How gatekeeping became digital: infrastructural barriers to participation in conventional and platformized cultural production

ABSTRACT

Digital platforms supposedly allow global corporations to exert novel infrastructural power over cultural participation due to platforms’ increased centrality as key gatekeepers. Extant theorizations of global capitalism, however, suggest infrastructural power as a longstanding feature of capitalism, especially in media industries. How novel is the infrastructural power of platforms? How does platformization affect cultural participation? Through an ethnographic comparison of conventional and platformized cultural intermediaries (respectively, a music distribution company in 2010 and a multi-channel YouTube network or MCN in 2015), I show continuity in infrastructural power alongside distinctive differences in logics of inclusion/exclusion – what I call hard and soft gates. Hard gates exclude while the soft gate simultaneously increases participation and heightens circulation inequality. These modes of infrastructural gatekeeping follow from the operations of each case’s distribution technologies: automated warehousing and associated barcodes in the music case and algorithmic search and metrics in the YouTube case. Considered alongside recent research, my findings suggest that policy on participation must consider how value-laden infrastructures impact participation and visibility in digital culture. More broadly, my findings suggest that the transition to ‘the digital’ demonstrate continuity rather than a sharp ‘disruption’ by ‘platform capitalism.’

KEYWORDS:

• Gatekeepers
• social media
• music industry
• infrastructure
• participation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David Wright and the other editors of this special issue; Angèle Cristin, Steven Tuttle, and Pat Reilly for comments on drafts of this manuscript as well as earlier comments on the project from Ching Kwan Lee, Edward Walker, Christopher Kelty, Stefan Bargheer, David Halle, and Gabriel Rossman.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The production of popular music, books, television, films, and magazines follow what Miège (1989) termed the ‘publishing logic’ wherein a networked organization of small firms producing a range of products with the hope that a few products may be successful enough in terms of sales or status to support other, less successful projects. Given the long history of analysis of this mode of cultural production, I call these established industrial formations conventional when compared to ‘platformized’ cultural production (see Nieborg and Poell 2018).

2. I use pseudonyms throughout for all companies.

3. These practices are very similar post-punk and indie practices in the U.K. and Italy (Hesmondhalgh 1999; Magaudda 2009).

4. In the early 2000s, the three largest media conglomerates purchased the three largest indie rock record distributors (O’Connor 2008).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation Division of Social and Economic Sciences [Grant No. 1636662].

Notes on contributors

Michael L. Siciliano

Michael L. Siciliano is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Communication at Tulane University in the US. His research focuses primarily on how workers become affectively attached to exploitative systems and how infrastructure impacts cultural production. To date, his publications include the book Creative Control: The ambivalence of work in the culture industries (Columbia University Press) as well as sole-authored articles in Ethnography, Organization Studies, International Journal of Communication, and Research in the Sociology of Work.