Digital Cultural Production Research Articles

Emotional Digital Labor Among Young People Within the Context of Lumpencybertariat

Türkiye ranks among the countries with the highest rates of social media usage. Especially among the young population, the prevalence of social media usage reaches the highest rates. This article focuses on the formation of hate within the cultural production processes on social media among young population. The monopolization of social media platforms fosters an economic logic where hateful interactions gain exchange value within algorithmic distribution systems. The online activities of social media users are at risk of being drawn into a “discursive spiral of hate”. Algorithms direct social media activities towards emotional escalation and transform online interactions into the “emotional digital labor”. Thus, the digital cultural production is tended to be dominated by the “lumpencybertariat”. This lumpenization process poses a direct risk to young social media users. This article aims to outline the conceptual framework of the position of lumpencybertariat as the producer of emotional digital labor in the digital capitalism. The possibility of “emotional sustainability” as a potential tool to counter the risk of lumpenization in digital cultural production is discussed.

Making virtual celebrity: Platformization and intermediation in digital cultural production

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.

Accountable countability. Digital cultural consumption among young people and the tools used to measure it

ABSTRACT This article is a contribution to a discussion on how surveys of cultural and media consumptions among children and young people can be as accurate and relevant as possible. Digital culture represents challenges for both cultural statistics, cultural research and cultural policy: Cultural policy tools and categories of cultural statistics need to be developed to reflect digital cultural consumption and production. Using a survey among upper secondary school pupils in Norway about their cultural and media consumption, we discuss how surveys can become more precise tools for both research and policy. We argue in favour of a type of inductive and multi-dimensional cultural consumption survey in which questions and categories are developed based on broad knowledge of the relevant target group’s cultural consumption. We show that there is a mismatch between public statistics and actual consumption and discuss how statistics and the categories on which they are based can be developed further.

“I know it's sensitive”: Internet censorship, recoding, and the sensitive word culture in China

This article conceptualizes the Sensitive Word Culture as a new theoretical lens for understanding how Chinese netizens interact with Internet censorship systems. Through the use of 22 in-depth interviews of Chinese Weibo users and netnography as empirical material, eight types of word recoding practices are identified and mapped into two discourse strategies, namely “evading detection” and “expanding interpretability.” Drawing on the concepts of everyday resistance and everyday politics, we analyze the power relations behind these discourse strategies, and also identify the apolitical aspects and scope of the Sensitive Word Culture. One notable finding is that the Sensitive Word Culture is becoming a part of China's digital cultural production, influencing the development of slang and memes. This research offers insights into how censorship from artificial intelligence and human intelligence influences the online discourses on Chinese social media.

Researching Motherhood in the Age of Short Videos: Stay-at-Home Mothers in China Performing Labor on Douyin

Addressing the particular context of China, this article has two aims. First, it offers reflections on the possibilities and limitations of using user-generated short videos (vlogs) as research data both methodologically and ethically. We specifically explore the potential of centering vlogs as a new format for examining motherhood behavior across online and offline spaces. Secondly, it adds to the thematic literature on the (re)production and representations of motherhood. We critically examine the rising phenomenon in China of the stay-at-home mother, by exploring how these mothers use short video platforms. Inductively learning from the thematic analysis of short videos of stay-at-home mothers published on Douyin, the patterns in the data indicate three distinct forms of labor are performed through digital motherhood practices: domestic labor, affective labor, and entrepreneurial labor. Drawing on these patterns, we update the original framework of “motherhood 2.0,” which was coined in the 2010s to address mothering practices in industrialized western societies. We extend this framework and conceptualize “motherhood 3.0” by analyzing a type of Chinese community-based intersectional performance of motherhood, gender, and labor that we see emerging in digital cultural production centered on short videos. Mediated labor within online and offline motherhood practices is informed by social, cultural, and technological factors. Digital technologies and mobile media communication provide new means for stay-at-home mothers to navigate between their roles as devoted mothers and their pursuit of self-actualization.

