Platform super user: Examining Google Arts & Culture’s cultural production

Current scholarship on platforms does not fully account for how platforms produce content. To demonstrate this limitation, we examine the platform Google Arts and Culture (GAC) revealing distinct forms of cultural production. While GAC functions as a repository, allowing users access to objects, sites, and exhibitions, it is more than a digitization project. GAC is a content producer providing narrativized content, as well as games, and opportunities to curate digital collections and produce creative projects. Unpacking these dimensions, our study demonstrates how cultural production functions on GAC and the users that this enables. We argue that GAC facilitates four types of cultural production for distinct groups of cultural producers. Focussing on the cultural production of the platform, we further contend that GAC occupies a unique hybrid role as facilitator and author. We point to this authorial role because it is largely obscured. Assessing how GAC wields cultural control, we characterize its distinct functionality as a ‘super user’ on the platform: facilitating end-user engagement with content, moderating the content uploaded to the platform by institutions, and producing and promoting its own curated content. Analyzing GAC’s affordances as a super user extends our theorization of platformized cultural production with respect to non-monetized platforms. Based on these findings, we call for scholars to attend to the ways in which platforms can function as cultural actors, in addition to their role as technical intermediaries structuring the means of engagement.