The vortex of visibility: Platformization and literary practices in an emerging economy

Introduction

Narratives circulating in popular imagination often depict writers like Marcel Proust or Harper Lee as solitary figures, crafting their work in isolation, spending years in cork-lined rooms or withdrawn from public attention (Kear, 2012; Neary and Dwyer, 2016). In contrast, today's authors are facing different constraints. They are expected not only to write, but also to engage with audiences, build fanbases, and navigate self-promotion (Larson, 2024). This shift unfolds in a broader media environment where the publishing industry is struggling for consumers’ attention (Tomasena, 2019), and platformization is restructuring various aspects of cultural production (Nieborg and Poell, 2018). Indeed, the rise of platforms has transformed how cultural workers create, distribute, market, and monetize their work (Poell et al., 2021).

While research on digital creative work has expanded (Baym, 2021; Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Duffy, 2017), attention to how platform-independent media workers adapt to the shifting logics of platform capitalism has been uneven. Specifically, how platforms affect the literary field remains comparatively underexplored. In research on media industries, the publishing industry and the creative work of book authors are often overlooked, even though books are one of the key cultural products (Deuze, 2025; Havens and Lotz, 2014; Herbert et al., 2020). What is more, most existing literature is situated in the Global North and countries like Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS), with few studies examining how platformization plays out in smaller or emerging markets. Recent calls in platform studies have emphasized the need to multiply reference points and include a broader range of cultural actors and locales (Poell et al., 2025).

This article addresses this gap by examining the case of Vietnam, an emerging market economy with a publishing industry where long-standing professional norms and local literary traditions sharply collide with global platform capitalism. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 36 authors and online participant observation, I examine how authors perceive the platformization of their creative work and how they negotiate the tensions between traditional literary values and heightened demands for visibility and marketability. Using Bourdieu's (1983) framework on the literary field and the framework of platformization of cultural production (Helmond, 2015; Poell et al., 2021), the article argues that platforms facilitate different dynamics in the literary field, pose new tensions regarding content repackaging, and intensify the negotiation between artistic expression and market demand. Based on data analysis, the article proposes the concept of the vortex of visibility, which demonstrates how authors are drawn toward the opportunities offered by digital platforms, while navigating the risk of being “swept away” into cycles of performance and market logic that can compromise their creative agency and alter literary works.

In this article, I focus on how social media platforms shape not only the visibility and positions of authors, but also the content and form of their literary work. I pay special attention to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, as these are the platforms most widely used by authors and the most popular in Vietnam. By centering the perspectives of Vietnamese authors and their hybrid practices, this article not only contributes to the underexplored field of platformized creativity but also expands the geographic and epistemological scope of platform studies, offering insights from the Global South that challenge dominant, Global North-centric narratives.

Professional authors and cultural production

Professional authors and the literary field have been the subject of extensive study by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1983, 1996), whose work offers a strong framework for understanding cultural production. Bourdieu conceptualizes the field of cultural production as including two primary subfields: small-scale (or restricted) production and large-scale (or mass) production (Bourdieu, 1996). These subfields are structured along two intersecting axes. First, the horizontal axis measures autonomy versus heteronomy, where small-scale production prioritizes “art for art's sake,” and large-scale production caters to market demands. Second, the vertical axis represents the degree of consecration, indicating the level of literary or artistic prestige of a creative work within the field (Bourdieu, 1983).

Along these axes, Bourdieu classifies authors based on the genre and intended audience of their work. He places what he terms “pure” or “autonomous” authors in dominant positions within small-scale production, those who resist market pressures and seek validation from peers rather than mass popularity. Although they often lack commercial success, especially early in their careers, these authors accumulate symbolic capital (literary prizes, critical acclaim, inclusion in academic curricula) and form close-knit communities with shared values and norms to reinforce their legitimacy (Speller, 2011). Contemporary examples of such writers include Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera, whose works are critically acclaimed, philosophically complex, and primarily engaged with by literary critics, academics, and serious readers rather than the general public.

