Creative destruction in the screen industries and implications for policy

This article traverses aspects of a personal journey of a humanities scholar, trained in traditional disciplines of textual analysis and aesthetic appreciation, working with evolutionary economics. Reflecting on a 2008 article for the Journal of Cultural Economics that hypothesised the importance of social network markets as a new definition of creative industries, the article notes how remarkably this had come to pass, with the emergence of social media entertainment. This new industry is based on previously amateur creators engaging in content innovation and media entrepreneurship across multiple social media platforms to aggregate global fan communities and incubate their own media brands. The implications of social media entertainment for screen policy, both through cultural and industry agency support and through regulation and programme innovation, are explored internationally as well as in the context of the current Australian Content and Children’s Review.