Papers by Michael Siciliano
International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2022
Digital platforms supposedly allow global corporations to exert novel infrastructural power over ... more Digital platforms supposedly allow global corporations to exert novel infrastructural power over cultural participation due to platforms' increased centrality as key gatekeepers. Extant theorizations of global capitalism, however, suggest infrastructural power as a longstanding feature of capitalism, especially in media industries. How novel is the infrastructural power of platforms? How does platformization affect cultural participation? Through an ethnographic comparison of conventional and platformized cultural intermediaries (respectively, a music distribution company in 2010 and a multi-channel YouTube network or MCN in 2015), I show continuity in infrastructural power alongside distinctive differences in logics of inclusion/exclusion¾what I call hard and soft gates. Hard gates exclude while the soft gate simultaneously increases participation and heightens circulation inequality. Considered alongside recent research, my findings suggest that policy on participation must consider how value-laden infrastructures impact participation and visibility in digital culture.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
International Journal of Communication, 2023
What possibilities for collective struggle exist within platformized creative labor processes? Th... more What possibilities for collective struggle exist within platformized creative labor processes? The platformization of creative labor exacerbates barriers to collective resistance such as widespread entrepreneurial dispositions and divergence in terms of workers' experiences, narratives, practices, and class interests. I show how routine and expressive workers involved in the production of YouTube content share a distinctive dispossession: alienated judgment. Based upon 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted within a YouTube management company and interviews with managers, office staff, and content producers, I argue that alienated judgment provides a possibility for collective resistance across creative class fractions. Creative labor requires judgment, yet routine and expressive workers' use of judgment tends to be subordinate to both management and platforms' affordances and governance. I conclude by highlighting major obstacles to collective resistance among creative workers while holding out the possibility that alienated judgment provides for the articulation of workers' experience and thus a point around which the digital economy's divided labor might organize.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Poetics, 2022
How do intermediaries affect cultural production in the age of platformized gatekeeping? Cultural... more How do intermediaries affect cultural production in the age of platformized gatekeeping? Cultural production increasingly depends upon digital infrastructures known as platforms (e.g., Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Google, et al.) for distribution. These infrastructures supposedly diminish the importance of conventional, non-infrastructural intermediaries, yet cultural production's platformization occurred alongside the emergence of new downstream intermediaries. Here, I show how the practices of YouTube content creators reflect direct instructions from both the platform (primary gatekeeper) and a downstream intermediary (an MCN). Producers no longer require non-platform intermediaries for access to markets, and so, rather than acting as gatekeeper, non-platform intermediaries support the platform. The MCN aids the platform by propagating platform conventions and an orientation toward metrics and algorithms among content producers. This differs markedly from conventional sociological theories of cultural production which presume intermediaries as autonomous organizations that reproduce and mediate social conventions of cultural production (i.e., genre, roles, etc.). Thus, under conditions of platformization, both intermediaries and producers appear subordinate to infrastructure.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Ethnography, 2022
In this article, I draw upon 20 months of participant observation to compare the labor processes ... more In this article, I draw upon 20 months of participant observation to compare the labor processes of routine, office staff in the popular music and digital content industries in the U.S. In both cases, workers play a game of disappearing, pursuing immersive experiences in their efforts to be more productive. These pleasurably immersive experiences vis-à-vis technology described by informants bear a similarity to aesthetic experiences typically associated with art objects. Comparing how workers describe their aesthetic experiences, I show how the materiality of technology as well as management mediate workers' immersion. In doing so, this article extends theories of control over work by highlighting the importance of work's affective and aesthetic dimensions while also making an empirical contribution by examining the culture industries' often overlooked, routine workers in conventional and platformized contexts.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In recent years, a variety of cultural industries have been transformed by platformization – a pr... more In recent years, a variety of cultural industries have been transformed by platformization – a process in which technology companies serve as intermediaries connecting different parties (most importantly cultural producers and audiences) through websites and applications. From music to book publishing, movie production, and the visual arts, cultural production has undergone massive changes due to platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Goodreads, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Etsy, etc. In most cultural sectors, creators now have to grapple with the platforms that make their work visible to online audiences. This often means paying close attention to the quantitative infrastructure of platforms, namely their algorithms and analytics, which drive visibility and commercial success. This panel examines what these economic and technological changes imply for the independence of cultural production. Classical studies of culture often emphasized the role that the values of...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This article addresses research on worker skill, technology, and control over the labor process b... more This article addresses research on worker skill, technology, and control over the labor process by focusing on routine immaterial labor or knowledge work. Based on participant observation conducted among analytics workers at a digital publishing network, I find that analytics workers appear paradoxically autonomous and empowered by management while being bound by ever-evolving, calculative cloud-based information and communication technologies (ICTs). Workers appear free to " be creative, " while ever-evolving ICTs exert unpredictable control over work. Based on this finding, I argue that sociology's tendency to take organizational boundaries and technological stability for granted hampers analyses of contemporary forms of work. Thus, sociologists of work must extend outward-beyond communities of practice, labor markets, and the state-to include ever-evolving, infrastructural socio-technical networks in which work and organizations are embedded. Additionally, research on the experience of immaterial labor suggests that ICTs afford pleasurably immersive experiences that bind workers to organizations and their fields. Complicating this emerging body of research, I find workers acutely frustrated by these unpredictable, ever-evolving, cloud-based ICTs.