• Wattpad, Platform Capitalism, and the Feminization of Publishing Work
• Sarah Brouillette (bio)

Wattpad is a reading and writing platform that is mainly free to use, which allows users to easily upload and interact with text, and is developing techniques to chart reading behavior and to deploy this data to shape ongoing content production. It has accumulated a vast treasure of material—by one count now "the biggest database of user-generated fiction"¹ online—and every moment of engagement with that material is gathered in the form of data and marshalled in a panoply of ways.

In one of the earliest studies of the platform, Melanie Ramdarshan Bold positions Wattpad as part of what Henry Jenkins famously celebrated as the "participatory culture" of productive fandom, a generative "prosumption" blurring amateur and professional modes. Bold argues that social computing "has created a shift from consumer culture to a culture of participation" that allows people "to contribute to social collaboration and production instead of, simply, passively consuming products." In turn "writing is slowly becoming more open and democratic," while "traditional publishers are no longer the sole gatekeepers of written culture."²

More recently Claire Parnell has studied Wattpad as a sign of the need for a broader "integration of publishing and platform studies." She argues, like Bold, that cultural production now takes place in a "media environment where the distinction between non-professional amateur and professional, commercial creativity continues to blur." Yet for Parnell Wattpad's case is best understood through an "entertainment ecosystem" approach. Within this ecosystem, "the economic, technological and cultural assemblages of the platform shape content production and reception." To grasp its operations we need, Parnell argues, "a non-hierarchical ecology model" that has a "heuristic value for connecting publishing and digital media studies as it allows for a consideration of cooperative intermedia relationships and [End Page 419] emerging media forms that exist within this dynamic sphere of creative production."³

My contribution to the scholarship on Wattpad parts ways both with the participatory culture approach and the ecosystem model. In emphasizing the expansion of inclusion in activities of cultural production, the participatory culture approach risks disguising the nature of exploitation and profit making in the industry. In emphasizing horizontal connections and complex networks, the entertainment ecosystem approach risks overlooking the determining force of platform capitalism on the nature of cultural experience today, while evacuating any real critique of the effects of social media on the behaviors and mentalities of readers and writers.⁴

I embrace Simone Murray's caution in her work on authorship in the digital age: that we must not "retrofit" transformation in the book industry with "a discourse of authorial empowerment" that helps pave the way "for authors to shoulder more of the financial and time burden for publicizing and marketing their own work." The "rhetoric of author empowerment" can fit "hand in glove" with publishing industry "cost shifting," she adds.⁵ Taking my cue from Murray's mention of labor as a topic of concern for publishing studies, I discuss how Wattpad's success reflects and reinforces trends in the distribution of publishing work and profits. Key among these trends is the feminization of labor and the habits of thinking about reading and writing that support it.

These habits entail conceiving of publishing as a roster of personally satisfying activities of bibliotherapeutic pastoral care work. This conception helps to stimulate and justify harrying overwork. It also encourages free activity that is not exactly work, in that it is unpaid, but that resembles work, in that in other contexts people are paid to do the same activities, or it is done in the hopes that it might become paid work in the future. By putting Wattpad's marketing materials in conversation with successful Wattpad authors' public statements about their own experiences, we glimpse something of the labor subtending a platform that promotes itself as a space of pastoral care and inclusive community. This matters because, as Aarthi Vadde notes, Wattpad is one of the newly dominant, increasingly powerful "communal processes of reading and writing [that] exert transformative pressure on august institutions of literature, from the publishing house to professional authorship to reviewing culture." She adds...

• Wattpad、平台资本主义和出版工作的女性化
• 莎拉·布鲁耶特（简介）

Wattpad 是一个主要免费使用的阅读和写作平台，允许用户轻松上传文本并与之交互，并且正在开发绘制阅读行为图表并部署这些数据以塑造持续内容生产的技术。它积累了巨大的材料宝藏——可以说是现在“最大的用户生成小说数据库” ¹在线——并且与这些材料接触的每一刻都以数据的形式收集并以多种方式进行整理。

在对该平台的最早研究之一中，梅兰妮·拉姆达山·博尔德 (Melanie Ramdarshan Bold) 将 Wattpad 定位为亨利·詹金斯 (Henry Jenkins) 著名的生产性粉丝圈“参与文化”的一部分，这是一种模糊业余和专业模式的生成性“消费”。博尔德认为，社交计算“创造了从消费文化到参与文化的转变”，让人们“为社会协作和生产做出贡献，而不是简单地被动消费产品”。反过来，“写作正在慢慢变得更加开放和民主”，而“传统出版商不再是书面文化的唯一守门人”。²

最近，克莱尔·帕内尔 (Claire Parnell) 对 Wattpad 进行了研究，认为这表明需要更广泛的“出版和平台研究的整合”。她和博尔德一样认为，文化生产现在是在“媒体环境中进行的，在这个环境中，非专业的业余创意和专业的商业创意之间的区别继续变得模糊”。然而，帕内尔·瓦特帕德的案例最好通过“娱乐生态系统”方法来理解。在这个生态系统中，“平台的经济、技术和文化组合塑造了内容的生产和接收。” 帕内尔认为，为了掌握其运作，我们需要“一种非等级的生态模型”，该模型具有“连接出版和数字媒体研究的启发价值，因为它允许考虑合作的媒介关系和[第 419 页]新兴媒体形式存在于这个充满活力的创意生产领域中。” ³

我对 Wattpad 奖学金的贡献与参与式文化方法和生态系统模型不同。在强调扩大文化生产活动的包容性时，参与式文化方法有可能掩盖该行业剥削和盈利的本质。在强调横向联系和复杂网络时，娱乐生态系统方法有可能忽视平台资本主义对当今文化体验本质的决定性力量，同时回避对社交媒体对读者和作家行为和心态影响的任何真正批评。⁴

我赞同西蒙·默里（Simone Murray）在数字时代作者身份研究中提出的谨慎态度：我们绝不能用“作者赋权的话语”来“改造”图书行业的转型，这有助于为“作者承担更多的经济和社会责任”铺平道路。宣传和营销自己作品的时间负担。” 她补充说，“作者赋权的言论”可以与出版业的“成本转移”“紧密结合”。⁵ Murray 提到劳工是出版研究关注的一个话题，从中得到启发，我讨论了 Wattpad 的成功如何反映和强化了出版工作和利润分配的趋势。这些趋势中的关键是劳动力的女性化以及支持女性化的阅读和写作习惯。

这些习惯需要将出版视为个人满意的图书馆治疗性教牧关怀活动的名册。这种观念有助于刺激和证明过度劳累是合理的。它还鼓励自由活动，这种活动不完全是工作，因为它是无偿的，但类似于工作，因为在其他情况下，人们有报酬做同样的活动，或者希望它可能成为有偿工作未来。通过将 Wattpad 的营销材料与成功的 Wattpad 作者关于其自身经历的公开声明进行对话，我们可以看到一个平台所包含的劳动力，该平台将自己宣传为一个田园关怀和包容性社区的空间。这很重要，因为正如 Aarthi Vadde 指出的那样，Wattpad 是新近占主导地位、日益强大的“阅读和写作的公共过程，对从出版社到专业作者到文化评论等庄严的文学机构施加变革压力”。她补充道...