Creating careers in the kingdom of content. The platform-dependence and platform-ambivalence of digital cultural labour in Norway

Abstract

Cultural production is to an increasing degree characterized by digitalization, mediatization, platformization and the use of social media. In this article, we investigate how digital cultural labour is experienced by platform-dependent cultural producers. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews with more than twenty Norwegian content creators, we more specifically analyse how they describe and valuate their products and production, the online communication of their labour, and the careers and strategies of digital cultural labour. The production of content is experienced as a demanding and continuous endeavour, being relentlessly quantified through clicks and metrics. Furthermore, the content creators show the psychological toll of being the product or a more or less integrated part of the product. Partly because of the challenges of continuous content production and communication with a community, as well as because of the unpredictable power of algorithms, we see creators branching out, spreading risk, or combining platform-dependency with -independency. This tendency only partly explains why digital cultural labour in the Norwegian context does not tend to represent a career end in itself, but a means to reach other and/or more long-term career goals. In the Norwegian context, this tendency is also explained by other factors: the welfare-oriented and inclusive Nordic model of cultural policy, which includes a public broadcaster integrating social media actively in its portfolio, as well as a general risk- and precarity-reducing welfare society.