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Taking a labor process approach to organizations in cultural industries, this article compares ex... more Taking a labor process approach to organizations in cultural industries, this article compares expressive and routine workers (audio engineers and studio attendants) within a US music-recording organization. I describe a practical control strategy that aims to reproduce the pleasurable feel of expressive work among routine cultural workers. Because this strategy depends upon workers’ aesthetic experiences of technological objects, I term this strategy aesthetic enrollment. Drawing upon theories of aesthetic experience and Callon and Law’s enrollment processes, I theorize this strategy as a form of control. Engineers come to love their ability to express creativity at work and appear captivated by the organization’s aesthetically compelling technical artifacts (music equipment or “gear”). Among rehearsal hall attendants, management provides similar aesthetically appealing, expressive technologies. These objects afford experiences among routine staff that resemble those found in more expressive occupations, providing opportunities for creativity in the context of routine, task-oriented work. This strategy manages the “feel” of work and thus incorporates employees by way of their relationship with technical artifacts – part of the organization’s aesthetic landscape.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies, Mar 25, 2015
Mass media have been a core social institution throughout modern history and in contemporary life... more Mass media have been a core social institution throughout modern history and in contemporary life. The term “mass media” refers to an array of technological systems, industries, cultural forms, and practices of production and consumption characterized by the transmission of information from a few producers to large groups of consumers. Technologically, mass media include the printing press, telegraphy, telephony, music recording, film projection, radio and television transmission systems, and the World Wide Web or internet. Cultural forms associated with mass media include cinema, recorded popular music, newspapers, broadcast journalism, popular literature, television programming, video games, computer software, and advertisements.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Punkademics, Jun 1, 2012
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Volume!, Dec 20, 2013
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Volume ! by Michael Siciliano
by Volume ! The French journal of popular music studies, Ruth Herbert, Theodore Gracyk, Mark Duffett, Laura Jordan Gonzalez, Sarah Benhaïm, Michael Siciliano, Jedediah Sklower, Raphaël Nowak, Tom Attah, and Antoine Hennion Volume ! the French journal of popular music studies, Dec 30, 2013
The ear does not just listen to music: it informs it to appreciate and evaluate it. Listening is ... more The ear does not just listen to music: it informs it to appreciate and evaluate it. Listening is made of circulations: it reflects itself in discourses which make visible representations, that constitute the musical experience. It becomes incarnate in practices and rituals which individually or collectively outline their object to better assurer the listening experience's success, which can not happen without its multiple mediations, whether social, symbolic or material.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Books by Michael Siciliano
Creative Control, 2021
Workers in cultural industries often say that the best part of their job is the opportunity for c... more Workers in cultural industries often say that the best part of their job is the opportunity for creativity. At the same time, profit-minded managers at both traditional firms and digital platforms exhort workers to “be creative.” Even as cultural fields hold out the prospect of meaningful employment, they are marked by heightened economic precarity. What does it mean to be creative under contemporary capitalism? And how does the ideology of creativity explain workers’ commitment to precarious jobs?
Michael L. Siciliano draws on nearly two years of ethnographic research as a participant-observer in a Los Angeles music studio and a multichannel YouTube network to explore the contradictions of creative work. He details how such workplaces feature engaging, dynamic processes that enlist workers in organizational projects and secure their affective investment in ideas of creativity and innovation. Siciliano argues that performing creative labor entails a profound ambivalence: workers experience excitement and aesthetic engagement alongside precarity and alienation. Through close comparative analysis, he presents a theory of creative labor that accounts for the roles of embodiment, power, alienation, and technology in the contemporary workplace.
Combining vivid ethnographic detail and keen sociological insight, Creative Control explains why “cool” jobs help us understand how workers can participate in their own exploitation.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Michael Siciliano
Volume ! by Michael Siciliano
Books by Michael Siciliano
Michael L. Siciliano draws on nearly two years of ethnographic research as a participant-observer in a Los Angeles music studio and a multichannel YouTube network to explore the contradictions of creative work. He details how such workplaces feature engaging, dynamic processes that enlist workers in organizational projects and secure their affective investment in ideas of creativity and innovation. Siciliano argues that performing creative labor entails a profound ambivalence: workers experience excitement and aesthetic engagement alongside precarity and alienation. Through close comparative analysis, he presents a theory of creative labor that accounts for the roles of embodiment, power, alienation, and technology in the contemporary workplace.
Combining vivid ethnographic detail and keen sociological insight, Creative Control explains why “cool” jobs help us understand how workers can participate in their own exploitation.
Michael L. Siciliano draws on nearly two years of ethnographic research as a participant-observer in a Los Angeles music studio and a multichannel YouTube network to explore the contradictions of creative work. He details how such workplaces feature engaging, dynamic processes that enlist workers in organizational projects and secure their affective investment in ideas of creativity and innovation. Siciliano argues that performing creative labor entails a profound ambivalence: workers experience excitement and aesthetic engagement alongside precarity and alienation. Through close comparative analysis, he presents a theory of creative labor that accounts for the roles of embodiment, power, alienation, and technology in the contemporary workplace.
Combining vivid ethnographic detail and keen sociological insight, Creative Control explains why “cool” jobs help us understand how workers can participate in their own exploitation.