To understand the changes to production and especially cultural production regarding content creation, we have first to understand the changes in technology that may have impacted the structures the most. With the enhancement of mobile and social technologies, we have seen changes in not only cultural production but what it even means to create content in an online marketplace. With platforms such as Kickstarter and Patreon creators and audience members have gained some control over the modes of production.
Crowdfunding is a model of production that took prevalence online in the in the early 2000s with sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter. It allows consumers to provide financial backing for the products they are interested in before the product even exists. Creators then give rewards to their backers as a thank you for helping fund the creation and/or production of their product. The whole system works as an almost antithesis to the typical production model of corporations or sponsors providing funding for some amount of return on their investment. In a world before the internet, this model of crowdfunding would not work nearly as well, and there is a reason for this.
As researchers Raine and Wellman describe, the internet has created a society of networked individualism, the idea that people that are the focus of the network (2012). Nowhere is that more evident than in the sub-cultures that exist across the net. These sub-cultures are very often tied to fandom and can be as broad as “Table Top Gaming” to as narrow as “Competitive Pauper Format Magic The Gathering.” And if you don’t know what that is, that is kind of the point. These networks of individuals create a sense of community that is almost unbreakable because they are made of individuals that exist as a network. These sub-culture networks form because these individuals do not live in a bubble.
The power these networked individuals provide to creators of content is significant. This is often because the creators come from within the network and not from outside of it. For example, very often you will see creators of the comic book sub-culture promoting each other’s works on Twitter and even sharing Kickstarter campaigns. The sense of competition lessons in a sub-culture market and a sense of community rises in its place. This concept of self-funded network content, where your own community of peers and audience members provided the means by which to produce, exploded with the emergence of crowdfunding platforms. With these platforms not only was it more straightforward to support creators within your sub-culture network but now you were no longer supporting an invisible corporate company. You knew that money provided would go to the use outlined by the creator(s).
Another aspect of this combination of sub-culture production and crowdfunding is the system by which things like webcomics are produced. Webcomics, in general, are created for free by a creator and put onto a website on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis for their audience to enjoy. There is no real monetary value in this unless they create merchandise to go along with the content creation. What some of them do however is, use crowdfunding to finance the production of physical versions of their webcomics. An example of this happening is the Kickstarter campaign for the webcomic “Check, Please!”. This webcomic was funded a total of $398,520 by passionate audience members and not by corporate sponsors.
That isn’t to say we have ventured very far from Smyrnaois’s idea of the internet being nothing but free labor and the concept of the rise of the Digerati recreating capitalism on the internet (2018). Yet, for small portions of the internet community, the crossover between these sub-culture networks and the idea of free labor overlaps to provide benefits to both entities. If you look at popular fandoms such as Steven Universe or any number of anime, you will find creators producing fan art and fan fiction. These pieces of content work as both a small amount of income for these creators, but also a free promotion for the original works that were usually created with some amount of corporate support; such as Cartoon Network for Steven Universe. These Corporate sponsors tend to let any monetary gain from such fanart slide because it works as such good free promotion for generating new audience members and consumers.
It seems clear to me that to define the internet as either a free labor marketplace controlled by technological determinism or a place of networked individualism is a flawed assessment. Both of these views can and do exist within the network. They both play a role in content production across mediums and will continue to influence each other for many years to come, I would guess. The essential point to take from all of this is that content creation still matters in the internet age, and I would argue sincere content creation matters more than ever.
Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. (2014). Networked: The new social operating system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Smyrnaois, N. (2018). INTERNET OLIGOPOLY: The corporate takeover of our digital world. S.l.: EMERALD GROUP PUBL.