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.

About the Author
Thomas Poell is Professor of Data, Culture & Institutions at the University of Amsterdam.
David B. Nieborg is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto.
Brooke Erin Duffy is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University.

Reviews

"The most impressive and illuminating research yet published on how digital platforms are reshaping the cultural industries."
David Hesmondhalgh, University of Leeds

"The authors expertly explore the ways that platforms have produced opportunities and constraints for media creators. Their account is clear and engaging and will doubtlessly provide a foundation for many conversations about the role of platforms and culture in the coming decade."
Amanda Lotz, Queensland University of Technology

"[It] will be [a] valuable reference [book] for students in the field of media and cultural studies. [It] may also inspire researchers and practitioners in related fields to understand how culture is created and modulated on platforms, and how culture can be studied in the platform environment."
Media, Culture & Society

"This is a very well written and engaging book which clearly lays out thecritical issues of platform based cultural production. It is essential reading for any re-searchers and students interested in the politics of platforms and social media, con-temporary cultural production and the role of platforms in consumer culture."
Journal of Consumer Culture

"Platforms and Cultural Production provides a solid introductory overview of the growing tendency towards platformization in cultural creation, at both the infrastructural and cultural levels. Approachably presented, this work will be of interest to all levels of university students and researchers interested in platform studies. This book is a thoroughly researched and persuasive portrait of how new media technologies in the cultural industries constitute extensions of-rather than ruptures with-traditional legacy media apparatuses."
Canadian Journal of Communication

"The book... is a must-read for faculty and students working in platform studies, internet studies, or the social study of platform societies or platform labour. However, the book will be of great use to anyone beyond these academic fields who needs to understand how the broader contours of social and cultural life are shifting in relation to platform power and digital forms of inequality. Platforms and Cultural Production should be read widely by institutional leaders and policy makers as the issues raised by the book require public discussion and debate."
International Journal of Culture Policy

Book Information
ISBN 9781509540518
Author Thomas Poell
Format Paperback
Page Count 260
Imprint Polity Press
Publisher John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Weight(grams) 363g
Dimensions(mm) 226mm * 152mm * 15mm