CDCS Colloquium: Yena Lee

Creator Logic-in-Practice: Political Content Creators and the Negotiation of Influence in the Post-Networked Era

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Talk Description 

In today's media environment characterized by algorithmically governed platforms like TikTok, publics are no longer primarily organized through social networks that have defined earlier platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Instead, visibility is increasingly allocated by algorithmic predictions of what will capture attention in the moment. Drawing on a year-long digital ethnography on TikTok and interviews with progressive political content creators and communications strategists, this book project investigates how influence is enacted and translated into political power in what Lee conceptualizes as the post-networked era—where networks still exist but their organizing force is eclipsed by opaque algorithmic platform infrastructures.

Extending Bourdieu's logic of practice, Lee introduces the framework of creator logic-in-practice, treating creators as fielded actors whose practices take shape in relation to one another while contending with constantly evolving and overlapping forces of algorithmic pressures, political opportunity structures, and commercial imperatives. Beginning with the structural focus on the field of social media production, where attention capital has become the dominant force, the analysis moves inward to examine how creators navigate the field demands that often come into conflict with the political ethos driving their work. Finally, it expands outward to explore the friction that arises when creators attempt to become movement actors across grassroots and institutional politics. In doing so, this book project reveals new ways of thinking about influence, power, and political possibility in a landscape where attention economies are fundamentally reconfiguring American political life.

About Yena Lee

Yena Lee (she/they) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society. She holds a Ph.D. in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern School of Communication. 

Yena’s research spans networked social movements, creator culture, and fan activism, unified by two central questions: How do unorganized actors become influential and under what conditions does that influence translate into political power? These questions anchor her broader research agenda, which examines the shifting dynamics of influence and power across digital platforms, issue areas, and national contexts, including South Korea, the United States, and Brazil.

Her work has been published in Information, Communication & Society and the International Journal of Communication, and presented at the annual conferences of the International Communication Association and Association of Internet Researchers, among others.