Rethinking Creative Labor: A Sociotechnical Examination of Creativity & CreativeWork on TikTok

Social media platform success relies on users to consume, create, and share creative content. While some creatives aspire to become influencers, this is not the goal of all creatives, particularly those with smaller audiences. Through an interview study of 15 creatives on TikTok, we explore the often overlapping intentions for creating and sharing videos, as well as the challenges to maintaining these creative intentions and routines as they are shaped by platform logic. We find platforms introduce impediments which disrupt people's creative routines and alienate people from their overlapping creative intentions; introducing challenges which alienate people from their sense of self, and their audiences. We construct a broader definition of creative labor - the work of professionalizing and monetizing a creative product shared on social media - reflecting on how the routine enactment of creative labor is impacted by infrastructural elements of technology.