The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is David Craig, whose focus is on Thai creator culture. Creator culture is now a worldwide phenomenon; these creators exist across multiple platforms within a complex transnational cultural industry and media ecology, but this still also has many diverse national and local forms.
Creators exist at the nexus between platforms, content, management, and community; this is inflected by the specific contexts of national imaginations, technonationalisms, and digital nationalism that configure differently in each country. There is also a kind of platform nationalism as national governments, media, tech, and users harness platforms to advanced their preferred forms of nationalism.
We might then also consider a new concept of ‘creator nationalism’, though, to understand how creator cultures factor into these contexts. David’s project examined this for the context of Thailand, through qualitative fieldwork, interviews and a creator summit, and secondary research. Thailand is interesting in this regard for its highly advanced technical infrastructure, its tiny cultural-linguistic market, and its flexible ‘bamboo diplomacy’ approach that has pragmatically weathered the influence of dominant powers in its region.
Thailand also has extensive soft power initiatives, spreading awareness of Thai culture and encouraging visitors to explore and embrace Thai culture. This operates across major US-based global platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube) as well as the social messaging platform Line, and now also TikTok. US platform content payments tend not to be sufficient to sustain creator culture; they therefore often rely on sponsored advertising from domestic companies, which also directs their content to be shaped more towards domestic audiences.
Another aspect of the platform economy in Thailand are e-commerce platforms (especially after Amazon’s exodus from the country): of the leading three Shopee, TikTok Shop, and Lazada, two are Chinese-owned. On such platforms, brands can also more quickly se the returns on their investment in creator sponsorships. TikTok Shop in particular has become a critical platform for creator engagement.
Several models emerge here: the first is seller creators who engage in product reviews and live selling; some of them spend some 16 hours per day on such practices. Some of them are called e-selling opinion leaders or e-SOLs. This is directed exclusively at Thai consumers, so it is distinctly not global. There is a great deal of platform dependency and precarity in this line of work.
A second model is lifestyle or culture creators; they engage in everyday culture creation, shape social discourse, present diverse voices, and represent soft power in action. These too remain limited to national advertising and the Thai linguistic space.
There is also an alt-centre at the margins, championing marginalised identities, and an influx of non-Thai digital nomads championing Thai culture. It remains unclear to what extent any of these models can be enrolled in Thai soft power initiatives.
