Mapping creator labor in the digital society: Potential and challenges

The view that the contemporary media environment is ecology is not novel to any media scholars. There were various attempts to gain a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics by which digital media affect our political, cultural, and economic life from an ecological view, which not only allow researchers to capture the entanglements between technical devices, codes, and human actions (e.g., Taffel, 2019) but also help to explain the mechanisms of transmedia and transplatform cultural flows (e.g., Steinberg, 2012). Daniela Jaramillo-Dent and Michael Latzer (2026, in this issue), however, chose to center content creators’ belief systems within the social media ecology with the aim to capture the full complexity of creator labor. In particular, they develop a visual mapping approach to illustrate content creators’ different sense-making in interactions with distinct actors that coexist within the vast social media ecosystem, including their immediate network (e.g., audiences, creator communities, platforms), as well as with structural forces recognized as platform economics.

Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer's focus differs from conventional media ecology studies, as the core of their inquiry is the human perception and interpretation of the ecological system from the perspective of a particular group of media users, namely, content creators. This visual mapping approach, according to Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer (2026, in this issue), contains emancipatory potential to help content creators make sense of their own positions in the complex value chain established by social media. This approach is a valuable attempt to provide a timely update to Jameson's (1988) conception of cognitive mapping, bringing spatial analysis into current creator-studies scholarship and enabling more critical reflection on the relations between global platform-capitalist systems and creator labor. In this commentary, I will first elaborate on the value and challenges of cognitive mapping (Jameson, 1988) as an analytical and political project for our contemporary digital societies. Subsequently, I will highlight some of the article's findings regarding cognitive mapping and formulate critical responses to further develop this approach in the field.

To start with, Jameson's (1988) cognitive mapping is a political project that took inspiration from urban planner Kevin Lynch. According to Jameson (1988: 283), “the conception of cognitive mapping involves a spatial analysis of the totality of class relations on a global scale,” which is closely associated with ideology itself, as “the imaginary representation of the subject's relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.” This was a significant political issue in late capitalism, when multinational corporations coordinate commodity production and consumption across the globe and render the aesthetic sensation into a postmodern hyperspace (Jameson, 1984). Under postmodern and late-capitalist conditions, historical experience and its richly affective structures of feeling collapse into a perpetual present of consumer-driven intensities, making it extremely difficult for a subject to cope with or figure out their imaginary relation to the global, multinational, and decentered networks of capitalism (Mirrlees, 2005). For Jameson (1988), cognitive mapping provides a needed intervention to enable an individual subject to situate perceptions of their immediate surroundings within historical time and to interpret their experiences through the structure of feeling. At that time, hyper-real and commercial-coded media simulations were circulated on television screens and in cinemas, through branding and marketing, concealing the inequalities and exploitation of global supply chains (Jameson, 1984; Klein, 2009). For a subject to reconnect with surrounding objects, one has to think beyond the consumer's position and ground oneself in historical, political, and economic relations and forces, which is the core value of cognitive mapping.

Almost three decades later, the late capitalist system has evolved: while the dominant capitalist systems are still driven by multinational corporations, these corporations are no longer manufacturers but platform companies that possess tremendous technological and economic power, transforming the political and social infrastructure of contemporary life (Srnicek, 2016). Individual relations with the surrounding lifeworld are now deeply embedded in digital networks and platforms (van Dijck et al. 2018), structured around certain data-centered economic models (Zuboff, 2015), and mediated by evolving forms of interface—from social media to AI agents (Ortiz-Freuler and Castells, 2026). Accordingly, how we make sense of our relation as an individual subject to the surrounding lifeworld (in terms of temporal, spatial, affective, and embodied experiences) and capitalist developments became even more unmappable. How could we practice cognitive mapping in today's digital societies? The layering, or the stack, of relations operates at a planetary level (Bratton, 2026), seemingly a scale far beyond the perception of individual subjective experience.

