TikTok: Work, Time, and Play in a Platform Economy brings together papers that analyse emerging digital visual culture(s) and aesthetics through critical platform analyses. We are particularly interested in TikTok, as it is a platform where many dynamic digital subcultures proliferate and circulate. 

Over the last decade, the internet has been subsumed by a complex of privately owned online services that call themselves ‘platforms’. This has radically altered the coordinates of the internet, from a peer-to-peer communications infrastructure to an extractive arguably ‘neo-feudal’ system. 

In light of these recent shifts, the conference will rethink a number of questions about digital culture that were initially explored in the early 2010s, with the rise of Web 2.0. Papers will explore contemporary understandings of the construction of the self and collective identity, digital labour and cultural production, political discourse online, digital affect, and more. 

Keynotes by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and Y7 (Hannah Cobb & Declan Colquitt).

Full schedule TBA. 

Please, register for attendance via Eventbrite (click below) before 7th June:

Content Providers is a research collaboration between researchers Ian Rothwell (University of Edinburgh), Idil Galip (University of Amsterdam), Ingrid Luquet-Gad (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne).

The conference is supported by The New Real and the Edinburgh College of Art, with additional funding from the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Science.