The Influencer Economy: Exploring the Work of Social Media Cultural Production

Social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have created a new group of workers who are commonly referred to as ‘influencers’, ‘content creators’, or ‘creators’ . These terms have a loose connotation and generally refer to people with a large number of followers/subscribers who engage in digital cultural production on social medial platforms and can mobilize their audience’s attention to generate income. It is estimated that the influencer marketing industry, marketing based on the contents created by influencers on social media, will grow to be worth up to $15 billion by 2022 compared to $8 billion in 2019 (Geyser, 2019). Leading corporations are increasingly incorporating influencer marketing in their budget; Estée Lauder, for example, announced that the company is committing to spend 75% of its marketing budget towards influencer marketing (Gerdeman, 2019). While this growth has implications for the organization of work and the experiences of workers, most research in this area is conducted by scholars of media and communication studies (e.g., Baym, 2018; Duffy, 2017; Marwick & Boyd, 2011) and management and organizational scholarship on the topic is scarce. More research is needed in order to understand the nature of this work, the experiences of workers, and the role of different social identities such as those based on gender or race in this market. The aim of this symposium is to initiate a conversation about studying social media cultural production and the influencer economy in management and organization studies. The dialogue will focus on questions concerning theory, methods, and future directions. This symposium will provide conceptual depth in terms of philosophical underpinnings for digitally-mediated cultural production, and will explore theoretical frameworks and methodological tools most suitable for studying social media content creators.

Literary Networks and Digital Media in Contemporary African Literatures

Building on recent research around digital cultural production in Africa (Ligaga, Adenekan, Nyabola), my paper seeks to engage with digital media and online spaces — blogs, social media — in relation to contemporary literary practices in Africa. Its aim is to examine issues surrounding the production and circulation of contemporary “digital-native” texts, as well as the networks, both virtual and material, that underlie them. It draws on a range of examples from contemporary anglophone Africa, from online magazines (Bakwa, Saraba, Jalada, Hekaya) and Facebook fiction to self-published popular novels by writers who use social networks and blogs to produce, advertise and circulate their work (like Nigerian writer Myne Whitman and South African novelist Dudu Busani-Dube).First, the paper examines the complex relationship contemporary digital productions bear to the materiality and literary value usually associated with print. It then seeks to question the widespread notion that digital spaces are unmoored to geography and unbound by the power structures of the print publishing sector. Lastly, by analyzing two recent initiatives from Kenya (Jalada and Hekaya), it focuses on the various scopes and geographies of these virtual literary networks and the ways in which they intersect with material and social networks, through events like festivals or writers’ workshops.

Cultural diplomacy under the “digital lockdown”: pandemic challenges and opportunities in museum diplomacy

The article analyzes the case of museum diplomacy during the Covid-19 global outbreak to illustrate two important trends that were reinforced in the condition of the pandemic. First, it argues that digital innovations achieved by cultural institutions in their international communication in the conditions of mass closures and national lockdowns significantly accelerated and even further legitimized digital diplomacy (Bjola et al. in Hague J Dipl 14(1–2):83–101, 2019). During the Covid-19 crisis, for instance, the volume of digital cultural production and its global consumption rate have dramatically increased (UNESCO in Report “Culture & COVID-19: Impact and Response Tracker.” https://bit.ly/3iQLN74, 2020b), paving more reliable avenues for digital communication and even diplomacy. Second, the pandemics prompted cultural actors to take institutional initiatives and complement official cultural diplomacy exchanges, which due to the travel boundaries either temporarily ceased to exist or considerably slowed down.

Room without Room

Room without Room

“The Big Women”: A textual analysis of Chinese viewers’ perception toward femvertising vlogs

Video blogging (vlogging), a type of short video that people produce by recording and editing their daily lives, has become an emerging form of digital cultural production on social media platforms in China. With the profound growth of video marketing on social platforms, brands have increasingly leveraged vloggers to promote female-targeted products. This phenomenon becomes especially paradoxical when marketers bring the narrative of female empowerment into the discourse. This case study employed textual analysis to understand how Chinese viewers make sense of Bobbi Brown’s “The Big Women” vlog endorsed by the female vlogger Zhuzi on Weibo. A typology of viewers’ response was generated: (1) reciprocity of self-disclosure; (2) perceived interconnectedness with the vlogger; and (3) perceived women empowerment and advertisement effectiveness. The findings of this article articulate a symbolic form of relationship between content creators, brands, and consumers that promotes women empowerment. This study argues, however, that this perception of women empowerment may obscure the implicit consumerism embedded in the femvertising contents, while promoting the myth of self-empowerment through consumption. The findings of the study shed light on the rise of (pseudo-)feminism ethos constructed by the consumer market in contemporary China and beyond.

