The LSE Digital Ethnography Collective are delighted to invite you to our next zoom event on Thursday 7th April (4-6pm BST), where the wonderful Thomas Poell, David Nieborg and Brooke Erin Duffy will be discussing their new book Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021).
The authors will present some of the findings of the book, which examines both the processes and implications of platformization across the cultural industries. This will be followed by an audience Q&A. As usual, our events are designed to be interactive and generative of ideas and conversation, so we hope you'll come with questions! The event will be chaired by LDEC Co-Founder Zoë Glatt.
BOOK DESCRIPTION:
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. In 'Platforms and Cultural Production', the authors identify key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labour, creativity, and democracy. Foregrounding simultaneous changes in institutional relations and cultural practices, the authors define platformization as: the penetration of digital platforms’ economic, infrastructural, and governmental extensions into the cultural industries, as well as the organization of cultural practices of labour, creativity, and democracy around these platforms. Exploring how these interrelated changes take shape in different industrial and geographic contexts, they discuss key variations in the trajectories of transformation. This analytical framework should assist students, scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners in their efforts to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are evolving in the era of platforms.