Cultural crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms : cultural democratization or reinforcing the norms of cultural, media and creative industries? – COLLAB

This research project focuses on the analysis of cultural crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms in France, the United States, as well as in South America and Africa. These platforms allow the « crowd » of Internet users to take part in the production and financing of diverse projects in the fields of culture and media. Do they contribute to cultural democratization and diversification or, on the contrary, do they reinforce globalized industrial norms, under the cover of user and citizen empowerment?

This research will investigate the rapid expansion of these intermediary players as the expression of social, economic and ideological trends. Our hypothesis is that these devices represent possible fields of socio-economical experimentation, both on a national and international level, and are of interest to industrial players as well as public institutions. The issue of how these new modes of production and funding are legitimized will indeed be investigated via the media representations they bring about, and their uptake by public institutions. This will also entail analyzing how the collective financing, exchange and implication phenomena lead these platforms to impact changes in the production chain, in labor organization, and a shift from the figure of the consumer towards an amateur-producer-consumer.