In contrast, bestselling authors, whom Bourdieu refers to as “heteronomous” writers, occupy dominant positions in large-scale production. They gain commercial success through mass sales and public recognition, but are more heavily subjected to external influences such as market trends and audience preferences (Bourdieu, 1983). Despite the significant economic capital they accumulate, these authors are often symbolically discredited, as they are perceived as catering to the mass market, which implies a lower-class readership (Speller, 2011). J. K. Rowling, Stephen King, and Nicholas Sparks can be considered representatives of these writers. On the other pole of the horizontal axis, positioned in opposition to popular writers are Bohemian writers, who challenge literary conventions by advocating for innovation, artistic independence, or a return to origins. Writers who are unsuccessful or in decline also occupy these dominated positions, lacking both economic and symbolic capital (Speller, 2011).

Bourdieu's framework is particularly relevant for understanding the position of authors in contemporary literature and analyzing how digital platforms shape (or reshape) their positions, influence creative work, and transform the literary field. Therefore, this article applies his field theory to examine how Vietnamese book authors experience, integrate, and negotiate these technological and market transformations, offering a nuanced understanding of the shifting power dynamics in cultural production. Within his framework, Bourdieu also introduces the concept of position-takings, which refers to the struggles among writers to define their positions within the field (Bourdieu, 1983). These often unfold as tensions between newcomers and established figures, leading to shifts within subfields and the broader literary field (Hesmondhalgh, 2006). He refers to this evolving terrain as the space of possibilities, which includes potential courses of action, established positions to surpass, and the conditions that enable or constrain position-takings (Hesmondhalgh, 2006; Speller, 2011). Considering the way digital platforms shape both the position-takings of Vietnamese authors and their space of possibilities can reveal how platform logics intersect with professional norms to transform modes of authorship, gatekeeping, and recognition within the literary field.

Crucially, Bourdieu emphasized the relative autonomy of the literary field, developed through a long history of internal resistance to external pressures, such as social pressure, technological advancements, or political upheavals (Benson, 1999; Speller, 2011). In today's digital media environment, this autonomy is increasingly negotiated within new conditions shaped by platform logics. For contemporary authors, many of the tensions between creativity and constraints can be further illuminated by the framework of platformization, which specifies how platforms reconfigure media work, restructure the dynamics of visibility, labor, and creativity in an increasingly digitized cultural economy.

Platformization of cultural production

Cultural production has long been marked by difficulties of market entry and tensions between creative agency, economic pressures, and market logics. Bourdieu (1983) noted that the field historically favored those secure enough to dismiss conventional careers and to take on the risks of an occupation that was not a “job.” Later, Gill and Pratt (2008) show how ideas of work autonomy, informational capitalism, and the “factory without walls” illuminate cultural workers as exemplary of the new precariat. Building on this, McRobbie (2018) depicts contemporary creative workers as young, middle-class, university-educated individuals with the cultural capital and flexibility to pursue temporary, project-based work in search of long-term opportunities within a new creative economy characterized by inequalities, precarity, and competition.

The rise of digital technologies, and particularly platformization, has reshaped the cultural production landscape. This article adopts Poell et al.'s (2021) definition of platformization as “the penetration of digital platforms’ economic, infrastructural, and governmental extensions into the cultural industries, as well as the organization of cultural practices of labor, creativity, and democracy around these platforms” (p. 5). At its core, platformization involves a shift from traditional two-sided markets to multi-sided configurations, dominated by Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) in the West, and Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xaomi (BATX) in China (Lin and de Kloet, 2019; Nieborg and Poell, 2018). This article focuses specifically on the creativity and production aspects of platformization, investigating how book authors navigate these infrastructural and institutional transformations and how these dynamics shape the content they produce.

While platforms are often hailed as democratizing spaces that create opportunities for expressions of creativity and audience engagement (Duffy et al., 2019), they also entail significant constraints. First, platforms are subject to various laws and government policies that determine the content and activities they can host, depending on the specific regional context (Gillespie, 2018). Second, platforms impose their own rules that shape the technical framework and structure cultural content through regulation, curation, and moderation (Gillespie, 2018). Therefore, platforms represent a distinct form of governance, described as digital cages and accelerants of precarity, which exacerbate unstable conditions of labor, externalize responsibility while concentrating control, and pose unique challenges, especially for gig workers (Vallas and Schor, 2020). For example, Zeng and Kaye (2022) show how TikTok must constantly navigate the rules and regulatory frameworks of the countries where it operates, as well as its practices of visibility moderation, which leave creative workers on the platform feeling confused and frustrated.

