The creator function, post-structuralism, and the perils of terminological dissonance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A broadly interdisciplinary field is emerging to study creators, referred to as “creator studies”, “platforms and cultural production studies”, “influencer studies”, and “ wanghong studies”. Yet the subject of this field—the creator—is still in the process of “being born” or constructed. The definition of the creator that will inevitably stabilize and be governmentalized remains uncertain and contested, shaped by corporations, states, scholars, and creators themselves. Drawing on Foucault's concept of the author-function and framed by the concept of the creator, this essay analyzes five major creator constructions: the content creator, platform-based cultural producer, influencer, precarious worker, and celebrated entrepreneur to assess their functions, dysfunctions, possibilities and limitations. We advocate for terminological coherence, describing how ongoing terminological dissonance carries real-world consequences for creators and creator governance. In this way, our deconstruction is also an act of construction: aimed at building a more grounded and critical field of creator studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.053 | 0.052 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.153 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".