In the contemporary digital society, people use social media unconsciously almost every day, and these platforms have connected the whole society’s lifestyle, and economic consumption, with highly data-driven and commercialised growth potential.
I also use Instagram, WeChat, Weibo, Redbook, and other social media daily to browse and click on news or other people’s social updates. These visual, and lifestyle images or videos attract my attention, even if they do not make any sense.
Being one of the users of social media, we engage in a “chaotic” labour relationship with the media platforms.
My digital labour track is a typical portrait of the most common and average user in the Internet society. In contrast to Influencer labour, a type of labour that allows for the exchange of value with the platform or brand and accumulates social currency for themselves, the average user practice presents an unpaid form of labour under platform capitalism, which means that we unconsciously serve the capital appreciation of the platform. The data support contributed by users, mostly in the form of likes, retweets, comments, followings, and views, will be transformed into motivational flux for the platform’s content, and then turn into algorithmic power so that it can deliver personalised and targeted advertisements to the users. These data overlays become an essential component of the digital economy, and it is difficult for the average user to avoid the closed loop of labour in the social media usage process.
It isn’t easy for the average user to obtain an equivalent value in return for such digital labour, one could even say that there is no economic value in return.
Labour over social media is the main form of reliance on people’s digital existence, along with the intervention and control of platform operators and commercial capital, Labour over social media is the primary reliance for people’s digital existence. While users play the role of producers in media participation and consumption, they often find themselves in a passive status. It is interesting to consider the consent mechanisms of this digital labour. Social media serves as a bridge that links users to the external social world. For example, Redbook, in which the life-oriented, food-oriented, travel-oriented, fashion and beauty-oriented content harvests a huge number of comments and attention, these visual contents motivate female users attempting to obtain the recognition of the interest relationship’s communities and form an emotional empathy, which then generates an emotionally powerful connection, including behaviours such as produced user-generated content.
However, we cannot attribute all the digital labour of users as unconscious or discrete.
We can find many private social accounts on Instagram that are managed with intention, and a lot of emotion is involved in this “self-made labour”. They satisfy themselves by receiving likes and comments, even if they are trapped in the commercial value chain of the platform’s content production, also leaving a unique social imprint. We are empowered in production and participation by social media, but the profits generated from that power remain in the hands of the platform. However, such active production of content and participation in the creative process undermines users’ feelings of alienation from the platform’s control, which subsequently promotes self-identity. At this dimension, platforms provide an arena for users to construct their own identities. We cannot deny that digital identities can’t be constructed independently or autonomously in such a society.