Creativity and Creative Labor

PhD Work

In my dissertation work, I seek to uncover these impacts and develop community-driven solutions to improve the platform experience for individual users. Focusing on the routinized, everyday work of people who make, share, and promote their creative work on online social platforms, I seek to understand how people draw on sociotechnical systems in daily routine to inform, hinder, and alter how they engage with their creativity, their communities, and the technical systems upon which they work. These individuals serve as the backbone of online social platforms by providing the user-generated content upon which these platforms rely for commercial success, yet their creative work is often overshadowed by the work they have to perform to manage both their audiences and the platforms themselves. By examining their everyday experiences and interactions with technology, I hope to uncover the impacts of these systems on creative work and the relationship between individuals and their creativity.

From how algorithmic systems shape how we routinely experience entertainment on streaming services or news on Facebook or Twitter, or how the art people make and share online is shaped by and through the logics of these platforms, my work takes the stance that systems have the power to influence individual action, while individuals, in turn, have agency in navigating and circumventing this power. Drawing on a mixed-methods research practice, I take an infrastructural approach to examine power dynamics between individual users and the online platforms they routinely use. These everyday, mundane encounters reveal how platforms steer their users into behaving in specific ways, which can have detrimental impacts on the individual’s sense of self, their creative work, and the overall quality of the platform environment. With attention at a premium on online platforms, understanding how creatives work - or do not work - toward attaining that attention will provide valuable insight into how to better support the creatives whose (largely unpaid) labor creates the current social media entertainment environment we all live in today.

Papers In This Project

  1. Simpson, E., and Semaan, B. (2022) Rethinking Creative Labor: A Sociotechnical Examination of Creativity and Creative Work on TikTok. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.35

  2. Simpson, E., Dalal, S., and Semaan, B. (2023). “Hey, Can You Add Captions?”: The Critical Infrastructuring Practices of Neurodiverse People on TikTok. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW1, Article 57 (APR 2023). https://doi.org/10.1145/3579490