Content Creators’ Belief Systems within the Social Media Ecosystem

This project considers an ecological perspective of social media platforms as ecosystems, and their role as drivers in digitalized societies. In these algorithmic spaces, content creators contribute essential value to platforms and are part of an industry that has expanded significantly in the past decade and is expected to reach half a trillion dollars by 2027.

Research on content creators has significantly expanded in the past few years, reflecting a high interest in exploring the beliefs and behaviors of creators about different aspects of their work.  This research has relied in a variety of terms such as beliefs, perceptions, folk theories, imaginaries, assumptions, among others. Research on digital media also reflects increased interest in the religion-like functions of digitalization, including transcendent media experiences, and the theistic nature of social media algorithms, but there is scarce research exploring the transcendent and religion-like features of content creation.

We aim to close these gaps by proposing the use of a belief system framework to explore the cognitive (myths), behavioral (rituals), and experiential aspects of creators’ belief systems to assess the potential for implicit religiosity and religion-like functions in their everyday digital activities. We consider previous research on creators to propose a sketch of a social media ecosystem including different aspects of their work as key objects of belief for content creators (e.g., platforms, communities of creators, audiences, other complementors) and a framework to explore the (un)knowable nature of different aspects of the social media ecosystems to explore the extent to which creators’ belief systems feature religion-like functions based on previous theorizations of implicit religiosity and religion-like digitalization.