ABSTRACT

This article proposes that professionalization services are significant media industry spaces because they are the first access points to industry work for many nonprofessionals. I use business-facing marketing materials from the popular self-publishing platform Wattpad as a case study, drawing on discourse analysis to argue that the platform’s strict guidelines governing which users can professionalize are a response to gendered and generational assumptions within legacy media industries about the commercial value of the data gathered from Wattpad’s predominantly young and female userbase. Weighing Wattpad’s business-facing rhetoric against the platform’s strict governance of professionalization, I argue that the efforts of platforms to promote their users to legacy media industries as exploitable workforces can provide important insights into how and why platforms structure professionalization for their users.

摘要

本文提出，专业化服务是重要的媒体行业空间，因为它们是许多非专业人士进入行业工作的第一个接入点。我使用来自流行的自助出版平台 Wattpad 的面向企业的营销材料作为案例研究，利用话语分析来论证该平台对用户可以专业化的严格指导方针是对传统媒体行业中关于性别和代际假设的回应从 Wattpad 主要是年轻和女性用户群中收集的数据的商业价值。权衡 Wattpad 面向业务的言论与平台严格的专业化治理，