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Platform society requires users to negotiate the rules, infrastructure, and algorithmic systems established by Big Tech companies. 

The logics of optimisation and attention

For creators and influencers who depend on platforms to circulate their content, the strategic, skillful navigation of this ecosystem is essential. They learn and may lean into ideal user types and practices in hopes of being rewarded with the right attention from platforms, audiences, and brands, and for some, translating their visibility and engagement into income. But it is not only those within the creator economy or who seek monetisation that are implicated. This event grapples with the logics of optimisation and attention that govern user practices, exploring what the work of specialised users reveals about expectations and mechanisms of the creator economy, and why this matters for other industries, professions, and people. 

Program

(Associate Professor, ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Leeds) will discuss her new book ‘Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture’ (ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of California Press), which explores how influencer culture has shaped the way that creative workers exist online by drawing from in-depth ethnography and interviews with influencers and professional artists. Bishop argues that looking to the shifts within influencer culture can help us understand contemporary changes to labor conditions, compensation and representation within art worlds and beyond. Early praise for the book includes “those in the art world will find plenty to chew on” (Publishers Weekly) and “both a page turner and thorough academic study” (Professor Thomas Poell).

Lucie Chateau (Assistant Professor, Utrecht ľ�ϸ���Ӱ��) will address the meme economy as an anxious form of cultural production. Memes occupy a mediating role between the democratic potential of the internet as a digital communication technology and the reality of the digital landscape, as composed of private platforms and populated by corporate actors. This dialectical tension is represented in the aesthetic form of the meme, which toes the line between embodying the liberatory, libidinal potential of networked images and their vulnerable nature as one of many in the commodity-flooded marketplace of digital capitalism. In this talk, Dr. Chateau will focus on memes as an alternative to the creator economy. She will cover 'brainrot' and other esoteric meme forms that shy away from the mainstream,  what their politics are, and why the difference between 'brainrot' and GenAI 'slop' is an urgent distinction to make.

(Professor, ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� of Amsterdam) unpacks the organization and labor behind “cringe” content. Drawing on immersive ethnography with viral content creators, she examines how algorithms reshape creative labor through alienation, adaptation, simplification, replication, and gamification. Ultimately, content creators transform their standards of quality to align with the metrics that platforms deliver. This ethnography shows how value capture is rooted in the labor process, in which platforms turn artistic standards into algorithmic ones.