economic power expansion in the Global South. We examined how cultural differences are negotiated and mediated on two Chinese(-invested) e-commerce platforms. Through focus groups and platform walkthrough method, our findings serve to enrich existing theories of cultural production–platform relationships applicable in the study of various cultural and creative sectors, to offer new understandings of how symbolic, sociopolitical and cultural meanings of fashion are constructed through divergent platform affordances, and to reveal the various forms of cultural negotiations and resistance in different contexts, multiplying our frames of reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how influencers establish agency amidst precarious working conditions both on and off platforms. Findings from over 50 in-depth interviews show that influencers in Slovenia do not gain agency through platform-centred practices as described in existing literature. Influencers use platform features with minimal effort across the entire cycle of cultural production, which includes content creation, distribution, and monetisation—a phenomenon referred to as 'platform lethargy'. Instead, influencers gain agency through diverse income streams and the support of Instagram husbands and family members. Precarity is not alleviated by using intimacy as a tool in practices of relational labour with audiences, but by relational work that connects actual intimate relationships with economic transactions. This study sheds light on the integration of social media platforms into a pre-existing hustling culture and is relevant for the de-westernisation of research on platformised creative work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the intersection of racism, nationality, and the global Latin American influencer dream. It examines the experiences of Latin American influencers in the United States, where pursuing commercial success intersects with cultural and economic aspirations. Additionally, it explores the role of content service organizations in shaping creator culture and the working experiences of Latin American influencers. Despite the global imagination, influencer economies largely remain national, constrained by socio-cultural, linguistic, and regional norms. Drawing from literature on influencer cultures, platform economies, and imaginaries, the study analyzes data from interviews with content service organization executives and influencers, alongside platform analytics and advertising campaigns. The findings elucidate how racial discourses shape and challenge creator cultures, highlighting barriers for Latin American influencers in the US. This research contributes to understanding the social dimensions of creator culture, revealing impediments faced by diasporic influencers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study builds on theories of user imaginaries by examining how LGBTQ+ creators in Montreal, Canada and Berlin, Germany respond to perceived algorithmic bias. Through observation and close reading of creators' Instagram content, the study finds that expectations of discrimination based on sexual and gender identity, embedded in geographical and sociocultural contexts, shape these users' understandings of threats posed by algorithmic governance. Findings also identified three main responses to perceived algorithmic bias: direct calls for engagement, strategies for eluding algorithmic surveillance, and adaptation to presumed algorithmic parameters. Instead of giving up or leaving, these responses demonstrated users' participatory resignation, as an expectation of algorithmic bias informed by past experiences of identity-based discrimination paired with determination to negotiate such bias to endure on the platform. Thus, this article contributes a novel comparative analysis that expands conceptualizations of algorithmic imaginaries while revealing how resignation is mobilized as resistance to algorithmic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, media organizations globally have increasingly benefited from financial support from digital platforms. In 2018, Google launched the Google News Initiative (GNI) Innovation Challenge aimed at bolstering journalism by encouraging innovation in media organizations. This study, conducted through 36 in-depth interviews with GNI beneficiaries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, reveals that despite its narrative of enhancing technological innovation for the media's future, this scheme inadvertently fosters dependence and extends the philanthrocapitalism concept to the media industry on a global scale. Employing a theory-building approach, our research underscores the emergence of a new form of 'philanthrocapitalism' that prompts critical questions about the dependency of media organizations on big tech and the motives of these tech giants in their evolving relationship with such institutions. We also demonstrate that the GNI Innovative Challenge, while ostensibly promoting sustainable business models through technological innovation, poses challenges for organizations striving to sustain and develop these projects. The proposed path to sustainability by the GNI is found to be indirect and difficult for organizations to navigate, hindering their adoption of new technologies. Additionally, the study highlights the creation of a dependency syndrome among news organizations, driven by the perception that embracing GNI initiatives is crucial for survival in the digital age. Ultimately, the research contributes valuable insights to the understanding of these issues, aiming to raise awareness among relevant stakeholders and conceptualize philanthrocapitalism through a new lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines precarious working conditions for YouTube content creation in Turkey. Creator studies have extensively examined creator precarity within the context of platform architectures and the broader social media entertainment industries. Instead of applying this lens to YouTubing in Turkey to highlight shared precarity experiences of Turkish creators with other YouTube production cultures, I focus on localised precarity to examine how creator labour is made less stable by geographical context. Drawing on in-depth interviews with creators, the research findings demonstrate that there are multiple sources of precarity associated with localised YouTube revenues in an unstable national economy, restrictive internet governance at nation-state level, and culturally situated creator–audience relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short article critically examines the growing body of research on algorithms and platforms in Latin America. Drawing on an analysis of articles published