title: The platformised creative worker: an ethnographic study of precarity and inequality in the London influencer industry (2017-2022)
Creators: name: Glatt, Zoë
Publisher: name: London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Year: 2023

description: Building on the recent proliferation of scholarly interest in the impacts of platformisation on the Cultural and Creative Industries, this thesis draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the London influencer industry (2017-2022) to examine the sociocultural, technological, and commercial contours of labour for social media content creators. Within this context, I ask which creators are able to gain visibility and success, and conversely who is systematically excluded from opportunities, and why? As a digital anthropologist, it is through immersion in the everyday contexts of creators’ lives, in seeing them interact both online and offline and hearing them describe their experiences, that I seek to understand these dynamics. To this end, the project combines several ethnographic methods: online participant observation, offline participant observation, ethnographic semi-structured interviews, and autoethnography in the form of becoming a YouTuber myself. In framing these micro ethnographic insights within macro structures of power and intersecting inequalities, this work seeks to make an original contribution to the literatures on influencer cultures and the platformisation of creative industries and labour. Shifting patterns of employment in the Cultural and Creative Industries away from stable structures, and the emergence of the neoliberal worker-subject: entrepreneurial, flexible, self-directed, always available to work, has been the topic of much academic scrutiny since the 1990’s. This research found that the labour of content creators bears many of these hallmarks, and yet platformisation has given rise to novel formations, concerns, and challenges. This thesis makes the case that the platformised creative worker marks an intensification of the neoliberal worker-subject, with content creators facing heightened conditions of both precarity and inequality. In their search for sustainable careers in an unstable emerging industry, creators must spread their labour thin across multiple platforms and revenue streams, all whilst obsessively scrutinising their popularity metrics, performing taxing relational labour, and navigating opaque algorithmic recommendation systems. Further—and contrary to highly celebratory discourses that position social media creation as more diverse, inclusive and meritocratic than legacy cultural industries—not only are certain creators subject to long standing discriminations, but we can identify new forms of structural inequality emerging. In the influencer industry certain identities, expressions and types of content are propelled into the spotlight whilst others are cast into the shadows of obscurity, mapping onto well-worn inequalities of race, class, gender and sexuality. This is an advertising-driven industry that makes visible the most profitable creators, those who do not disrupt the neoliberal status quo: white, straight, male, middle class, cisgendered, brand-friendly. Overall, this thesis argues that platformisation has significant implications for creative labour and contributes to ongoing debates about the future of work and the impact of technology on contemporary forms of employment.