Algorithmic precarity in cultural work

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 103-107
Author(s):  
Brooke Erin Duffy

While work in the media and cultural industries has long been considered precarious, the processes and logics of platformization have injected new sources of instability into the creative labor economy. Among the sources of such insecurity are platforms’ algorithms, which structure the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural content in capricious, enigmatic, even biased ways. Accordingly, cultural producers’ conditions and experiences are increasingly wrought by their understandings—and moreover their anticipation—of platforms’ ever-evolving algorithmic systems. Against this backdrop, I urge fellow researchers of digital culture and society to consider how this mode of “algorithmic precarity” exacerbates the instability of cultural work in the platform era. Considering the volatility of algorithms and the wider cross-platform ecology can help us to develop critical interventions into a creative economy marked by a profoundly uneven allocation of power between platforms and the laborers who populate—and increasingly—power them.

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110213
Author(s):  
Brooke Erin Duffy ◽  
Annika Pinch ◽  
Shruti Sannon ◽  
Megan Sawey

While metrics have long played an important, albeit fraught, role in the media and cultural industries, quantified indices of online visibility—likes, favorites, subscribers, and shares—have been indelibly cast as routes to professional success and status in the digital creative economy. Against this backdrop, this study sought to examine how creative laborers’ pursuit of social media visibility impacts their processes and products. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 30 aspiring and professional content creators on a range of social media platforms—Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Twitter—we contend that their experiences are not only shaped by the promise of visibility, but also by its precarity. As such, we present a framework for assessing the volatile nature of visibility in platformized creative labor, which includes unpredictability across three levels: (1) markets, (2) industries, and (3) platform features and algorithms. After mapping out this ecological model of the nested precarities of visibility, we conclude by addressing both continuities with—and departures from—the earlier modes of instability that characterized cultural production, with a focus on the guiding logic of platform capitalism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Azizah Hamzah ◽  
Rosmani Omar

This article describes the latest developments in the creative industry in South Korea and Malaysia. This article begins with the facts and figures of the global creative economy, followed by a specific discussion of experiences and stories in an effort to develop the creative industry between Malaysia and South Korea. To achieve that goal, this article discusses various business models that have been used that can serve as a guideline in managing the media and cultural industries around the world.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooke Erin Duffy ◽  
Annika Pinch ◽  
Shruti Sannon ◽  
Megan Sawey

While metrics have long played an important, albeit fraught, role in the media and cultural industries, quantified indices of visibility—likes, favorites, subscribers, and shares—are indelibly cast as routes to professional success and status in the digital creative economy. Against this backdrop, this study sought to examine how creative laborers’ pursuit of social media visibility impacts their processes and products. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 30 aspiring and professional content creators—including Instagrammers, YouTubers, TikTok creators, and those seeking monetization through Pinterest and Twitter—we contend that their experiences are not only shaped by the promise of visibility, but also by its precarity. As such, we present a framework for assessing the volatile nature of visibility in platformized creative labor, which includes unpredictability across three levels: (1) markets, (2) industries, and (3) platform features and algorithms. After mapping out this ecological model of the nested precarities of visibility, we conclude by addressing both continuities with—and departures from—the earlier modes of instability that characterized cultural production, most especially the guiding logic of platform capitalism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
Ramon Reichert

The history of the human face is the history of its social coding and the media- conditions of its appearance. The best way to explain the »selfie«-practices of today’s digital culture is to understand such practices as both participative and commercialized cultural techniques that allow their users to fashion their selves in ways they consider relevant for their identities as individuals. Whereas they may put their image of themselves front stage with their selfies, such images for being socially shared have to match determinate role-expectations, body-norms and ideals of beauty. Against this backdrop, collectively shared repertoires of images of normalized subjectivity have developed and leave their mark on the culture of digital communication. In the critical and reflexive discourses that surround the exigencies of auto-medial self-thematization we find reactions that are critical of self-representation as such, and we find strategies of de-subjectification with reflexive awareness of their media conditions. Both strands of critical reactions however remain ambivalent as reactions of protest. The final part of the present article focuses on inter-discourses, in particular discourses that construe the phenomenon of selfies thoroughly as an expression of juvenile narcissism. The author shows how this commonly accepted reading which has precedents in the history of pictorial art reproduces resentment against women and tends to stylize adolescent persons into a homogenous »generation« lost in self-love


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1(31)) ◽  
pp. 8-16
Author(s):  
Черемних І. В.

