Session Chair: Lana Swartz
Presentation 1
Generation of Structural Changes through Translation: Effects of SVOD platforms on European Audiovisual Industry
Lixin Lu
Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden
SVOD platforms’ increasing pan-Europe presence is forcing the existing actors in European motion picture industry to calibrate their positions and redefine assumed roles. These platforms impose fierce competitions over contents as well as the key resources of production, such as labour. Their effects are reflected not only in competitive market offerings, but also upcoming structural changes in the industry. The structural arrangements in European motion picture industry were organized around what I term a communal production culture. The disruptive effect of SVOD platforms is most prominent in its introduction and successful translation of market-driven logic and private production culture. The interactions between these two distinctive logics and cultures had generated a series of conflicts. This paper sets out to explore how SVOD platforms obtained central positions and institutionalised various novel logic and practices, and their impacts on the industry structure, for instance, remediation of creative labour and financing model. These changes can generate substantial implications for European contents and cultural heritage. The study draws on archival data issued by European Commission and affiliated policymaking organisations, media sources, and SVOD firms, as well as semi-structured interviews with diverse stakeholders. The empirics were analysed thematically with an institutional framework combining institutional work and translation model to address the ongoing interplay between SVOD platforms and European motion picture industry.
Presentation 2
THE ZEALOUS PRACTICES OF TECH INDUSTRY LEADERS
Sara Reinis
University of Pennsylvania, United States of America
Prepping for the apocalypse. Fighting for eternal life. Building separatist compounds for like-minded people. Reproducing to fill the world with chosen ones. All these practices are age-old characteristics of religious zealots and sound like the makings of a promising cult docuseries. And yet, they are also increasingly common obsessions of leaders of the tech industry. From building luxury bunkers to hoping cryonic freezing could make resurrection possible, many billionaire and multi-millionaire founders, engineers, and VCs are investing time, money, and attention into speculative pursuits that are often considered the realm of science fiction or religious paranoia. Through a conjunctural analysis (Hall, 1978), this research gathers evidence of four key religiously coded practices that are coursing through the Silicon Valley elite and examines the guiding ideologies behind them. By connecting the techno-solutionist practices of today’s tech elite to questions that have historically been explored via religious interventions, I hope to decenter appeals to rationality and expose the underlying values and emotions that drive these decisions. Additionally, this framework requires taking these practices seriously as symptomatic of an underlying belief system—rather than just the quirks of people with too much money on their hands. This research will unpack four core focuses: apocalypse prep, eternal life, separatist compounds, and strategic reproduction. In all, this analysis reveals a strand of thinking that positions the tech elite as "chosen ones," bent on ensuring their own survival by any means necessary.
Presentation 3
When workers own the newsroom: Mapping the transition from corporate to cooperative media ownership
Caitlin Petre
Rutgers University, United States of America
Questions of media ownership have taken on renewed urgency in recent years, as media workers contend with ongoing consolidation, platformization, and precarity in their work. It is widely agreed that ownership structures matter for media industries and labor, but less is known about why and how. This paper addresses those questions by examining the case study of Defector Media: an online media company whose editorial workers experienced multiple ownership changes in a condensed period – from an individual entrepreneur to a media conglomerate to a private equity firm – before its staff quit en masse and launched Defector as an entirely worker-owned multimedia cooperative in 2020. Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews with Defector staffers (representing 75% of total staff), in addition to a textual analysis of press coverage and company materials, I examine (1) how different ownership structures shaped the editorial labor process at Defector, and (2) how staffers experienced the transition from corporate ownership to worker-ownership. The paper finds that the transition to worker-ownership model forced Defector staffers to critically reassess three fundamental aspects of journalistic work: internalized productivity expectations, the “wall” between business and editorial, and the purpose of revenue and growth. By examining a case where media workers have, in the words of one interviewee, “no suits” to answer to or push back against, the paper sheds new light on the influence of ownership structures on digital media production.
Presentation 4
When Industry Lore doesn't Work: Exploring MCNs' Limited Intermediary Roles in Promotional Culture
Zhen Ye
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, The
Originating as supplementary firms that operate in and around YouTube’s advertising infrastructure, Multichannel Networks (MCNs) have become a renewed form of cultural intermediaries shaping platform-based cultural production (Lobato 2016; Craig and Cunningham 2019). The emergence of MCNs represents “an opportunity to revisit some elements of the theory base around intermediaries and update it for the platform economy” (Lobato 2016, 350). To hold with this appeal, this research investigates MCNs’ operations in the context of China’s e-commerce livestreaming industry and rethinks its position within the complicated social commerce landscape based on a three-month participatory observation (from December 2021 to March 2022) taken place in an MCN organization (pseudonymised as W company) in Guangzhou, China. For providing a more grounded analysis, 15 in-depth interviews with media professionals working in MCNs (within and outside W company) or working in the e-commerce livestreaming sector as content creator, advertiser, or manufacturer were also included. I employ the concepts of “trade stories” (Caldwell, 2008) and “industry lore” (Havens, 2014) to describe MCNs professionals’ meaning-making practices when navigating a complex network of actors including platforms, livestreamers, brands and retailers. Whilst MCNs are important “platform complementors” (Poell, Nieborg and Duffy 2022, 11) fulfilling an intermediary role in compliance with platforms’ commercial logics, practitioners also struggle to keep up with the changing business models. The deeply integrated components between cultural production and marketing activities in MCNs’ work are supported and determined by the digital platforms they operate around, making the MCNs’ intermediary roles limited, contingent, and oftentimes failing.
