Get To Know 23-24 RSM Visiting Scholar: David Craig
David Craig is a Clinical Professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism who studies the rise of creator culture and how social media entrepreneurs harness platforms to build and engage communities for commercial, political, and sociocultural value. A 2023-2024 Institute for Rebooting Social Media (RSM) Visiting Scholar, Craig will focus on “Creators for Change,” a term that describes creators who are explicitly aligned with and advocating for political, social justice, and cause-based efforts. His work will interrogate how creators navigate their commercial and cultural interests and engage their communities around these concerns on and across platforms.
In the Q&A below, Craig discusses the growth of the global platform economy, accommodating “creators” in everyday life, and the broader set of questions he’ll be exploring at the Berkman Klein Center this fall.
How did you begin studying creators and the creator economy?
Before I came to academia, I was a Hollywood producer. I came to Hollywood primarily as a political player because I saw movies as a tool for educating people about progressive issues. I made about thirty movies, mostly for television, and most wound up being sold to classrooms as teaching tools. After all that, it made sense to become a teacher of Hollywood!
By 2012 and 2013, there was a new cultural industry that my students were asking me about — which I didn't know anything about. At this time, Stuart Cunningham, a professor visiting from Australia asked me to help him with some research he was doing about YouTubers. We went from three interviews to 300, in twenty-five cities and ten countries over four years, which then turned into three books and about twenty-four articles. So, this initially tiny thing ended up snowballing into a huge set of questions.
How do you define a creator?
I define a creator as someone who harnesses social media platforms to organize online communities through which they can then extract many different types of value. This includes commercial value that dozens of business models offer and from advertising, subscription-based models, and non-platform business models like merchandise and licensing.
These are not just simply ‘entrepreneurs;’ these are social media entrepreneurs, which also makes them cultural entrepreneurs. They create by building and organizing online communities, generating cultural and social value, which can often lend itself to gaining political value as well. “Creator culture,” then, is a nod to this, as people benefit from connections to their online communities which transcend geographical or national boundaries, instead operating on mutual interests.
A more precise term for a creator might be a “social media entrepreneur,” or someone who is a for-profit, online community organizer. This definition might be a provocative one but it’s important to use because it reframes these practitioners in a very different way from what we’re used to and, I think, normalizes them. There are many different terms to describe them — influencers, bloggers, gamers, YouTubers, talkers, wang hong, etc — and all have different connotations and are usually pejorative, but I prefer creators.
Why do creators matter?
Creators have found a way to harness what may arguably be the most powerful technology we've ever witnessed in the history of humanity, period.
My work has tried to avoid platform-centricity, to look more at who uses the platforms and in particular, who's harnessing the platforms for the most financial and cultural effect, benefit, and influence. If you observe this phenomenon through that set of frameworks, I don't know why we aren't studying more of this. Anyone below a certain age is intimately aware of social media and creator culture and doesn't even understand why there's a debate. Why does creative culture matter? Well, what other culture is there?
And, despite these apps and companies having spectacular capital and spectacular wealth there's always a chance all of this could go away tomorrow. We’ve already seen this play out with Twitter, and the first iteration of short-form video content — Vine, Meerkat, and Periscope — were live-streaming platforms that came and went with deep funding and very powerful resources. So, this isn't an attempt to suggest that the platforms themselves deserve any kind of pass, it’s just a recognition that the evolution of the platform economy alongside the creator economy is fraught with its precarious conditions, including technological innovation.
How can we, then, understand the connection between the political and the social? Is it becoming more complicated with these decentralized models?
We can't look in abstract terms at what is social, what is public, and what is civic space. Are social media platforms fundamentally political platforms? 1000%. Take a look at Tarleton Gillespie's work, which goes back to 2010, when he talked about the politics of platforms.
There is no doubt and there should be no question that the core function and value of the platforms, to their owners, is for commercial value and growth, power, control, and domination. However, our creators are harnessing platforms in ways that we might not have witnessed previously. I don't see any other way to deny that creators succeed by organizing online communities to generate revenue. And if I've organized a community to support my livelihood, I also organize this community around causes that I care about. However, the majority of creators would not describe themselves as political activists or impact participants, or cause-based workers.
In short, we've been mapping creators as a new cultural industry and as a set of platform-based cultural industries that is unique from the way legacy media industries work. We already know that it's caused a tremendous disruption, not only in terms of identity and expression and speech and governance but also from a regulatory perspective. All of this is leading up to the larger set of questions that I'm trying to address at Berkman Klein Center this fall: Do creators have rights? Do they have the right to commerce? Should creators have the right to harness the marketplaces provided by these platforms? Do creators have the right to organize and assemble? If we see creators as assembling groups online, is that a right that they should share?
Last question: do you have a favorite social media platform?
A picture says a thousand words and a thousand pictures say a million words. That means I love Instagram. I can store all my dog pictures on there and I love sharing Instagram reels with my favorite people in my life. I do about an hour of reels a day. It's the way I decompress. It fills me with a little more joy from what is otherwise a lot of dread and anxiety about what is going on in the world.
Interviewer
Eri Kostina an aspiring spatial designer and cultural documentarian, is a student at Boston University studying Architecture and Sociology. During the summer of 2023, she interned with the Berkman Klein Center’s metaLAB team.