Zizi Li is an interdisciplinary media theorist and critical digital scholar. Her research primarily focuses on aesthetics and discourses of labor and identity formation under technocapitalism.
✨Research ✨
The underlying drive behind my research concerns questions of power operating in media/cultural/tech industries masked by technological developments and emerging production practices.
My doctoral dissertation examined specters of the influencer ecosystem. The influencer ecosystem is a messy, complex system, comprising many embedded production systems, interdependent sectors of operation, and nested precarious labor. I bring together production cultures with critical digital studies’ attention to platform, interface, and infrastructure to grapple with the material and immaterial processes of identity formation and labor precarity in digital media production.
My research, as seen in Television and New Media, Velvet Light Trap, and Mediapolis, positions the influencer-centric platform economy in the 2010s and 2020s as a stage in technocapitalism that shifts industrial practices of work in media production while mobilizing an overlooked network of extraprecarious laborers from logistical supply chains to home production.
Stay tune for my forthcoming writings on topics including ‘racial logics in influencer media production,’ ‘logistical labor in creator economy,’ ‘ultrashort vertical dramas,’ and ‘influencer horrors.’
✨Book In Progress ✨
I am currently writing a book on the theory and history of influencer- and creator-centric digital/visual/media cultures in the early 21st century’s platform era.
In this book, I trace a history of mainstream time-based internet media from the mid-2010s to the mid-2020s including long-form creator process videos, virtual influencer music videos and advertisements, short-form viral dance challenges, and ultrashort vertical dramas. These digital cultural productions, though often considered as bad objects, embody key aesthetics and work of spectacle-making, image and relations management, algorithmic visibility, and platform/industrial logics.
This book invites audiences to practice modes of spectral engagement; that is, critical ways of seeing, listening, and sensing sideways with media objects fueling the glance culture and attention economy.