The article is devoted to the problems of finding new forms of interaction between various media market players and new tools for converting TV and Internet content into profit. Changing the paradigm of consumption of TV and online content creates new conditions for the functioning of media business in Ukraine. Media can effectively monetize content through cross-platform processes such as co-branding, sampling, media baying, PayWall, b2b, b2c partnership, Transmedia Storytteling and others. First of all, it concerns the co-operation of traditional and Internet TV, PAY-TV, IPTV / OTT, digital, cable and satellite penetration, TV and Internet content producers, operators, providers. Through the cross-media consolidation of resources, the combination and distribution of content, players of the media market have the opportunity to successfully finance their budgets and receive greater dividends from the integration of efforts.


Author(s):  
David Lee

This chapter considers the emergence of the discourse of creativity in contemporary economic, political, and social life, and the characteristics of emerging labour markets in the cultural industries. In particular it is concerned with analysing the working experiences of a number of individuals working in the cultural industries in London. Using a critical theoretical framework of understanding, it examines the importance of cultural capital, subjectivisation, governmentality, network sociality, and individualization as key concepts for understanding the experience of labour in the creative economy. This chapter considers how creative individuals negotiate the precarious, largely freelance, deregulated and de-unionised terrain of contemporary work. As the economic becomes increasingly inflected by the cultural in contemporary social life, the terrain of experience of individuals working in these expanding sectors has been neglected in cultural studies. This chapter seeks to critically intervene in this area, arguing that the “creative” turn in contemporary discourse can be seen to mask emergent inequalities and exploitative practices in the post-industrial employment landscape.


Author(s):  
David Lee

This chapter considers the emergence of the discourse of creativity in contemporary economic, political, and social life, and the characteristics of emerging labour markets in the cultural industries. In particular it is concerned with analysing the working experiences of a number of individuals working in the cultural industries in London. Using a critical theoretical framework of understanding, it examines the importance of cultural capital, subjectivisation, governmentality, network sociality, and individualization as key concepts for understanding the experience of labour in the creative economy. This chapter considers how creative individuals negotiate the precarious, largely freelance, deregulated and de-unionised terrain of contemporary work. As the economic becomes increasingly inflected by the cultural in contemporary social life, the terrain of experience of individuals working in these expanding sectors has been neglected in cultural studies. This chapter seeks to critically intervene in this area, arguing that the “creative” turn in contemporary discourse can be seen to mask emergent inequalities and exploitative practices in the post-industrial employment landscape.


2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1293-1308
Author(s):  
Amal Jamal ◽  
Noa Lavie

This article explores the complexity of minority creative workers in the media industry. It challenges the common notion in the literature that minority creative workers are fully submissive to the dominant power structure and examines whether such workers could still be conceived as active agents by resisting submission and marginalization even when they cannot influence their own representation in hegemonic media texts. To answer this question, it explores the performances of minority creative workers in a hegemonic cultural industry. To determine whether one can speak of subaltern agency and, if possible, examine how it manifests itself in reality, it addresses the daily performances of Palestinian creative workers during the production of the second season of the Israeli television series, Fauda. Observations conducted during production demonstrate that since in such contexts minority creative workers cannot avoid being projected in negative roles in the media text, they adopt creative subversive practices of passing and transgressive mimicry, resisting full compliance with the production, without endangering their own position. By doing so, the article contributes not only to the emerging field of creative entrepreneurship in cultural production, but also enables determination of common practices of creative subversion in the cultural industries.


Comunicar ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (32) ◽  
pp. 209-214
Author(s):  
Núria García-Muñoz ◽  
Luisa del Carmen Martínez-García

This article aims to outline the positive assessments made by the public, through the service of the Catalan Women’s Institute (ICD) on speeches containing media representations of gender. It is a way to illustrate how the products of cultural industries are part of the audience’s social imaginary and how it is able to identify and assess constructive representations of gender. The media and audience as agents of social change suggest ways of teaching on gender issues. Finally, the text encourages us to think about the possibility of creating and enhancing educational strategies to form a critical audience that generates proposals, guidelines, a discourse on gender according to social reality.Este trabajo tiene como objetivo describir las valoraciones positivas realizadas por la ciudadanía a través del servicio del Instituto Catalán de las Mujeres (ICD) sobre los discursos mediáticos que contienen representaciones de género. Es una forma de ilustrar cómo los productos de las industrias culturales forman parte del imaginario social de la audiencia y cómo ésta es capaz de identificar, valorar, las representaciones constructivas de género. Los medios de comunicación y la audiencia como agentes sociales de cambio sugieren vías pedagógicas sobre cuestiones de género. Finalmente, el texto nos anima a pensar en la posibilidad de crear y potenciar estrategias educativas para formar una audiencia crítica que genere propuestas, pautas, sobre un discurso de género acorde a la realidad social.


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