Social media entertainment (SME) — an emerging industry; "Creator Studies" new concept to study
Mapping scholarship of Influencers, where does one place "Creator Studies"?
Making money creating and uploading video content online became a career option in the second decade of the millennia. Some have indeed succeeded in building careers as platform-enabled cultural creators, for example as youtubers. The Danish YouTube star Rasmus Brohave (2017) explained, why young audiences might prefer a youtuber to a tv personality.
“[T]hey see themselves 100 % in a teenager, who sits in his room in his parents’ house – because they may be in the same situation. We are at eye level. “
Social media entertainment1 is a new industry, clearly distinct from the legacy media industry, David Craig and his co-author Stuart Cunningham argue. Unlike the legacy screen entertainment business, Social media entertainment’s monetization does not hinge on securing intellectual property (IPR) ownership. Social media entertainment, and it’s related creator industry, so Craig, produces unique research challenges ”regarding the sustainability of creator labor, practices of creator management and entrepreneurialism, and their role in platform innovation” (source of quote: The ICA 2022 post-conference Creator Studies Workshop description by David Craig).
Image: Screenshot from the May 31 2022 Creator Studies Workshop in Amsterdam. Does the world really need one more field of study, Craig asked, referring to a 2011 book Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method with an Introduction posing the same question.
While the jury is still out as to if Creator Studies can be considered a proper academic field of study, it certainly can be included in academic curricula. Clinical professor at Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, Craig taught during Fall 2022, among others, a course titled Social Media Entertainment and Creator Culture.
I have found the terms creator and influencer sometimes used alternately. In the platform parlance, Creator is the term commonly used, as in the support resources websites “YouTube Creators”, “Instagram Creators” or “TikTok Creator Portal”.
In academia, though, the field of “Influencer Studies” has more accumulated research due to early interest in the field in both strategic communications and marketing. It is my hypothesis, pending further inquiry, that in the context of media industries they both are similarly new candidates as independent subfields of study.
Cunningham, S and Craig D (2019), Social Media entertainment. The New Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. New York University Press.