Join us for the ICA Post-Conference "Labor and Play in Platform Society"

We invite audience to join us for the ICA post conference on Labor and Play in Platform Society, on June 18, at Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences. Registration is free and you can register through this link.

Scholarship on ‘creator culture’ (Cunningham & Craig, 2021) and digital labor on social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok has shown how platforms infrastructure and governance condition the work of content creators (Bishop, 2018; Gregersen & Ørmen, 2021; Kumar, 2019). For example, while YouTube videos prioritize followers and TikTok prioritizes content, advertisements, and subscriptions (subbing) all determine how content creators work and broadcast, underlining the ideological nature of these platforms by pushing the exploitation of laboring bodies further.

On streaming services such as Twitch and YouTube, content creators’ ability to build a following has been referred to as viewer or audience engagement. These strategies can range from streamers actively encouraging emotional engagement by using humor, adapting to viewer wishes, or responsivity in rapid succession on the side of the content creator. Media scholars perceive this as aspirational (Duffy, 2022), hope (Kuehn & Corrigan, 2013), or relational labor (Baym, 2018)  that can be both physically and emotionally taxing.

For game scholars, this is also the platform convergence of labor and play, as in the pursuit of interactivity with an audience, creators find themselves increasingly engaged in a mode of gamification (Deterding et al., 2011), such as setting donation targets sometimes in competition with other streamers (Johnson & Woodcock, 2019). These strategies can be viewed as monetization attempts or seen as ‘gamification-from-below’ where creators gamify their lives to make it through. But one of the most pressing questions is, how does this configuration of play and labor constitute working? What existing worker vocabulary, such as gig-work, freelancing, entrepreneur, or platform work akin to annotation or Amazon Mechanical Turk workers adequately describe digital workers at the intersection of play and labor?

Keynote:

• Daniel Joseph (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Organizers:

• Daniel Nielsen, Charles University, in Prague
• Alessandro Gandini, Milan University
• Anne Mette Thorhauge, Copenhagen University