'The Big Women:' A Textual Analysis of Chinese Viewers’ Perception towards Femvertising Vlogs

Video blogging (vlogging), a type of short video that people produce by recording and editing their daily lives, has become an emerging form of digital cultural production on social media platforms in China. With the profound growth of video marketing on social platforms, brands have increasingly leveraged vloggers to promote female-targeted products. This phenomenon becomes especially paradoxical when marketers bring the narrative of female empowerment into the discourse. This case study employed textual analysis to understand how Chinese viewers make sense of Bobbi Brown’s ‘The Big Women’ vlog endorsed by the female vlogger Zhuzi on Weibo. A typology of viewers’ response was generated: (1) reciprocity of self-disclosure; (2) perceived interconnectedness with the vlogger; and (3) perceived women empowerment and advertisement effectiveness. The findings of this paper articulate a symbolic form of relationship between content creators, brands, and consumers that promote women empowerment. This study argues, however, that this perception of women empowerment may obscure the implicit consumerism embedded in the femvertising contents, while promoting the myth of self-empowerment through consumption. The findings of the study shed light on the rise of (pseudo-)feminism ethos constructed by the consumer market in contemporary China and beyond.

The Beguiling: Glamour in/as Platformed Cultural Production

Arguing that questions of power expressed through aesthetic form are too often left out of current approaches to digital culture, this article revives the modernist aesthetic category of glamour in order to analyze contemporary forms of platformed cultural production. Through a case study of popular feminism, the article traces the ways in which glamour, defined as a beguiling affective force linked to promotional capitalist logics, suffuses digital content, metrics, and platforms. From the formal aesthetic codes of the ubiquitous beauty and lifestyle Instagram feeds that perpetuate the beguiling promise of popular feminism, to the enticing simplicity of online metrics and scores that promise transformative social connection and approbation, to the political economic drive for total information awareness and concomitant disciplining, predicting and optimizing of consumer-citizens, the article argues that the ambivalent aesthetic of glamour provides an apt descriptor and compelling heuristic for digital cultural production today.

Platformization of the Unlikely Creative Class: Kuaishou and Chinese Digital Cultural Production

This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific lens of Kuaishou, an algorithm-based video-sharing platform targeting second- and third-tier cities as well as the countryside. It enables the forming of an “unlikely” creative class in contemporary China. Kuaishou’s platform business fits into the Party State’s socio-economic agenda of “Internet+” and “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation,” and is also folded into the state’s demand for cultural censorship and social stability. As we will show, this state-commerce relationship largely shapes Kuaishou’s interface and its affordances as encoded in its algorithm. Nevertheless, Kuaishou enables the diverse, often marginalized, Chinese living outside the urban centers of the country to become “unlikely” creative workers, who have become self-employed creative, digital entrepreneurs. For these “grassroots individuals,” creativity, life, and individuality are constantly mobilized and calculated according to the workings of the platform. This grassroots entrepreneurship, in tandem with the institutional regulation and censorship of the Internet, contributes to the transformation of Chinese economy and the production of social stability and a digital culture permeated with contingency and negotiation.

Romanian Users’ YouTube “Shakespeares”: Digital Localities in Global Fields

The cultural production of “Shakespeare” on the Internet has received growing attention in recent years, particularly in reference to newcomers in the field such as media users or “prosumers”. This is potentiated by the connectivity of digital platforms and growing access to digital means of production and distribution. From a field perspective on digital cultural production, participation online can be seen as a socially situated activity, often differentiated and marked by the habitus of digital media users. The present article aims firstly to discuss the utility of a field conceptualization of the cultural production of Shakespeare online, with reference to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Secondly, through a critical framework derived from cultural and media economies, this article analyses Romanian appropriations of Shakespeare’s works on YouTube as cultural productions inscribed in both the global digital economy and also in the local cultural field. Thirdly, based on an overview of Romanian producers who have published Shakespeare videos and on the analysis of their visibility and circulation online, as well as their chosen genres and discourses, I argue that the Romanian digital (re)production of Shakespeare is situated at the periphery of both the national and the global digital field. User-made Shakespeare productions are yet to find valuation in the local cultural and media fields, being situated in an illegitimate location for appropriating Shakespeare. This will be contextualized in the larger discourse regarding the fundamental role of curation, but also in light of recent concerns about privileged locations, languages, and algorithmic bias across online cultural production, circulation, and consumption.

