Global South Creator Cultures Tugce Bidav(1), Smith Mehta(2), Arturo Arriagada(3), Wangari Njathi(4), Wilson Karis(6), Cecilia Ka Hei Wong(5), Suren Nora(7), Kaye Bondy(8) 1: Maynooth University, Ireland; 2: University of Groningen, the Netherlands; 3: Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile; 4: Pepperdine University, United States; 5: Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; 6: New York University, USA; 7: University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA; 8: University of Leeds, UK
Platformisation of cultural production has given rise to a new era in media globalisation thanks to the platforms’ socio-technical affordances which enable global circulation and reception of media content. While there are certainly some unifying practices shared by creators globally, social media entertainment, nevertheless, is far from creating a global monolithic creator culture. This is because platformed creator labour is situated in diverse regional, national, and local media production, distribution, and consumption contexts as much as in the global platform architectures. By shifting the analysis of creator cultures from the Global North to the Global South, this roundtable discussion will make a significant intervention into how we make sense of the complex relationship between Global South nation-states, social media platforms, and creator cultures. The roundtable participants will situate creator labour within the complexities of digital production cultures, in conversations with local political, economic, social, cultural and linguistic contexts. Our findings suggest that the creator cultures in the Global South exhibit a more dynamic landscape than the Global North due to a concatenation of diverse governance and regulatory systems, as well as cultural heterogeneity, lopsided infrastructure penetration, and informal industry structures. Rather than placing creator cultures in the Global South against the Global North to produce a series of binaries, this roundtable discussion will put Global South creator cultures in a dialogue by shedding light on distinctive local factors shaping digital production cultures. Providing rich empirical insights from Global South countries such as India, Turkey, Chile, Hong Kong, Nigeria, and Kenya, the participants will engage in a productive discussion without erasing the richness and complexities of each local context to fit into the existing conceptual framework developed in Western contexts and thereby contribute to theory building exercises about creator cultures.
