“You Need At Least One Picture Daily, if Not, You’re Dead”: Content Creators and Platform Evolution in the Social Media Ecology

Abstract

Despite extensive literature on content creators’ identities, strategies, and activities, there remains a gap in understanding how the constantly changing platform environment impacts their brand subjectivities. Against this backdrop, our article explores how evolutions in platforms—including constant updates to their affordances—shape the activities and interpretive processes of content creators. Drawing on interviews with 35 Chilean content creators in the field of fashion and lifestyle, along with an analysis of their Instagram images ( N = 165) and stories ( N = 150), we show how creators feel compelled to enact different versions of their brand subjectivities. Our findings show how creators experience platform changes based on three interrelated levels: in the form of communicative styles, as a sense of temporal acceleration, and as a constant negotiation with other actors in the social network through which commercial activities are configured. Thus, when platforms tend to make changes to improve their commercial viability, content creators have to adapt their brand subjectivities and practices across platforms and affordances. In addition to shedding light on the new routines and intensified economic pressures demanded of today’s digital workers, we also reveal how the ideal of creation has been supplanted with intensified competition amid constantly changing technological, social, and commercial ecologies.

The Nested Precarities of Platformized Creative Labor

“…Through a case study of creative workers on Pinterest, Klawitter and Hargittai (2018) argue that, in the digital economy, these kinds of workers "are more incentivized than most in understanding how [algorithmically curated] feeds decide what to display to users given that their livelihood directly depends on such exposure" (p. 3504). Similar conclusions have been drawn from studies of creative workers across other platforms, most notably Instagram (Cotter, 2019;O'Meara, 2019;Petre et al, 2019;Arriagada & Ibanez, 2020) and YouTube (Cunningham & Craig, 2019;Bishop, 2018;Caplan & Gillespie, 2020).…”

“…Many of these works, moreover, underscore the role of (perceived) algorithmic systems in configuring creators' level of visibility-often in ways that are lopsided, if not outright biased (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020;Glatt, 2021). Algorithmic systems are dynamic by definition; as such, the nature and extent of their impact seems to change at whim, alongside other forms of so-called platform evolution (Arriagada & Ibanez, 2020). Such changes often necessitate that content creators "adapt their brand subjectivities and practices across platforms and affordances" (ibid, p.…”

“…Platforms evolve at a breakneck pace (Arriagada & Ibanez, 2020); such changes command creators to continually adapt, swapping yesterday's way of doing things for tomorrow's anticipated rollout. Interviewees expressed frustration that when a platform announced a change to their features, communication was often unclear, leaving creators with more questions than answers.…”

“…Data for this project included in-depth interviews with 30 aspiring and professional platformized creative laborers-including Instagrammers, YouTubers, TikTok creators, and those seeking monetization through Twitter and Pinterest. These interviews were conducted across a span of more than two years; hence, they provide insight into creators' experiences with visibility across key moments amid what Arriagada & Ibanez (2020) describe as the continuous stages of platform evolution.…”

Influencers as socio-technical actors: mapping the paths of influence and the traces of the digital influencers’ system in Italy

“…The aim of this theoretical paper is to investigate this multifaceted phenomenon by adopting an ecological approach, observing the influencer system as an environment with its own rules and subjects that interact with the mass media system (Boccia Artieri & Gemini, 2019;Arriagada & Ibáñez, 2020). The starting point of the paper is that influencers are not alone in their communication and branding practices, but are inserted in a specific cultural, social, and market context, and interact with other subjects, contributing to configure the current (social) media system.…”