Across the social sciences and humanities, scholars have long approached valuation as a social process, and often, a social struggle. How do people arrive at consensus on the worth of things that are inherently unstable, from art worlds to advertising and financial industries? Sociologists have shown valuation struggles rooted in social logics of fields and markets (Bourdieu 1993), while media scholars have attended to the architectures of industries and political economies (e.g., Meehan 2012). These macro structures orient how people “makes sense” of and reconcile economic and cultural value, or as the sociologist Talcott Parsons famously called them, value and values (Beckert and Aspers 2011).
This paper advances the study of valuation as a social struggle in the age of platforms. How do platforms change notions of value, of what is valuable, and how we create value? In so doing, how do platforms transform existing logics of markets, fields, and industries? Platforms have introduced some of the most significant transformations in economies of value; they are new actors shaping how assets emerge, such as in FinTech and social media economies. They shape how goods are priced, such as via rankings and metrics that dominate considerations of value, even in art worlds (Christin and Lewis 2021; Levina and Arriaga 2014; Vallas and Schor 2020). They shift how goods circulate in exchange, now that actors have mediated exchanges across far distances without ever seeing each other face to face.
This panel thus bridges scholarship on valuation and platformization, to ask: how do platforms shape valuation struggles over the social worth of goods? We gather as a group of scholars across the disciplines of media, information, and sociology with a range of case studies of online social worth struggles, from cultural goods (the performing art of magic, and rare plant collections) to financial ones (social media advertising and financial services). Our range of cases is balanced by our variety in method and scale: we use various qualitative methods including ethnographies and interviews to capture micro interactions, such as how people negotiate and contest the value of art, to institutional analyses at the macro-level, such as how institutions “see” value in global audiences.
The first three papers are related to each other in terms of their broader interest in how the proliferation of platforms and digital technologies transform the existing sectors or fields. First two papers focus similarly on how the penetration of platforms into the production and exchange of cultural goods re-shapes the operation of cultural fields. Based on interviews with magicians and participant observation in the magician community in the USA, sociologists [Paper 1] shows how social media platforms are remaking the rules of art, based on an in-depth study of magicians who are re-imagining “what counts” as magic when it is presented online. With a digital ethnographic study on rare plant collectors, the sociologist presenting [Paper2] identifies a shift in norms of valuation from offline to online exchange of cultural goods. It documents how the internet and social media platforms can enable new and creative forms of exchange dependent on relationships between rare plant collectors and insider knowledge of community members. Studying financial technology (a.k.a. fintech) platforms, communications scholar [Paper 3] discusses how the proliferation of platforms re-shape the markets for financial services. It examines the ways in which such credit scoring and lending platforms build the logics of attention-getting visibility and self-promotion into the infrastructures and design of their products and services, exerting overt forms of behavioral discipline on users.
Paper 4 and Paper 5 extend the arguments raised in the first three papers, showing platforms can engender new forms of production and exchange of cultural goods such as social media content. Using a qualitative content analysis of YouTube videos, communication scholars [Paper 4] discuss how social media platforms, such as YouTube, navigate between content creators and advertisers who fund the platform economy. Their paper documents various consequences of advertiser-dependence of social media platforms for content production and monetization as well. Drawing on the interviews with content creators in Chile, communication scholars [Paper 5] bring a different angle to the content production process, showing how creators value the labor of content creation and navigate their parallel work lives.
The first and third papers offer important insights into how increasing impact of platforms reinforces the existing social inequalities and hierarchies as well. For instance, Paper 1 explains how symbolic hierarchies sustain in the magic community despite the increasing use of social media in doing and sharing magic tricks. Paper 3 provides insights into how fintech platforms contribute to the already existing economic inequalities as well as to the racist, colonial patterns of expropriation and exploitation.
