PAY4PLAY · Entrepreneurial Organizing in the Platform Society

Digital platforms increasingly integrate financial transactions into social interactions, facilitating new ways of coming together and creating value. PAY4PLAY sets out to develop a new theory of organizing that grapples with the intersection of sociotechnical systems and socioeconomic relations that characterizes public life in the platform society. I focus on creator communities, defined as primarily platform-based associations formed around media personas with (1) hierarchal structures, (2) monetized interactions, and (3) asymmetrical relationships. I approach the project’s overarching question—How do people form communities around media personas and with what consequences?—from three perspectives: culture, infrastructure, and policy. Across each perspective, I compare three types of creators (gamers, VTubers, and adult content creators) working in three languages (English, Spanish, and Japanese) to understand how factors such as occupational stigma, gender, technology, and geography shape opportunities for organizing. PAY4PLAY employs distinct methodological approaches and disciplinary toolkits drawn from media and communication, information science, and economic sociology best suited to engage with each perspective, investigating culture with multi-sited ethnography, infrastructure with digital methods, and policy with controversy mapping and stakeholder interviews. Through an integrative analysis of these methods, this project will conceptualize creator communities on their own terms, mapping the value they provide to those involved and their broader influence. PAY4PLAY will thus offer the first large-scale comparison of the industry conditions of monetized content creation, develop a new theory of organizing and platform power, create methodological tools for future comparative research within the creator economy, and offer new policy recommendations for integrating creators into platform governance at the state and corporate levels.