Journey to the stars program: the gendered and generational governance of professionalization on Wattpad

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article proposes that professionalization services are significant media industry spaces because they are the first access points to industry work for many nonprofessionals. I use business-facing marketing materials from the popular self-publishing platform Wattpad as a case study, drawing on discourse analysis to argue that the platform’s strict guidelines governing which users can professionalize are a response to gendered and generational assumptions within legacy media industries about the commercial value of the data gathered from Wattpad’s predominantly young and female userbase. Weighing Wattpad’s business-facing rhetoric against the platform’s strict governance of professionalization, I argue that the efforts of platforms to promote their users to legacy media industries as exploitable workforces can provide important insights into how and why platforms structure professionalization for their users.