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The development and rapid uptake of digital platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and WeChat is profoundly reconfiguring cultural production around the globe. Legacy cultural industries such as news, gaming, music and television are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations — live-streaming, social media influencing, and podcasting are emerging at a breakneck speed.

In this talk, Thomas Poell, David Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy will discuss their new book Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, forthcoming), which explores both the processes and implications of this so-called platformisation of the cultural industries. Foregrounding simultaneous changes in institutional relations and cultural practices, they define platformisation as the penetration of economic, infrastructural, and governmental extensions of digital platforms into the cultural industries, as well as the reorganisation of cultural labour, creativity, and citizenship around these platforms. Exploring how these interrelated changes take shape in different industrial and geographic contexts, they will discuss critical variations in the trajectories of transformation. Focusing on news, gaming, and social media entertainment, Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy use two analytical devices to map these trajectories. They distinguish between cultural producers as platform independent or dependent, while simultaneously considering how this affects the formal or informal organisation of cultural production, distribution, and monetisation. This analytical framework should assist students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners in their efforts to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are evolving in the era of platforms.

This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on critical inquiry with and about the digital hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. If you tweet about the event you can use the #kingsdh hashtag or mention @kingsdh. If you'd like to get notifications of future events you can sign up to this mailing list.

Event details

Safra Lecture Theatre
Strand Campus
Strand, London, WC2R 2LS