in Portuguese or Spanish in journals of the region, we discuss the main analytical approaches that shape Latin American platformization research. We reveal a tension between two dominant analytical orientations. On one hand, there is a tendency to directly apply concepts and theories from the global North to interpret Latin American experiences, a phenomenon we call "tropicalization." On the other hand, research from the region also produces context-specific knowledge that questions established theoretical frameworks or bridges the study of the local and the global. While both orientations are valuable, we emphasize the importance of developing analytical approaches tailored to address the specific realities of Latin America. These approaches underscore the significance of regionally grounded scholarship in understanding contemporary cultural practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About a decade ago, Turkey's television drama makers believed that streaming platforms would expand markets and create an uncensored space. Platforms did partly reform working conditions and enable drama creatives globally to produce quality shows. Yet creatives remain politically restrained because of platforms' compliance with state regulations. Drawing on platform studies' emphasis on how platforms have both restraining and enabling features, and extending this towards the contradictions around creative freedom and state control, I conceptualize drama creatives' working experiences with national and global streaming platforms through platform ambiguity. Platform ambiguity allows a grasp of how platforms exert power over cultural producers by both enabling and restraining their creative work. Dewesternizing platforms and cultural production scholarship by highlighting how drama makers are not only creative but also geopolitical subjects dependent on the state, I show that their imaginaries and labour practices are always embedded in national contexts and shaped by regulatory structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In relation to work, the term 'platformisation' has gained popularity to indicate the various ways in which a digital platform gets to mediate, organise, intervene in, or otherwise facilitate some work activity. Yet, the intervention of digital platforms into work today increasingly involves activities that are not immediately related to the digital sphere, where different kinds of platforms have become part and parcel of the cultures and practices of work. There is a necessity, in other words, to develop a clearer framework to identify what it means when work activity gets to be 'platform- ised', the conditions under which this takes place, and what the main implications are deriving from this process. Using the case of 'neo-craft' work in the European Union, we propose and illustrate a theoretical conceptualisation of platform- ised work, critically discussing the distinctiveness of this process and highlighting its key features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Instagram content of Nigerian digital creator Olalekan Olaleye illustrates how cultural netizenship stresses the centrality of platformization to the articulation of new genres of African popular representations. This article develops the argument by examining how platform aesthetics shape the trajectories and performative acts of cultural producers, something Olaleye's Nigerian context also modulates. By lingering on the digital and aesthetic labors of the cultural netizen, the article pinpoints the interactions between creative adaptations and social media texts. Olaleye's Instagram content demonstrates the way digital platforms have become integral to the production and circulation of popular forms and genres and the artistic responses everyday digital subjects make to institutions of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To mediate the tensions between state regulation and content-creator incentives, Chinese social media platforms have developed an interesting practice of using platform official accounts to communicate their rules to the creator community. These accounts anthropomorphize platforms, enabling platforms to represent their regulatory bodies using fictional human characters or animated figures. The phenomenon of platform anthropomorphization in the Chinese context stems from a different ontological understanding of platform governance. The first part of this article discusses the logic of platform governance in China, and highlights a different state–platform relationship in comparison to the US and European countries. In the second part, the article turns to focus on Douyin as a case study to further investigate how Chinese social media platforms establish rules and govern content creators. By analysing Douyin's public-facing policy documents and its platform official account, Douyin Safety Centre, we reveal a mechanism of playful governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses labour precarity in platform-based cultural production from the perspective of Brazilian camming work, examining it through cammers' perceptions and experiences. Precarity has been a framework for assessing work conditions in platformised cultural industries. This framework stems from a normative standpoint of standard work and employment, which neither represents labour markets nor marginalised cultural labour in the majority world. This article tackles precarity from marginalised Global South cultural producers' perspectives. Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews with cisgender female cammers, I show that local work and employment realities, and the positionality of platforms within them, are critical to cammers' sense-making of labour precarity. For the cammers, the parameters for evaluating quality and precarity are unstable and adjusted according to their position within and outside platform economies. Conclusions suggest that precarity is situated and derives its meaning from a complex articulation of workers' experiences and positions across various economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a major blindspot regarding our understanding of different structural models of platformization beyond the dominant Anglo-American markets. This article develops a typology of political economic models of platformization by using the case of music platformization. In order to generate such a typology, the article proposes that we start by identifying variables present in any music market around the world. Three different variables are proposed: (1) platform dependence; (2) dominance of 'global' platforms; and (3) the degree of platform and recording industry integration. To illustrate how these variables result in structurally