Additionally, platform metrics and online visibility also introduce new dynamics in the age of platform capitalism. On the one hand, online reputation in forms of likes, shares, and follower counts offers social recognition both online and offline. According to Bourdieu (2018), reputation functions as symbolic capital, convertible to other gains such as marketing or political influence. Online visibility can thus enhance social capital by expanding trust, recognition, and network access. Online fame and virality also generate economic capital through brand endorsements and platform monetization (Mears and Beauvais, 2025). On the other hand, platform metrics reshape creative priorities and intensify productivity demands. Research shows that platform logics restructure traditional cultural production, from journalism to music, raising tensions between commercial imperatives and creative autonomy (Baym, 2013; Christin, 2020; Dvir-Gvirsman and Tsuriel, 2022). These dynamics require creators to constantly adapt to algorithmic demands and balance authenticity with self-promotion. Accordingly, recent scholarship highlights practices of algorithmic resistance, showing how platform workers devise strategies to counter platform power and exercise agency within metric-driven environments (Bonini and Treré, 2024).

One of the key debates in platform studies is whether platformization fosters or hinders diversity in both content and producers. While Caplan and Boyd (2018) argue that algorithmic systems may lead to industrial homogenization by inducing mimetic and normative pressures, other studies suggest more complex outcomes. In South Korea's webtoon industry, Kim and Yu (2019) find that platforms have expanded content variety and diversified the backgrounds of creators. Similarly, Lin and de Kloet (2019) show that in rural China, platform labor offers marginalized individuals social mobility and economic opportunities, facilitating their emergence as the “unlikely creative workers.” Therefore, scholars have called for expanding the analytical reference points to account for the diverse perspectives and capacities for action among a wider range of creative workers (Poell et al., 2025).

To date, most studies in platformization have focused on influencers and content creators, with less attention paid to platform-independent cultural producers, who are also navigating digital transformation. While existing research has examined how digital platforms shape the practices of musicians (Baym, 2018), journalists (Bossio et al., 2024), screenwriters (Navar-Gill, 2020), and game developers (Nieborg and Poell, 2018), sectors such as literary and book publishing remain underexplored. This oversight is significant given the literary field's long-standing professional norms and cultural hierarchies, which distinguish it from platform-native industries (Bourdieu, 1983; Speller, 2011). As Nieborg and Poell (2018) note, platformization does not unfold uniformly but varies across cultural sectors based on their historical relationships with platforms.

Additionally, the literature not only tends to focus on platform-dependent sites of cultural production, but also often overlooks regions considered peripheral (Melkote and Steeves, 2015). Recent scholarship cautions against framing platformization as a singular, universal process driven solely by technological or economic logics, an approach often rooted in Global North epistemologies (Siles et al., 2025; Steinberg et al., 2025). The creative industries in BRICS nations may themselves be deeply intertwined with Global North dynamics (Herbert et al., 2020), making it difficult to fully isolate local effects. I argue that it is precisely in the so-called “peripheral” regions, where traditional creative practices intersect with modern technologies, that the tensions and transformations of platformization are most visible and revealing. This article responds to these calls by investigating how platformization shapes creative practices within Vietnam's literary field, an emerging creative economy marked by the coexistence of traditional production norms and rapid digital transitions. In doing so, it contributes to expanding platform studies beyond the Global North by focusing on cultural producers whose voices remain underrepresented in current scholarly debates.

Vietnamese publishing scene

Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia (Caporale, 2022). Since the reform era and the lifting of the US embargo in 1994, the Vietnamese economy has experienced rapid growth. The Vietnamese economy is unique in that it is controlled by a single-party state, the Communist Party of Vietnam, and operates as a socialist-oriented market economy. In recent decades, the expansion of GAFAM platforms has substantially influenced Vietnam's social and economic landscape. Unlike China, major global technology platforms are accessible in Vietnam, opening up space for public discourse, creative expressions, and other forms of the digital economy. In fact, Vietnam ranks among the top 10 countries in terms of social media users, with over 73% of the population active on social media (Nguyen et al., 2025). However, Vietnam's Cybersecurity Law grants the government the authority to block access to data or delete content deemed to infringe upon “national security,” constraining digital freedom (Sherman, 2019). Consequently, platforms such as Facebook must comply with the Vietnamese government's requests to remove anti-government content in order to maintain their operations within the country (Gillespie, 2018). For cultural producers in digital economies subject to such restrictive national internet governance, platformized creativity is further complicated by localized precarity and other geopolitical conditions (Bidav, 2025), shaping creative processes, content, and audience engagement.

