플랫폼 체제 하 웹소설 작가의 창작 노동 재구성 양상 연구: 성과 체계와 정동 관리를 중심으로

초록

This study investigated how web novel creation labor is organized and performed within the structural conditions of the digital platform environment. It was conducted based on in-depth interviews and written surveys with 11 active web novel writers. The study categorizes the web novel creation process into three stages: pre-production, production, and post-production. It examines how the platform's affect management and performance system intervenes throughout the entire process, from the writer's planning, writing, serialization, distribution, to secondary production. Analysis revealed that web novel creation is less an autonomous creative domain of the individual writer and more a process regulated and disciplined within a structure where readers' affective responses ― materialized as view counts, ratings, read-through rates, and comments ― are collected as data and fed into recommendation algorithms, promotion allocations, and decisions on secondary production. Within this system, reader preferences are continuously reinforced, and writers formulate their creative strategies using genre clichés, character archetypes, and proven narrative formulas accumulated in the web novel database. Their creative activities are evaluated based on market suitability, resulting in web novel creation being organized as labor that conforms to a cyclical structure: ‘verification by performance metrics → promotion allocation and affective data collection → revenue generation → preference reinforcement’. Furthermore, while IP expansion is perceived as an escape route mitigating platform dependency, it actually reveals the paradox of ‘re-subordination’ ― where the platform's performance system extends into the external environment by expanding selected works, based on performance metrics, into other media. This study aims to expand theoretical understanding of literary production structures in the digital age by illuminating web novel creation as a labor process reconfigured under platform capitalism based on performance systems and affective data.

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