Creator Culture: An Introduction to Global Social Media Entertainment

"The emerging shape of screen industries in the twenty-first century shows established players and practices ceding significant power and influence to powerful digital streaming and social networking platforms. Just as notably, these platforms have started to represent a greater value proposition to the advertisers and brands that have always served as the financial bulwark for main screen media. These deep structural changes in the media landscape have, in turn, contributed to the rise of what Cunningham and Craig refer to as the Social Media Entertainment industry, distinguished by native social media entrepreneurs, or creators.Creators signifies a distinction from an earlier phase of online content creation characterized by “user-generated content” (UGC). UGC referred to any form of content generated by users of digital platforms and scholarly attention rarely entertained the possibility that such activity might give rise to viable entrepreneurial careers focused on new entertainment genre. We believe the term creator – which we define as commercializing and professionalizing native social media users who generate and circulate original content in close interaction and engagement with their communities on the major social media platforms as well as off-line – is the term that captures best what is at stake in this book’s mapping of approaches to this emerging creator culture. Online creators are dubbed many things now: influencers, vloggers, YouTubers, Wang Hong (China), and livestreamers, amongst others. In addition to these terms, scholars have coined terms such as “micro-celebrities”. This terminological profusion is an index of the increasing importance of this field of study.Creator Culture: Studying the Social Media Entertainment Industry features scholars engaging with this dynamic, emerging industry from diverse disciplines and global geographies, and using a variety of conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches. This volume draws on a range of scholarship in media and communication studies, science and technology studies, and social media, Internet and platform studies."