Regarding Vietnam's publishing industry, in 2024 it generated 4500 billion VND (over 170 million USD), with more than 50,000 titles and 597 million copies published (Hồ Lam, 2025). Most books published in Vietnam are in Vietnamese, while English books (except textbooks) are typically imported and targeted at foreigners or English learners. Vietnam's publishing industry differs significantly from many others, reflecting characteristics of an emerging economy. Specifically, from 2017 to 2024, both the number of copies sold and the number of new titles published have steadily increased (Anh Vũ, 2023; Hồ Lam, 2025). In contrast, publishers in the United States and Ibero-America have expanded title output while cutting print runs (Larson, 2024), mitigating risk through diversification in response to global structural shifts such as battles with technology giants and competition for audience attention (Tomasena, 2019).

Notably, the Vietnamese publishing industry has not experienced significant disruption from self-publishing platforms such as Amazon. The process of purchasing rights and distributing books still operates in a largely traditional manner. Typically, authors sell copyrights to publishers, and printed books are disseminated through networks of publishers and distributors, including major bookstore chains and independent bookshops across the country. This traditional model is often characterized as a “top-down” process, in which publishers and industry stakeholders act as gatekeepers of ideas, exercising considerable power over authors and effectively determining what becomes widely accessible and publicly visible (Coser, 1975; Pecoskie and Hill, 2015). Additionally, most books sold in Vietnam are physical copies, while ebooks and audiobooks account for only about 10% of total sales (Anh Vũ, 2023), reflecting a traditional publishing market.

However, with the rise of social media, Vietnam's book industry has increasingly relied on platforms for marketing and promotion. Facing competition from online entertainment and the difficulties in reaching targeted audiences, most Vietnamese publishers now treat social media as a strategic tool, actively cultivating Facebook fanpages and online reading groups (Tâm Anh, 2024). For example, Nhã Nam, one of Vietnam's largest publishers, has a fanpage with over 1 million followers, surpassing Penguin Random House's and HarperCollins’ fanpages, and an online reading group of more than 250,000 members (Tâm Anh, 2024). Publishers also collaborate with prominent authors, influencers, or BookTokers to promote books. Consequently, authors in Vietnam, like their counterparts elsewhere, face significant pressures to market their works and build visibility (Tomasena, 2019). Exploring the experiences of Vietnamese book authors is therefore crucial to understanding how literary actors situated in the global periphery “produce and circulate cultural forms in historically and geographically contextualized ways” (Herbert et al., 2020: 6). It allows us to see how cultural workers navigate the infrastructural, commercial logics of global platforms within local sociocultural contexts.

Methods

This research employs a qualitative multi-method approach as part of a larger study on how Vietnamese authors navigate constraints in their work. Methods included: (1) in-depth interviews with 36 published book authors; and (2) eight months of online participant observation (February–December 2024) across major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Substack, Goodreads), focusing on online literary culture. I also followed public social media profiles and fanpages of 44 authors, including 16 interviewees, and collected publicly available metrics such as follower counts and interactions. Guided by ethical considerations in online observation, I only used online data when it directly related to participants’ practices, could be anonymized, and did not cause reputational harm or embarrassment (Hennell et al., 2020).

This article focuses on professional book authors—those who have published at least one book that is launched and distributed for commercial purposes, distinguishing them from bloggers, journalists, and other writing professionals whose work is often tied to institutional or organizational structures. While some authors may hold multiple roles (e.g., journalist, editor), their work as book authors is defined by relatively autonomous creative labor and involvement in the commercial publishing system. Additionally, although the boundaries between print authors and digital writers are increasingly fluid in a platformized media environment, this article centers on authors embedded in traditional publishing circuits to better understand how platform logics interact with conventional models of literary production.

