The Organizational Model of New Cultural Intermediaries in the social media era. An Italian case study

This article aims to investigate the phenomenon of video-making professionals and how they are changing the organizational and management dynamics of the creative industries in the social media era. These professionals have achieved resounding success thanks to commercial, amateur and satirical videos, viral marketing and web series. We see them as new cultural intermediaries occupying spaces between culture, economy and community, so fashionable and popular as to be capable of interacting and negotiating with publishing and production companies, proposing new models of economic exploitation of cultural products. Drawing on the bourdieusian framework of cultural intermediaries and by applying an in-depth case study of an Italian independent video-making company, we investigate how bohemian and entrepreneurial behaviours relate within their creative production. The analysis shows a gradual process of overlapping between product and producer that characterizes their contents’ production and enables them as ‘self-branded creators’.