Start-ups have become highly influential, with start-up logic permeating increasing aspects of private and social life. But how can we study and understand them? This chapter outlines possible media and culture studies perspectives on start-ups and entrepreneurship. It conceptualizes start-ups as a ‘new medium’ and situates them within contemporary (media) culture, viewing start-up ecosystems respectively as affordance networks, a symbolic form, and a cultural practice.
Introduction
Across the media industries, entrepreneurship has come to be regarded as a key variable determining one's success as a firm or professional. In recent decades, the ability and willingness to strike out on your own to create a new business – a start-up – has become a particular, and often cherished, manifestation of such talent. Today, start-ups in the media industry are common, contributing to a ‘start-up culture’ embraced by many.
In doing so, media follow a broader trend popularized by the tech industry, but also applicable in many other domains. The notion of start-ups and the corresponding focus on small businesses has gradually permeated economic thought since the late 1950s, but its relevance rapidly increased in the 1980s and quickly spread into other social discourses after the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s and especially the beginning of the global financial crisis in 2007/2008.
The social impact of embracing start-ups and the values they propagate must be considered ambivalent. For instance, the so-called appification of immigration, i.e. the creation of start-ups to alleviate the problems of people fleeing from the Syrian civil war, has helped many refugees locate family members or find a place to stay with host families. Yet, scholars like Brabham (2017) indicate that start-up rhetoric institutionalized by crowdfunding platforms (foregrounding flexible business models and bottom-up financing) can be socially harmful in the long run if applied indiscriminately to domains such as art or education. Indeed, recent controversies surrounding companies like Uber and Airbnb suggest that many technology start-ups become increasingly disassociated from the societies they originate from.
