The so-called “creator economy”--which encompasses independent artists, entertainers, educators, and influencers who rely upon platforms to create, distribute, and/or monetize content--has reached an unprecedented scale. Yet this sprawling sector of creativity and commerce is misunderstood, at best, devalued at worst. That’s where the Content Creator Scholars Network (CCSN) comes in. The CCSN is an independent network of researchers dedicated to sharing knowledge and resources on the creator economy with the wider academic, technology, media, and regulatory communities.
The network began as many academic collaborations do: With a small group with similar interests, realising they could do more together than individually. Over conference presentations and happy hours, socials and chats in hotel corridors between panels, we all touted how these spaces felt like going to an academic home. The interdisciplinary nature of Internet research, and specifically, content creator research, meant many of us found ourselves as an isolated case in home institutions focused more broadly on communication, sociology, anthropology, art, politics, and media. Together, though, we didn’t have to justify studying content creators and influencers. We didn’t have to explain our work as important and not frivolous. We didn’t have to prove to anyone that creators and influencers have become key pillars and players in the digital culture industries, spanning areas such as beauty, journalism, gaming, music, and literature. In this group, we found a space for community, collaboration, and care. And we want to extend it to you, too.
Welcome to the Content Creator Scholars Network (CCSN), an interdisciplinary network of researchers interested in the cultures, politics, and economies of digital content creation.
What does the CCSN do?
Representing a diverse range of disciplines and approaches-- media and communication to sociology, and from digital humanities and politics, from anthropology to critical cultural studies, our network sets out to cultivate an international community of members and affiliates to promote additional perspectives and generate new research in the field of creator culture.
CCSN members also produce educational resources, participate in journalistic interviews, connect with platforms and digital regulators, and organise events and spaces for creator studies research. At our core is the interest to engage with creators and the creator economy beyond observation, to create and contribute to dialogue with industry and workers in order to address concerns of power and in/equalities.
Why do we need a CCSN?
Social media platforms provide crucial opportunities for people to express themselves, find and build communities, promote small businesses, and earn a livelihood. But while these spaces are becoming key drivers of commerce and culture, they are also characterised by precarity, inequalities and power imbalances when it comes to governance, earnings and representation. As trained researchers, we are well poised to understand and redress the latter challenges, offering not only solutions but better questions about the trajectories of cultural work. The CCSN arises from academic conferences, events, round-tables and networking events where its founding members found similarities in the spaces, behaviours and issues they examined across different disciplines. By bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of content creation, we hope to generate the necessary conversations and changes for creator work to be taken seriously, and to promote and inform policy and industry change. Through our research, we hope to advocate for improved working conditions, fair compensation, and greater forms of transparency and communication, to help them be taken seriously and compensated fairly. More broadly, we aim to advance conversations about information and entertainment in the digital age through focusing on the labor, struggles, and celebrations of those in the digital trenches, making content day in and day out.
What the CCSN doesn’t do?
The CCSN is neither an influencer marketing company nor a professional organisation for current aspiring creators. Though we represent academic institutions across multiple countries, we are not affiliated with a single institution or professional organisation. CCSN members are not Big Tech employees, and cannot therefore provide one-to-one support to creators affected by some of the issues we research. We do, however, use critical research and strategic collaborations to create dialogue with industry professionals in the spirit of identifying opportunities for improvements when possible. Some of our individual members have consulted with companies in the past, and may do so in the future - but the CCSN is not a consultant for hire. While individual members may choose to collaborate on co-authored research, CCSN does not currently sponsor research projects - although we’d love to explore that in the future!
Who are the CCSN’s current members?
Our founding members’ work currently spans several themes,
including but not limited to:
industries and economies;
creative labor and resistance;
platform infrastructure, governance and moderation;
identity, inequality and marginalization;
social media cultures and communities;
algorithms and AI.