Research on the High-Skilled Labor and Identity Construction of Video Creative Workers

Why are mid-video creative workers willing to produce content on Bilibili even if the earnings are not high? This is the starting point of research thinking. This paper takes the cultural production practice of UP hosts as an example and finds that the platform attempts to eliminate the instability of labor through control strategies such as interface design, creation incentives, algorithmic streaming, and incubating accounts. The "high skill" of creative work and the non-standardization of the production model explain both the endogenous logic of the platform's "income does not cover income" and the premise of creators' "consent" for generating "love". The high threshold of users' consumption of video forces creators to "compete" in skills, highlighting the subjectivity of workers while forming "identity games", a form of labor control that is different from the previous "de-skillization". The labor-capital conflict conceals the "symbiotic relationship" of checks and dependencies among platforms, creators and users, which not only weakens the degree of labor control of platform capital, but also provides implications for understanding the diversified platform ecosystem and expanding the theory of the labor process.