Introduction: Continuing Community Collaborations and the Transient Digital

54 Interface Pasang Yangjee Sherpa Introduction: Continuing Community Collaborations and the Transient Digital Interface provides “a space to highlight digital humanities projects that span both Asian American and Asian studies” (Koh 2015, 98). Specifically, Interface prioritizes digital cultural production and research about and by Asian and Asian diasporic scholars to showcase the extensive work currently being undertaken in this field (98). For this special issue of Verge, we explore digital humanities projects within Himalayan studies through Digital Himalaya and Voices of the Himalaya. In the following essays, team members from these projects share their experiences. In his essay on Digital Himalaya, Mark Turin reflects on community, continuity, and collaboration. Digital Himalaya is a web portal for historical multimedia collections relating to the Himalayan region. Turin discusses changing user demographics, constructive community responses, shifting expectations about the portal’s services and role, and the future of this collaborative partnership. According to Google Analytics records, since 2005, the Digital Himalaya website has had more than five hundred thousand unique “sessions.” Google (2017) defines a session as “a group of user interactions with [the] website that take place within a given time frame.” A single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and e-­commerce transactions. Users of the Digital Himalaya website have been from Nepal (19 percent), the United States (16 percent), India (10 percent), and the United Kingdom (8 percent). In their essay on the project titled Voices of the Himalaya, Nawang Gurung, Ross Perlin, Daniel Kaufman, Mark Turin, and Sienna R. Craig describe their collaborative process of documenting Himalayan voices in New York City. Their project recognizes the challenges of migration and the assimilation of thousands of Himalayan individuals from specific ethnic communities who have settled in New York City. The project is guided Interface 55 by the questions of how Himalayan New Yorkers are finding a sense of community as they navigate new transnational and intergenerational cultural dynamics and respond to the shifting relationships between “home” and being “over here” in New York. Connections between language , culture, and migration are central to this project. In the essay, the authors discuss how their work at once coheres with and departs from traditional language documentation efforts. Instead of focusing on one marginalized speech or valorizing language endangerment, the project showcases compelling stories of everyday life that capture aspects of happiness and suffering as well as those that are sensitive to politics of self-­ representation. This novel approach makes its contributions to understanding transnational Himalayan lives today invaluable. In little more than a year, this project has produced twenty-­five short videos and made them available to the public through YouTube and social media sites. As of November 2017, the Voices of the Himalaya videos have been viewed on YouTube more than seventy thousand times. Their viewership includes approximately 33 percent from the United States, 15 percent from Bhutan , 14 percent from India, and 6 percent each from Nepal, Switzerland, and Canada. In both essays, common themes of collaborative effort, community engagement, and “creative exploration of the potential” surface. The Digital Himalaya Project was initiated by a group of four anthropologists and historians at the University of Cambridge to explore ways that would widen access to the Himalayan multimedia materials through emerging digital platforms. Similarly, a team of five anthropologists, activists, and linguists started Voices of the Himalaya to reach a wider audience through newer platforms. The Interface contributions presented herein also bring out the question of sustainability that lurks amid the progress and promise the programs represent. Whether it is the seventeen-­year-­old Digital Himalaya or the one-­year-­old Voices of the Himalaya, they inevitably have to deal with the financial and technical challenges of keeping the programs running. In Himalayan Anthropology: The Indo-­ Tibetan Interface, James Fisher (1978, 2) remarked on the need for clearing ethnographic provincialism and to make scholarly communication possible for the vast majority, who tended to work on one side of the mountain more than the other. Fisher was referring to those working with communities living on the southern, northern, eastern or western side of the Himalayas. He was also responding to the scholarly scene of forty years ago, before electricity had...

