There are two forms of cultures that I am interchangeably concerned with, the everyday and the industrial. The first comes from an understanding of culture in anthropological and cultural studies traditions, ranging from the Chicago school of sociology and the Birmingham cultural studies school to social and cultural anthropology, as composed by the meanings, values, rituals, and symbols embedded in vernacular forms of social interaction (Williams, 1981; Hall, 1997; Hebdige, 1979). These everyday forms through which users, communities, and individuals communicate and make meaning on and of platforms intersect with more organized forms of cultural production, that is, the industrial production of symbols and texts aiming at generating forms of capital (Hesmondhalgh, 2018; Banks, 2007). The industrial production of culture regards the intentionally commodified “production of ‘aesthetic’ or ‘symbolic’ goods and services” that is to say the “commodities whose core value is derived from their function as carriers of meaning in the form of images, symbols, signs, and sounds” (Banks, 2007: 2). On platforms, the industrial cultural production is visible in the performances of brands, micro-celebrities, restaurants, hotels, tour guides, and content creators, among others. In this book, I explore it in luxury fashion brands and designers in Chapter 4, the organizers of Airbnb Experiences and restaurant social media accounts in Chapter 5, and the life coaches in Chapter 6. Yet, in platform-based cultural production the distinction between the everyday and the industrial is complicated as everyday users can amass symbolic capital that can be later translated to forms of economic capital by monetizing audience or customer desire. In this sense, platform-based afordances drive everyday cultural production to assume practices of industrial cultural production, in which “the production of meaning is seen to be deliberate and selfconscious, designed to appeal to aesthetic preferences, or related to existing or emergent economies of taste, style and distinction” (Banks, 2007: 2). This is a key point here as platforms imbue everyday activity, which can often take unintentional forms, with entrepreneurial reasoning by turning the self into a constantly performing social, economic, and cultural actor. A complementary concept to think through this indefiniteness between industrial and nonindustrial platform production is the term “platform practices” that Dufy, Poell, and Nieborg ofer (2019: 2), which regards “the strategies, routines, experiences, and expressions of creativity, labor, and citizenship that shape cultural production through platforms” (Dufy, Poell and Nieborg, 2019: 2). Here, the emphasis is on the action, the “doing” that crisscrosses everyday and industrial platform cultures.12
Introducing the Curatorial Imperative
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