Jessica Maddox never expected to be an academic — let alone the editor-in-chief of a research journal.
An English major in college who graduated during the 2008 recession, she ended up working at a magazine where — being the youngest employee — she was tasked with figuring out social media.
“It was around the time everybody was like ‘Oh, should we have a Facebook page? Should we have a Twitter? Should we have a blog?’ and they were like, ‘You’re 22, figure it out,’” Maddox recalled.
Fast forward to last year, when she received a call from publisher Springer Nature, saying they were interested in making a research journal devoted to content creators and influencers, and they wanted her to lead it.
“I was like, ‘Oh God, that sounds terrible,’” Maddox said.
Eventually she came around, after realizing she would work well with the people at Springer Nature and that this journal is something that needs to exist.
“Content creators and influencers are where we get our information,” Maddox said. “They’re where we get our entertainment. They drive culture, politics, news, trends, just all of these things. And this research has been going on for a while. People have been doing this type of research for now 20 plus years and being able to give it a home matters because I do think it helps even today still legitimize that this is important.”
Creator and Influencer Studies launched on Feb. 12 of this year.
“It’s not going away,” Maddox said. “It’s fundamentally shifted how we consume media, how we interact with each other, how we see ourselves. And to me, that was more than enough reason to give it this dedicated home.”
Maddox is dedicated to inclusivity in researchers and content the journal will publish.
“There’s no such thing as a monolithic creator. Every single person’s experience in the creator economy is going to be so, so different, and every researcher’s experience studying the creator economy is going to be hugely different,” she said.
Maddox emphasized that the commitment to diversity starts with her at the top of the journal’s masthead. In her opening editorial for the journal, she said she called out the whiteness and American centricity of creator studies as a public promise — and a measure of accountability for herself.
She’s intentionally crafted a diverse editorial board — including people from 14 different countries — and a diverse associate editor team.
“As I’ve been soliciting inaugural submissions as well, I have been very deliberate about trying to reach out to earlier career researchers, researchers who also may not be at these huge research powerhouse universities, researchers in other countries,” Maddox said. “I’m trying to be really deliberate in soliciting these submissions so we get diversity of thought.”
One challenge with academic research, but particularly with research that studies something as fast moving as social media, is whether it can keep up with the pace of change in social media. It’s something Maddox has thought a lot about.
“I do think it’s something we need to worry about,” Maddox said. “It’s really good if we can situate our research in larger trends, in larger historical moments to help use them as almost explainers or like diagnostics for things because I think then it has staying power.”
For example, Maddox said, if a researcher is analyzing tradwife influencers, she wants to show insights beyond just analyzing their content, such as showing how that content is connected to a larger movement like Make America Healthy Again or the war on science happening in America.
Maddox also pointed to computation researchers who can design code that will scrape social media and catch things before they are deleted by platforms.
“Of course, there are a thousand privacy concern issues here, right?” she said. “This is something researchers like myself think about a lot, as well in my own work. Just because it’s public and in my case, I study very viral content sometimes, sure, it got 10 million views, but still within that 10 million views, someone is not expecting their work to wind up in a professor’s work, right?”
“The speed of it is crazy,” Maddox said. “I’ve had it happen to myself before where I was analyzing a YouTuber for a project and during the whole revise and resubmit process for the article, she took down a bunch of the videos we cited in the paper. We went to the Wayback Machine and were still able to prove they were there, and we didn’t make up our data while kind of respecting they weren’t publicly on her YouTube anymore.”
Maddox said she also plans to launch a part of the journal’s website that will essentially be a creator corner, where she will invite scholars to engage in interviews with content creators and influencers in response to something in the journal that can be published faster than full research articles.
“It also gives people who actually do this labor and do this career and do this work a space to be bridged with academic research,” she said. “I’m also a content creator myself, and I do acknowledge there are huge disconnects sometimes between what I am reading about and then what I experience as a content creator.”
The journal is currently soliciting research for three special issues: low visibility social media; misogynoir, the manosphere, and content creation as Black media battlegrounds and health care professionals as content creators.