In the Creator Culture the Periphery Has Become the Center

Interview with Professor David Craig

David Craig is a professor at the Annenberg School of communication. He teaches courses in media industries and published three books about creator culture that were of massive help to me when I started my PhD research. David was also a Hollywood producer and television executive. We discussed social media entertainment, the emerging scientific field of "creator studies", the meanings behind his tweets, and the death of platforms.

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When I started writing my PhD research proposal, your book Social Media Entertainment, co-authored with Stuart Cunningham, was one of the primary sources. Can you explain what social media entertainment is and who its denizens are?

I co-authored Social Media Entertainment with Stuart Cunningham, a distinguished media scholar from Australia. I have at least a dozen of his books on my shelf, and he is someone I have always regarded as my guide to understanding a new way of looking at how media industries are evolving in the digital age. He reached out to me about this book. We wound up writing a book that made the claim that social media was not another media industry, that there were many facets of this new space that emerged that were so strikingly, startlingly different from the way the traditional media industry work that we need to understand it as a new industry, new cultural industry, not just a media industry.

Where I think we might have done a better job was first to offer an understanding of what a media industry is. We just assumed that people understood that media industries are pretty much defined by who controls production or who controls distribution. In the instance of creators, these were things that mattered very little. The first thing we did was to come to a deeper understanding of what a creator was. We decided to go with the word creator in 2017 because YouTube had pivoted to that term; fortunately for us, almost every platform now refers to itself as having creators. Currently, there are websites devoted to the creator economy and creator culture. Other terms include influencers, vloggers, streamers, gamers, and tiktokers.

The one thing we thought was significant for our audience to understand was that creators were not interested in producing intellectual property as we think of in the media industry. They weren't producing movies and tv shows. In fact, they weren't even interested in who owned the rights to the content they put on their sites. Instead, what creators create is social. They create community. They are voices that represent people's interests, values, identities, love of fashion, beauty, lifestyle, video games. They were, in many ways, community organizers on social media platforms. What that allowed them to do once they built a large enough community, they could then develop business models to profit from that work.

There are more business models than we can even come to fathom. We know a few of them: influencer marketing, subscription fees, merchandising, and depending on the platform, there are tip jars. We soon discovered creators are not just community organizers. They are also platform entrepreneurs. They invented businesses on platforms or created new platforms like Patreon to help monetize their community. There were starkly different kinds of practices than what we were familiar with in traditional media industries, and while they may not be conventional media industry, they are culture industry. Wherever you have groups of people aggregating communities of shared values and ideas, culture emerges. Traditional media cultures are traditionally bound by nationality, but this doesn't apply to social media platforms that are global in scale and scope. Hence, the creators were not limited in any way by geography or nationality.

There are, of course, some continuities with media industries that scholars like Brooke Erin Duffy brilliantly researched. But they were looking at the continuities between the challenges and precariousness in producing culture in traditional media and the challenges these creators were having. Their work was so groundbreaking that we didn't see any reason to go and replicate it.

This brings us to creator studies as a new academic field. At the Global Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production conference in Amsterdam, I heard you speaking about "creator studies" as an emerging academic field. Can you tell me more about this field?

When you look around, you realize there are now hundreds of Duffys, Abidins, and Poells. Hundreds of graduate students were born into the platform generation and were studying how the meaning is done in this space. There are also brilliant and prescient scholars, mostly women, like Jean Burgess and Nancy Baym, who were anticipating this sort of thing to happen in the 1990s when social media came along. We are indebted to them and the early career scholars who first put ideas of affordances and algorithmic culture to the fore.

The idea for the Amsterdam conference was that we saw there might be some value to declaring this a new subfield of study. I use subfield deliberately because I don't know what firmly establishes a field of study. This is a strategic moment in how academia develops as fields often grow in response to changes in technologies and ideas. It is similar to Bourdieu, where you have fields of cultural production and knowledge production. So, here's a field of knowledge production, media studies came out of communication studies which came out of sociology. There are always periods of emergent new fields of study, ossification, and resistance to embracing new ideas within the field, or ideas from other disciplines.

During our research, we engaged with scholars from all across academia: from business schools to engineering. It is mind-boggling how every discipline in academia has had to look at this phenomenon of creators. I presented at the conference that we started to find articles about creators in dental journals. That makes sense when you understand that perhaps the most powerful tools for health communication are social media. Every field, from medicine to nuclear science, will have to get its head around this phenomenon, these platforms, and social entrepreneurs.

(Photo/Courtesy of David Craig)

I am stalking you on Twitter and your tweet about how platforms and cultural production "can appear too large under the microscope and too small in the rearview window" really stuck in my mind for some time. Can you please explain it?

[laughter] I need to be very careful how I use my metaphors on Twitter. :) What I meant was when you look at platforms, the term platform itself has become an incredibly powerful concept that we use slightly different definitions of. When we go and try to study what a platform is, it can get wildly expansive to the point where people confuse platforms with the entire internet. On the one hand, there's a tendency to use platforms in the same context as the internet, which it is not. On the other, there was a tendency to consider streaming video sites like Netflix platforms, except that the basic definition of a platform is something you build on. However, you can't build something on Netflix. It owns the superstructure, and they pay for people to come in and paint rooms in different colors. I am using metaphors here.

Some look at platforms and end up going way too broadly, considering it the internet, and other people look at platforms, and all they think of is streaming video. They want to put Netflix and YouTube in the same context because they understand it through the lens of the industries as content and distribution. There is a tendency where platforms scholars slip into this object of study of platforms so broad that it's almost meaningless, and there's a tendency where media scholars look at platforms and only think of them as 20th-century models of mass communication. That's what I think I was trying to show on my Twitter.

