The Impact of Digital Platforms on Canadian Media Production
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This report critically assesses the state of knowledge on how burgeoning digital platforms are affecting the nature of media work in Canada and elsewhere. The focus is on for-profit cultural production, that is, professionals working in the media industries, either as company employees, as freelancers, or as individual content “creators.” It is widely established that the rapid adoption of digital platforms owned and operated by US and China-based companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Tencent, ByteDance, and Amazon are profoundly reconfiguring the media industries in Canada and elsewhere (Cunningham & Craig, 2019; Srnicek, 2017). Over the last decade, cultural producers have become increasingly “platform-dependent”, a process theorized as the “platformization of cultural production” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018; Poell et al., 2021). Longstanding, or “legacy,” media industry sectors, such as journalism, film, and broadcasting, are experiencing tremendous upheaval as live-streaming, social-media influencing, podcasting, and other new practices develop at breakneck speed. Knowledge synthesis is structured by four overlapping research themes: 1) platform economics, 2) platform governance, 3) platform labour and cultural citizenship, and 4) geopolitical considerations. The report asks how media workers negotiate the often opaque regulatory frameworks set by platforms companies and how platform governance picks winners and losers by setting new regimes of visibility. Platform companies may have lowered costs in terms of production and distribution, but have their efficiencies translated into sustainable business models and a more equitable distribution of revenue among media workers? When asking these questions, particular attention will be paid to the Canadian dimension of platform-dependent media production.
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