This research analyses how cargo-culting practices and communication silos shape digital media content management workflows within already under practiced contemporary organisational contexts. Drawing on organisational communication theory, platform studies, and sociomaterial perspectives, the study reframes persistent digital media management challenges as structural and communicative conditions rather than technical or skills-based failures.
Cargo-culting is conceptualised as the uncritical replication of tools, workflows, and performance indicators based on perceived external success, without contextual understanding of their underlying logic. on the other side, Communication silos are analysed as organisational conditions in which visibility, authority, and interpretation are unevenly distributed across roles, platforms, and workflow stages. The research demonstrates that these two phenomena are mutually reinforcing within platform-mediated digital media systems.
Using an exploratory qualitative research design, the study integrates open-ended practitioner surveys, practice-informed inputs, and workflow and process mapping across agency-based, multi-client, and platform-dependent digital media environments.The Empirical findings reveal consistent fragmentation between planning, execution, and evaluation stages; asymmetric access to platform data and metrics; dominance of platform-defined performance indicators; and widespread reliance on replicative “industry standard” practices under conditions of time pressure and evaluative risk.
Rather than treating digital platforms as neutral tools, the analysis positions them as communicative infrastructures that stabilise siloed visibility and encourage cargo-cult adoption of workflows and metrics. The study argues that platform architectures, role-based access configurations, and metric-centred evaluation systems collectively obscure deeper organisational communication problems, limiting reflexive learning and shared sense-making.
By reframing digital media workflows as communicative systems, this research contributes a research-led, non-prescriptive analysis of why cargo-culting and communication silos persist despite widespread professional expertise and technological sophistication. The study offers an analytically grounded foundation for future research on platform dependency, organisational communication, and digital media governance, without proposing solutionist frameworks or optimisation templates