I wrote this tweet in the context of field building. I witnessed constant tension at the conference in Amsterdam as people did not want another academic field. There is a question, do we really need another field? In my view, the only difficulty with not declaring creator studies as a field is that it doesn't get academics to take this work as seriously as they should. In addition, there is also another issue at play. I am a big believer that academics are not just scholars but teachers of praxis. Their role is not only to generate knowledge but to put that knowledge to the betterment of society. If there's anything we have learned from looking at questions of creator policy, governance, and regulation, platforms are not mentioning creators because it will signal to the government there’s whole new labor that needs to be protected. So they never talk about creators. When they testify before congress, they don't want to talk about creators because they know the minute they do, the government wants to consider ways to protect creators and help them grow, which means making platforms behave. We have come to understand that it is not just an academic strategy of field building. It also came from activist advocate impulse. We want creators to be recognized but also held accountable. One way to do so is to identify them as a field of study and object worthy of study.

Social Media Entertainment primarily focuses on YouTube(rs). Recently, there has been a rise of venture capital blogs, posts, and tweets that YouTube is dying and TikTok will replace it. Do you think this will happen? 

The death of platforms has been anticipated almost as quickly and as long as the platforms themselves. As soon as platforms emerge, everyone assumes they are going to disappear. We have talked for nearly two decades that platforms will die. Twitter has been dead and came alive at least five times. The same was in China, where platforms like Weibo are said to disappear but have become the most powerful platform in the country.

There is a fascination with new platforms that have dramatically changed the game as TikTok has. There is no discount that TikTok came with a completely new algorithmically driven model for social media that wasn't based on the design and affordances that platforms have operated in the past. In many ways, it is the third wave of social media platforms - the first being YouTube and Twitter, which were more about building networks of relationships. The second was mobile apps like Snap and Insta that were made and designed to be used in the plam of your hand. The third wave is TikTok which is rooted in algorithmic discovery. It's not about people who share your interests and values. The platform itself will let you know who they are. You don't have to share, like, join, or subscribe.

The threat that TikTok will challenge the hegemony of YouTube and Facebook is real because Facebook just today (27.7.2022) reported that it lost money for the first time. A seismic shift is happening in the world that first-generation platforms are terrified of. Youtube is obviously in a different position. Owned by Alphabet, it is part of the larger media ecology for harvesting data for advertising. Facebook is as well, but something has gone awry.

When it comes to Facebook, which, by the way, gave USC money on our behalf without our knowing or having access to it, has never come to embrace creator as a stakeholder. They have given lip service, played weird semantic games, and kept creators at arm’s length, not allowing them much leeway. YouTube is different. It is singularly focused on creators. They are so focused on what would give creators money that they have never been successful in building communities and networks. We claim in our book that YouTube is where creators may have launched, but they quickly learned that to engage with their communities, they need other platforms. Hence, creators were multiplatform all along. I would suggest that the most successful TikTok creators are also multiplatform. It would be a mistake to think they are only on this platform because it is so different in how it is designed, and I believe TikTok is caught in the same battle on how much they let creators succeed – they are very cautious about giving creators too much power.

I don't think YouTube is going to die. I think they are massive tech companies that simply can't afford not to react to competition. As you know, I co-authored a third book which is about China's creator culture. In that context, we are looking at different conditions where creators have become too powerful and successful, and the government is trying to crack down on them. The government, not platforms, have started shutting down the creators and penalizing them. They charged one of the biggest creators with tax evasion for a quarter of a billion dollars. Whole new battles are emerging in China. Unlike western governments, which do not want to acknowledge that creators exist, the Chinese government is way ahead of everyone; they wanted everyone to become a creator, they built and nurtured platforms, but they now do not want them too successful, especially culturally, because they could threaten the government power.

You are also writing another book now?

Yes, but it is not a social media book. I have two lives. I research and write about creators and teach courses about media industries. I have a foot in both worlds. There is an incredible story I have always wanted to write and have been researching for six years on the side that is a tv history project. It's the story of the most successful tv movie ever made that may have changed the course of history about the arms race between the Soviet Union and the US. It is not an academic book even, just a great story. It relates to my teaching and my practice as a Hollywood producer. Interestingly, it also connects with creator culture because it is about people working within structures who, despite the capitalist nature of these structures, understand the tremendous power that comes in what you do in media – whether digital or social.

Any book recommendations? 

My head is so deep in my own book, and I need to catch up a lot. There is a new book on Twitter by Jean Burgess and Nancy Baym and I loved TikTok book by Chris Stokel Walker, a journalist who loves to engage with academics, which is so unusual, and he is a great writer.

It's such a fast-moving subfield, if you will. I have at least one or two more books in this area that I want to be working on. There are entire spaces that have not been touched, like eastern Europe. It is my belief that the periphery has become the center in creator culture. What do I mean by that? In traditional media, peripheral cultures were smaller media industries vulnerable to American or northern media imperialism. And now, creators from this world are no longer occupying the margins but the center, and I am passionate about learning from scholars like you to teach us. That gets me beyond excited.

Which creators do you follow? 

I am swimming in academic thought and ideas, and academics don't have a life outside of academia, you probably know that already. There are still really great thought leaders like John and Hank Green that I follow. What is interesting is that I probably have pivoted more for my academic benefit to reading newsletters about the creator economy. These newsletters help me stay relevant when I teach my classes. I won't talk about my creator interests except to say that I have a puppy cocker spaniel, and if you look at my Instagram, it is filled with pictures of my puppy and vacation places in Italy.