Participants were recruited through snowball sampling, starting with my contacts in the publishing industry. I explained my role as a researcher and author, outlined the aims of the study, and invited them to participate in interviews about their experiences. Participants represented diversity in professional backgrounds, age, socioeconomic status, and career trajectories. They published across genres, including novels, short stories, poetry, literary fiction, children's books, and creative non-fiction, with published works ranging from one to over 80. Age ranged from late 20s to mid-60s, with roughly 40% born in the 1990s, another 40% in the 1980s, and the remainder in the 1960s and 1970s. Socioeconomic backgrounds spanned from working class to upper-middle class. Most of them began their careers in fields such as banking, hospitality, journalism, marketing, editing, translation, teaching, and art before becoming book authors. Among the participants, 35 had Facebook accounts, 12 had Instagram accounts, 5 had Threads accounts, 2 had TikTok accounts, and 1 had a YouTube account. Of the participants, 13 identified as men, and 23 as women (see Table 1 in the Appendix for participant details).

Interviews were conducted via Zoom and recorded with participants’ consent. Using a semi-structured interview protocol, I explored topics such as career trajectories, the use of digital platforms in creative work, the number of public profiles or fanpages, the themes of their online content, market and commercial pressures on creativity, and authorship in the digital age. I allowed participants to fully articulate their perspectives and explore topics important to their creative practices, while also being attentive to their energy levels. Accordingly, interviews lasted between 45 min and 3 hours. After transcribing each interview, I translated it from Vietnamese to English for analysis.

Interviews were conducted and analyzed iteratively until the process of memo writing and reflection revealed that theoretical saturation was reached (Glaser and Strauss, 2017). I used an inductive approach to develop the coding categories. Grounded theory methodology (Glaser and Strauss, 2017) informed the coding process, which involved a line-by-line examination of the data to identify underlying themes and meanings. This approach helps researchers remain attuned to participants’ views of their realities, rather than assuming shared perspectives or experiences (Charmaz, 2000). To address concerns regarding the vulnerability of online research and participants’ desire for visibility, all interviewees were anonymized.

Additionally, this research is shaped by my dual role as both a scholar and an author within the Vietnamese literary community. I have published six books in Vietnamese, including a best-seller, and several of my works have won national book awards. My positionality facilitates access to other authors through established networks and professional credibility, shaping the nature of our interactions and enabling engagement as both a peer and a researcher. This insider status fosters trust and rapport, resulting in more candid and nuanced discussions on sensitive topics or traditionally held beliefs. It also allowed me to interpret participants’ emotional investments and cultural references through a framework of shared understanding rather than as an external observer. At the same time, through memo-writing and conversations with academic mentors and colleagues, I remained reflexive, recognizing that this proximity requires continuous self-examination to distinguish between my own authorial experiences and those of my participants, ensuring analytical distance while leveraging interpretive depth.

Discussion and conclusion

The integration of digital platforms into cultural production has had profound effects. In the context of Vietnam's emerging market, where traditional norms and new media technologies collide, this article reveals the increasing dependence of creative work and the literary field on platforms. Although print book distribution continues to dominate, Vietnamese authors are increasingly turning to digital platforms for topic exploration, visibility, and fanbase building. Authors employ various strategies within literary communities and with readers to co-create works that meet market demands more effectively. Additionally, they use diverse methods to boost book sales, from creating supporting content to attract readers, developing new content to test markets, building communities, and incorporating viral content to drive book sales.

It is important to note from the data analysis that while the process from digitalization to platformization unfolded over several decades in the Global North (Van Dijck et al., 2018), in the Vietnamese context, it occurred more rapidly and concurrently, with the two processes overlapping rather than unfolding sequentially. This convergence is reflected in participants’ accounts, where digital platforms are simultaneously described as tools for writing, publishing, promotion, and community-building, highlighting how digitalization and platformization are experienced as inseparable aspects of contemporary literary practice.

The findings also reveal tensions between market imperatives and authors’ creative autonomy. While the relationship between art and commerce is not a new topic in the creative industries (Caves, 2000), the platformization of the literary field has intensified these tensions. Digital platforms amplify market demand through online audience expectations and introduce new challenges in navigating different writing formats and divergent reader preferences. For authors producing sponsored content, these tensions are heightened as they must balance a three-way relationship among creativity, audience expectations, and brand goals.

