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Reference
Pillemer, J., Harrison, S., Murphy, C., & Park, Y. (2025). Audience Entanglement: How Independent Creative Workers Experience the Pressures of Widespread Appeal on Digital Platforms. Administrative Science Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392251399652
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Welcome to Revise and Resubmit 🎙️—the podcast where we take big, idea-heavy journal articles and translate them into conversations that actually stick with you.
Today we’re unpacking a brand-new piece that feels painfully relevant to anyone who’s ever hit “post” and then obsessively checked the numbers 📲📈. The article is titled:
“Audience Entanglement: How Independent Creative Workers Experience the Pressures of Widespread Appeal on Digital Platforms”
by Julianna Pillemer, Spencer Harrison, Chad Murphy, and Yejin Park.
It’s published online on 18 December 2025 in Administrative Science Quarterly—a prestigious, top-tier FT50 journal 🏛️📚—and released by SAGE Publications. When ASQ speaks, the academic world listens.
This paper dives into the lives of independent creators—visual artists, musicians, and other digital natives—who’ve “made it” on platforms like Instagram and YouTube. You’d think that once the followers arrive, the problems disappear. Instead, the authors show that a whole new struggle begins: something they call audience entanglement.
Audience entanglement is that deep, persistent sense that your audience is no longer just “out there.” They move into your head. Into your process. Into every decision you make. At first, this often becomes dysfunctional entanglement:
You feel oppressively dependent on likes, comments, and shares.
You’re at the mercy of platform volatility and algorithm mood swings.
You start questioning the meaning of your work and whether this life is sustainable at all.
But the story doesn’t end there. Some creators figure out how to manage this knot instead of being strangled by it. They develop entanglement management strategies:
Distancing themselves from constant audience input.
Depersonalizing harsh critiques so they hurt less and teach more.
Distilling their own standards so their inner voice outruns the algorithm’s demands.
When they do that, entanglement shifts into a functional form:
Audience reactions still matter, but they’re not everything.
Platform volatility becomes something to navigate, not fear.
Emotions tilt from draining to uplifting, and the work starts to feel meaningful and sustainable again 🌱🎨.
On this episode of Revise and Resubmit, we’re going to sit with one big, unsettling idea:
Once your audience shows up and stays, how do you keep your work from quietly becoming theirs instead of yours? 👀
Huge thanks to Julianna Pillemer, Spencer Harrison, Chad Murphy, and Yejin Park, and to SAGE Publications, for this powerful contribution in Administrative Science Quarterly, a truly prestigious FT50 journal 🙏📖.
If you love getting high-caliber research in plain language, don’t forget to subscribe to “Revise and Resubmit” on Spotify, Amazon Prime, and Apple Podcast, and hit subscribe on our YouTube channel “Weekend Researcher” 🎧📺✨
Because in an age where audiences are always watching, one question hangs in the air:
👉 Are you shaping your audience… or is your audience quietly reshaping you? 🤔💫