The work of Daniela Jaramillo-Dent and Michael Latzer (2026, in this issue) attempts to address the gap between cognitive understanding and a subject's position within the tremendously complex platform capitalist systems, centering on what they call the “disenchanted and enchanted dimensions of sensemaking” among content creators. Content creators are arguably representatives of individuals whose lifeworlds are primarily constructed and sustained by social media networks. While some of them might have varying degrees of understanding of platform monetization mechanisms and regulatory frameworks, many are experiencing “significant uncertainty and unexplainability,” as Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer (2026, in this issue) explain. The enchanted dimensions, therefore, account for one's attempt to understand such unexplainability. This reasoning provides an interesting addition to Jameson's (1988) original cognitive mapping approach, bringing in the conception of belief systems. According to Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer (2026, in this issue), disenchanted belief systems are characterized by material, concrete, and rational sensemaking approaches for understanding creator labor as work, information production, as well as (para)sociality, while the enchanted belief is captured in the ways creators cope with aspects beyond their rational understanding. The enchanted dimension of creators’ belief system underpins them in precarious labor conditions, providing speculative thinking about future success and passions, which is religion-like. Nonetheless, the embodied and affective experiences and reactions toward content creation work and life seem to be swinging in the space between enchanted and disenchanted dimensions, incapable of being captured.

What is interesting is the visual mapping methodological practices in this study, in which content creators were recruited to participate in a spatial positioning activity, accompanied by interviews. In this activity, creators materialized their cognitive understanding of their positions relative to other actors, using labels across different dimensions. These practices enable direct visualization of the creators’ sensemaking process, resulting in a cognitive map to some degree. Labels and relational actors (such as brands, audience, and app developers) were predefined by researchers as an invitation to provoke their sense-making process. The cocreation of cognitive mapping by researchers and content creators here is an innovative attempt.

Yet, such methodological practices can only address the phenomenological experiences of creators (and arguably the researchers as well) and have clear limitations in tackling the issue of how content creators position themselves within the planetary-scale computation in relation to aspects such as energy consumption, geopolitical tensions, and human–AI interactions (Bratton, 2026). For instance, the material and energy consumption of their content creation activities remains unexplored—or, in other words, could they make sense of the material conditions that support those practices. Moreover, while the article explored the economic dimensions of content creation, it left the broader scope, scale, and totality of data production in relation to platform capitalism unacknowledged. Against a backdrop of shifting techno-social realities—such as the rising ecological impact of AI—these data production schemes remain like ghosts in the house: uncaptured, yet lingering. To further develop the cognitive mapping practices, we need to think about the prototypes used for the mapping, which should build on critical conceptual models such as the layering of the Stack (Bratton, 2026) and take into account diverse interconnected actors from the global supply chains (Crawford and Joler, 2018; Tsing, 2015), which arguably are beyond individual subjects’ everyday thinking. It will be a challenge, but such a challenge carries critical sociopolitical value in transforming the participants’ cognitive boundaries and capacities.

In addition, this work ambitiously and systematically reintegrates important inquiries into creators’ beliefs about specific ecosystem elements (such as algorithms and platform affordances) into a single social media ecosystem mapping prototype. This prototype is primarily established on Western platform culture. Therefore, there is a risk of universalizing Western experiences (in this work, specifically perspectives by European creators) and of treating other platform cultures (see Steinberg et al., 2024) as case studies or supplementary materials for this prototype. Despite the authors call to “apply it to different contexts (emerging platforms, non-Western markets, niche creator communities), making it a flexible tool for platform studies broadly,” what was needed is not simply to “apply and adapt.” Fundamentally, this prototype needs to be revisited and calibrated with perspectives of content creators from diverse geographies and cultures (Bidav and Mehta, 2025; Poell et al., 2026), which will articulate alternative epistemological and ontological understandings about our positioning in platform capitalism grounded in local specificities and situated lifeworlds (Ye et al., 2025; Nguyen-Thu, 2026). The starting point is not to claim a single and universally applicable ecosystem for content creators but to acknowledge the diversity and complexities of platform cultures in today's digital society and ask: how could we cognitively map the creators’ labor under such global configurations? Also, do the actors of brands, agencies, and marketers hold the same weight in drawing the picture of creators’ labor in the Global Majority world? We do not have enough empirical answers but we can speculatively argue that the spatial mapping outcomes will be significantly different in terms of structures and ways of social organizations, and contingent on geographical and temporal conditions.

As revealed, to establish our relation as an individual subject to the surrounding lifeworld in the contemporary moment has become an urgent yet extremely difficult task. Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer (2026, in this issue) present an innovative and valuable attempt to address this issue from the perspective of content creators. Their proposed approach contains analytical rigor, shedding light on the core inquiry of how to conceive the digital conditions that we are living in. The entangled relations with other actors, the layering of technical and social structures, as well as the unexplainable affective experiences are all strong forces shaping our understandings of digital societies. To unravel these aspects, collectively, let's reactivate Jameson's political project of cognitive mapping, starting from this work.