While previous studies have examined the impact of digital platforms on creative work using terms like “paradox of connection” (Bossio et al., 2024) or the “digital double bind” (Duffy and Pruchniewska, 2017), this article introduces the model of the vortex of visibility to conceptualize the experience of book authors navigating platformization. I argue that for authors in traditional publishing industries like Vietnam, platformization acts as a vortex in the field; its immense gravitational pull opens new opportunities, transforming their work and careers in various dimensions. However, it also exposes them to public scrutiny and backlash. Given the historically independent nature of the literary field, authors respond differently to these pressures. Some remain on the periphery and boundary layer, engaging cautiously, while others are at the vortex's center, feeling compelled to participate despite the various risks involved.

The analysis indicates that within the vortex of visibility, authors accumulate different forms of capital—cultural, social, and symbolic. Authors in the vortex's inner layers can convert these capitals into economic gains through sponsored content or viral marketing to boost physical book sales. The increased visibility also accelerates authors’ positioning and upward mobility. This research extends Bourdieu's framework of the field of cultural production, illustrating how positions, position-takings, and capital conversions evolve in the digital age. Additionally, the article reveals how digital platforms enable undersupported authors to break into the literary world, showing that contrary to the homogenization often observed in platformization in the Global North, in certain Global South contexts, these platforms can expand possibilities for a diverse creative class and promote social mobility (Lin and de Kloet, 2019). Notably, several female authors reported frequently encountering online harassment and public scrutiny, which complicated their ability to translate platform visibility into mobility. However, the use of snowball sampling limits the representativeness of the sample, and the observed gender balance may reflect the composition of my professional networks. Future research could examine these gendered dynamics more systematically across a broader sample.

Regarding the debate over whether platformization promotes diversity in creativity (Duffy et al., 2019), this article shows that in the case of Vietnam's emerging market, the answer is not straightforward. On one hand, platformization broadens possibilities, allowing authors to focus on genres popular with online readers, such as short prose and illustrated poetry. However, persistent barriers remain, as authors of niche genres, such as literary fiction or long-form poetry, still struggle for visibility and publishing opportunities. Digital platforms amplify some genres while rendering others invisible. Although some authors can navigate subfields of literature, others face challenges in breaking into the market, especially those who reject viral content or algorithmic strategies. These findings contribute to prior research suggesting that platformization perpetuates existing disparities in online visibility and popularity (Tomasena, 2019).

Additionally, Nieborg and Poell (2018) discuss “contingent commodities,” where digital platform products are malleable, modular, and informed by data-driven feedback. This article shows that for authors, their content is subject to the affordances of platforms, continuously modified based on online reader feedback, and adapted to fit other formats, such as print books. This highlights the flexibility and ongoing evolution of cultural products in the digital age, driven by market demands, in contrast to the more static nature of traditional publishing. However, this flexibility may come at the cost of authorial agency and freedom in their work.

Finally, many authors express a shared desire to preserve the sacredness of creativity, maintaining their sanity, identity, and artistic integrity. Previous research on art and cultural production has discussed the division of labor in publishing, where publishers, editors, and dealers shield writers from direct market engagement, helping them maintain a distance from the audience (Becker, 2023; Bourdieu, 1996). However, the article emphasizes that platformization has a strong impact on the publishing industry, prompting many authors to create online content to promote their works. The tension between maintaining an online presence and preserving a sacred space captures the challenge of navigating the digital era, balancing professional demands for visibility with the anxiety of losing autonomy and creative freedom.

In conclusion, this article provides a multifaceted view of how platformization shapes the creative work of Vietnamese authors. On the one hand, platformization alters the field dynamics by enabling nontraditional entrants, repositioning authors via online virality, and fostering new genres. On the other hand, it also heightens the tension between creative autonomy and market logics through online audience pressures and platform metrics. The vortex framework offers an alternative to the paradox-centered accounts, emphasizing dynamic tensions rather than static binaries in conceptualizing cultural workers’ experiences with platforms. By focusing on creative practices in a peripheral region of the global economy, the article expands scholarship on platformized cultural production, offering new insights into how cultural workers in the Global South manage hybrid practices that balance visibility, livelihood, and artistic integrity.