Audience Entanglement: How Independent Creative Workers Experience the Pressures of Widespread Appeal on Digital Platforms

Abstract

Creative workers often seek a substantial audience for their work. Our findings reveal that a new struggle begins once they attain one. Existing theory fails to account for how creators conceive of and manage the relationship with their audience once their work has gained widespread appeal. In an inductive study of independent creative workers who use digital platforms to share their work, we discovered that after attaining a substantial audience, creators experience audience entanglement: a subjective sense of deep interrelatedness between an individual and the audience for their work such that this relationship becomes a persistent consideration in their approach to creating. This entanglement typically begins as dysfunctional entanglement, characterized by feeling an oppressive dependence on audience reactions, struggling with platform volatility, and experiencing distressing emotions. In this state, creators question the meaning of their work and view platform work as unsustainable. Some creators develop entanglement management strategies—distancing themselves from audience input, depersonalizing audience critiques, and distilling their personal standards—that shift them to a state of functional entanglement, or feeling a balanced dependence on audience reactions, accepting platform volatility, and experiencing uplifting emotions. Functional entanglement allows creators to capture meaning from their audience and to view platform work as sustainable.