In/Visibility in Social Media Work: The Hidden Labor Behind the Brands

Despite the staggering uptick in social media employment over the last decade, this nascent category of cultural labor remains comparatively under-theorized. In this article, we contend that social media work is configured by a visibility paradox: While workers are tasked with elevating the presence...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Media and communication (Lisboa) 2022-01, Vol.10 (1), p.77-87
Main Authors: Duffy, Brooke Erin, Sawey, Megan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accounts
Communication
Creative industries
cultural production
Digital broadcasting
Digital media
Emotional labor
Employers
Employment
gender
invisibility
Labor
Manual workers
Mass media
Paradoxes
Professionals
Publishing industry
Social media
Social networks
technology
Visibility
Work
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Summary:Despite the staggering uptick in social media employment over the last decade, this nascent category of cultural labor remains comparatively under-theorized. In this article, we contend that social media work is configured by a visibility paradox: While workers are tasked with elevating the presence--or visibility--of their employers' brands across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more, their identities, and muchoftheir labor, remainhidden behind branded social media accounts. To illuminate how this ostensible paradox impacts laborers' conditions and experiences of work, we present data from in-depth interviews with more than 40 social media professionals. Their accounts make clear that social media work is not just materially concealed, but rendered socially invisible through its lack of crediting, marginal status, and incessant demands for un/under-compensated emotional labor. This patterned devaluation of social media employment can, we show, be situated along two gender-coded axes that have long structured the value of labor in the media and cultural industries: a) technical--communication and b) creation--circulation. After detailing these in/visibility mechanisms, we conclude by addressing the implications of our findings for the politics and subjectivities of work in the digital media economy.
ISSN:2183-2439
2183-2439
DOI:10.17645/mac.v10i1.4460