Branding the self as an “authentic feminist”: negotiating feminist values in post-feminist digital cultural production

Freelancers who produce creative content online work in an increasingly precarious neoliberal economy, which requires self-branding, self-promotion, and constant audience engagement to succeed. Creating feminist content in a digital environment thus requires the negotiation of individual self-branding and promotional activities alongside the advancement of collective feminist politics. In this study, interviews with 11 feminist online writers reveal that they reconcile the individualistic undertakings required to succeed in the digital economy and their collective feminist values in three ways. Firstly, they incorporate “authentic feminism” into their personal branding endeavors; secondly, they redefine feminism to more closely match the values of post-feminism; and, thirdly, they advance peripheral collective goals in their creative communities. It is through these strategies that feminist values are negotiated and reworked, enabling producers to succeed as feminists in a digital economy that is more closely aligned with post-feminism.

A long shadow: Cultural capital, techno-capital and networking skills of college students

Networking skills are conventionally treated as a form of human capital shaped by individual attributes. In this study, we investigate the relationship between cultural capital, techno-capital and networking skills among college students. Based on a survey of a sample of college students, we identify that socialization into various cultural genres in an early age equips individuals with the cultural knowledge, attitude, and disposition to network skillfully. Second, we find that digital competency can contribute to networking skills. In particular, digital cultural production, in other words, actively engaging in creative online expression of one's cultural taste, is positively related to greater networking skills. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The virtual prison as a digital cultural object: Digital mediation of political opinion in simulation gaming

This paper engages with the digital mediation of cultural and political opinion in simulation gaming, and recent critique of cultural geography’s aptitude for research into digital media. Drawing attention to literatures within carceral geography and cybergeography, and presenting an empirical case study of the simulation computer game Prison Architect, it suggests that rather than being necessarily ephemeral, fleeting and transient, digital cultural production can also be carefully created, curated and manipulated in ways which involve both deep reflection on, and profound shaping of, political attitudes.

“Having it All” on Social Media: Entrepreneurial Femininity and Self-Branding Among Fashion Bloggers

Against the backdrop of the widespread individualization of the creative workforce, various genres of social media production have emerged from the traditionally feminine domains of fashion, beauty, domesticity, and craft. Fashion blogging, in particular, is considered one of the most commercially successful and publicly visible forms of digital cultural production. To explore how fashion bloggers represent their branded personae as enterprising feminine subjects, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the textual ( n = 38 author narratives) and visual ( n = 760 Instagram images) content published by leading fashion bloggers; we supplement this with in-depth interviews with eight full-time fashion/beauty bloggers. Through this data, we show how top-ranked bloggers depict the ideal of “having it all” through three interrelated tropes: the destiny of passionate work, staging the glam life, and carefully curated social sharing. Together, these tropes articulate a form of entrepreneurial femininity that draws upon post-feminist sensibilities and the contemporary logic of self-branding. We argue, however, that this socially mediated version of self-enterprise obscures the labor, discipline, and capital necessary to emulate these standards, while deploying the unshakable myth that women should work through and for consumption. We conclude by addressing how these findings are symptomatic of a digital media economy marked by the persistence of social inequalities of gender, race, class, and more.

Self-representation in literary fandom: Women's leisure reader selfies as postfeminist performance

In social media communities dedicated to women's leisure reading and literary fandom, images of women engaged in the act of reading circulate prominently. These images—created and uploaded to fan sites by the fans themselves—have recurring characteristics: the woman often holds a leather-bound book, wears romanticized, neo-Victorian dress, and has exaggeratedly feminine, sexualized features. These representations are not of actual members of the community but rather fictive, collected, circulated, and commented upon in a communal act of identity construction. This gendered visual representation of the literate self provides a performance of a double movement in postfeminist culture: a broadcasting of discourses that is empowering (participatory digital cultural production around literature) and yet promotes a cultural context for reinforcement of conventional gender norms. To demonstrate this double movement, I utilize a case study of these self-representational fan images, collected over a year on a Facebook group page for fans of 19th-century British literature and filmic adaptations. These images and their circulation are then analyzed via a two-pronged double movement theoretical framework. First, feminist media scholarship helps explain the empowering aspects of the new media creation of the reader selfie. Second, gender performance uncovers how these repeated sexualized images of women readers reentrench conventional, hyperfeminine, and sexualized gender roles. Double movement takes place in contemporary women leisure readers' lives, and the media-led postfeminist cultural movement offers a depoliticized, self-indulgent path toward youth and beauty at the expense of institutional or social change.