On the last Friday of each month, we spotlight a CLCF researcher with our profile series (check out our previous profiles here). This month, we’re delighted to introduce Dr. David Nieborg, Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto. David has published widely on app and platform economics, the game industry, and game journalism. He is the co-author of Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021) and Mainstreaming and Game Journalism (MIT Press, 2023). For CLCF, he is building on previous projects on the platformization of cultural production, with a specific focus on the emergence of generative AI and the question how all of this plays out across regions and territories.

Photo courtesy of David Nieborg

M.E.: In a nutshell, who are you as a researcher?

David: I consider myself a political economist of the media industries, so that means I’m interested not so much in the orthodox economic question of creating and capturing value, but rather the relationships of power and dependency in the media industries between large transnational corporations, typically platforms, and external third-party companies, or what we call cultural producers, whether they are game developers or journalists or creators and influencers. I’m interested in those shifting relationships.

If I would have to qualify myself as a scholar, my work is inherently collaborative. I started working together a decade ago with over a dozen scholars from all around the world, which makes my work so much more interesting and fun. Most of my work is co-authored. I would say I’m very internationally focused, and my move from the Netherlands to Canada, has only made that easier and also more interesting. I’ve had affiliations and worked in the US, across Europe, in Asia and Australia. That international focus is not working with people at other institutions, but also increasingly focused on local cultures of production and how global companies set global rules or the impact of those global rules, and whether they are economic or infrastructural and how they impact, again, domestic cultural production.

And then third, I would say I’m inherently interdisciplinary. So I try to combine insights from across the humanities and social scientists. I try to be a bit agnostic in my theory and methods, not to be too dogmatic or too siloed in my approach. So I’m interested in economic insights from strategic management and try to translate those to my home discipline, media studies, but also other fields. Such as sociology, to understand questions about labour. In that sense, I’m interdisciplinary, and I like to work with people who share such an outlook.

 

Daphne: In what ways does the rise of generative AI extend or challenge your earlier work on platformization?

David: It depends very much which perspective you take. And in our book, Platforms and Cultural Production, we divide these kinds of questions into two parts, either an institutional perspective, which is about shifts in markets or economics, infrastructures, and the governance frameworks that are related to markets and infrastructure. Or second, perspective on practices: creative practices, labour practices, and democratic practices.

My own research focuses on the former, so I’m interested in institutional shifts. And if that’s your perspective, then I think everything I’ve seen in terms of the hard economic data, but also reading more in the last couple of months about infrastructural politics, I do not see fundamental shifts because of the rise of generative AI. So what that means is that traditional platform companies, like the ones we know so well, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Amazons, they have been able to cement their positions in existing ecosystems or expand their ecosystems.

Of course, there are newcomers, like OpenAI famously and others, but the underlying institutional logics that we’re so interested in – i.e., how external companies align their business models or integrate their infrastructures with platform companies – has not changed that much. This means that there is still a concentration of capital among a small group of companies, the centralization of power, while at the same time, there is a sort of decentralization of external companies that have a certain amount of autonomy.

One could say there’s a democratization of access to the means of creation of content, and at times also distribution and marketing and monetization, though those latter ones are not that relevant per se for generative AI. So at the level of content creation, there is more access to the means of production, but to me, this is more of a labour and creativity question, where you see large shifts and less so on the institutional side of things. This of course may shift rapidly in a climate of great geopolitical uncertainty, so this may change.

 

Daphne: Looking ahead, what do you see as the most urgent research questions around cultural production and emerging technologies like generative AI?

David: To me, many of the most urgent research questions are being addressed, which is great. I think media and communication scholars and also in economics and many other fields are acutely aware of issues related to generative AI and its political economy, etc. There is a never-ending stream, it seems, of new PhD and postdoc positions, which is not necessarily bad. What we try to do in our forthcoming scholarship is to not only ask questions about personal autonomy and labour, which are important questions, but also to sort of double down on what we are good at, so to say, and what our past research, questions that our past research has addressed and that seems to have resonated with other scholars.

And those questions are not necessarily about labour, they are much more about institutional power. So it’s much more about economics and infrastructures and governance. And to me, those are the most urgent research questions that we also need to address. I think that other research questions that are urgent, again, are already addressed in terms of biases and LLMs and ethics. So they are urgent, but addressed, I think, when it comes to cultural production. I think it’s important that we, as scholars, have a good sense of the money and the data where it’s coming and going. And I have not seen, historically, that has not been the main focus of scholarship in our field. So that’s our goal, that’s why we’re addressing these. To me, that’s the most urgent question.

 

Rafael: What’s your star sign?

David: Orange

Follow David’s work with CLCF here.