distinct models of platformization, the article briefly discusses the cases of South Korea, the Netherlands and Nigeria. In doing so, a framework is provided through which to interpret the experiences and conditions of musicians, and other cultural producers, in diverse platform ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the influence of YouTube's monetization metrics on content creation practices and their reflection of geopolitical and economic factors. Using the case study of "Team Azimkiya," a Bangladeshi YouTube channel primarily targeting South Korean viewers, the study introduces the concept of "global CPM arbitrage." CPM, or cost per 1000 impressions, estimates advertising revenue for channels. Global CPM arbitrage characterizes content creators' strategic approach to leverage varying CPM rates across geographic regions, optimizing their advertising revenue within the YouTube ecosystem. While CPM is often seen as an objective metric, the analysis of Team Azimkiya's strategies reveals its role in constructing audiences and directing higher-revenue viewers. In a platform that exhibits a preference for content from more affluent regions, self-Orientalization emerges as an effective content creation approach. This article argues that this approach can perpetuate the inter-Asian dynamic and the Orientalist gaze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Diversity' is a heavily freighted and multivalent keyword in the global digital media environment. The recommender systems used by platforms are particularly acute sites of development and debate around the political, cultural and technical issues 'diversity' signifies. Drawing on a review of computer science publications on recommender systems in media and entertainment as well as a survey of recent advances in media and cultural policy scholarship, this short article performs a pragmatic close reading of diversity in these intersecting fields. We note that attention must be paid to the specific challenges and politics of diversity not only in particular cultural fields but also in local cultural contexts, drawing on examples from music and SVOD platforms to flesh out these questions and the practical possibilities that arise from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on intermediation in cultural production in a digital ecology consisting of multiple platforms mediating simultaneously converging and diverging industries, this study critically engages with the thesis that platforms act primarily as a disintermediation vector in a linear value chain within a single industry. With two empirical cases of intermediation in the emerging virtual celebrity sector – one organizing the recursive loop of prosumption, the other articulating authenticity against technological standardization and overproduction, the study shifts the focus away from questions of labor and agency of individual creators and unpacks the conditions of intermediation in the context of new industrial models of value creation, commodification, and division of labor. The empirical cases demonstrate that the implications of platforms for digital cultural production are paradoxical – while their business models lead to a centralized process of value capture, their flexible organizational forms may afford new distributed patterns of value creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing effort to locate metaverse developments within the purview of platform research. However, the majority of English-language studies take Horizon Worlds, Meta's US-centric prototype of a metaverse, as the starting point. This critical reflection argues that since the fate of the metaverse is far from settled, and its building blocks exist in a colorful array of global visions, we need to divorce discourses of the metaverse from Meta's hype cycle and multiply our frames of reference by engaging with international developments. In turn, this article proceeds by scoping out metaverse visions emanating from different parts of the world and drawing out common themes as entry points for future research. This article contributes to a re-orientation of metaverse studies toward critical and embodied global perspectives of socio-cultural production, while simultaneously reconsidering the very notion of the metaverse as a platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for a pluralization of the "platform capitalism" framework, suggesting we should think instead in terms of "platform capitalisms." This pluralization opens the way to a better account of how platforms work in different geocultural contexts, with our focus being on China, India and Japan. The article first outlines several roles the state has taken on in mediating platform capitalisms. We then signal three main axes around which to consider the implications of platform capitalisms for cultural production: state–platform symbiosis; platform precarity; and the informal–formal relation in cultural production. This short provocation, we hope, will help foreground the crucial role of the state in platform capitalisms, such that the state–culture–capitalism nexus might be better acknowledged in research on platforms and cultural production now and into the future. This is particularly important as states themselves increasingly become platform operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how sexual content creators manage their (in)visibility, as they navigate the constraints of online hyper(in)visibility. So far, research has focussed on how creators more generally attempt to enhance their visibility through social media platforms. Yet, especially for sexual content creators, platform visibility is not straightforward. These creators are hyper(in)visible: facing simultaneous risks of erasure and public scrutiny, harassment, and stigmatization. Drawing on 27 interviews with creators--online sex workers; LGBTQ+ activists; and sex educators--this research outlines the harms of hyper(in)visibility and creators' tactics for strategic invisibility. These interviews showcase how hegemonic norms make socially marginalized content both hypervisible and invisible, as well as how these dynamics are reproduced and institutionalized on platforms. As they are transgressing hegemonic sexual norms, the interviewees discuss risks of platform surveillance, outing, doxxing, harassment, and capping. Yet, within the confines of platforms, these creators find ways to manage and resist these risks and positively engage with strategic invisibility. Taken together, the analysis shows the need to complicate the notion of creator visibility and sensitize research to how creators seek particular types of visibility, as well as strategic invisibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]