IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cog/meanco/v10y2022i1p77-87.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Brooke Erin Duffy

    (Department of Communication, Cornell University, USA)

  • Megan Sawey

    (Department of Communication, Cornell University, USA)

Abstract

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 much of their labor, remain hidden 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Brooke Erin Duffy & Megan Sawey, 2022. "In/Visibility in Social Media Work: The Hidden Labor Behind the Brands," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 10(1), pages 77-87.
    • Handle: RePEc:cog:meanco:v10:y:2022:i:1:p:77-87
    DOI: 10.17645/mac.v10i1.4460
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/4460
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.17645/mac.v10i1.4460?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gershon, Ilana, 2017. "Down and Out in the New Economy," University of Chicago Press Economics Books, University of Chicago Press, number 9780226452142.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Salla-Maaria Laaksonen & Mikko Villi, 2022. "Editorial: New Forms of Media Work and Its Organizational and Institutional Conditions," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 10(1), pages 1-4.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Steffen Dalsgaard, 2022. "Can IT Resolve the Climate Crisis? Sketching the Role of an Anthropology of Digital Technology," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(10), pages 1-17, May.
    2. Rao, Aliya Hamid, 2021. "The ideal job-seeker norm: unemployment and marital privileges in the professional middle-class," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 108519, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Rundong Ning, 2023. "Patch‐work: The economic and moral complementarity of informal entrepreneurs' multiple projects in Congo‐Brazzaville," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 10(1), pages 90-99, January.
    4. Nancy Worth & E. Alkim Karaagac, 2022. "Accounting for Absences and Ambiguities in the Freelancing Labour Relation," Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG, vol. 113(1), pages 96-108, February.
    5. Wilcox, Annika & Damarin, Amanda K. & McDonald, Steve, 2022. "Is Cybervetting Valuable?," OSF Preprints f52a7, Center for Open Science.
    6. Dumont, Guillaume & De Marco, Stefano & Heslper, Ellen, 2024. "Online job search discouragement: how employment platforms and digital exclusion shape the experience of low‐qualified job seekers?," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 120166, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    7. Rao, Aliya, 2021. "Gendered interpretations of job loss and subsequent professional pathways," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 111866, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    8. Dukes, Ruth & Streeck, Wolfgang, 2020. "From industrial citizenship to private ordering? Contract, status, and the question of consent," MPIfG Discussion Paper 20/13, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    9. Rao, Aliya Hamid, 2021. "Experiences of white-collar job loss and job-searching in the United States," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 112455, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    10. Brooke Erin Duffy & Megan Sawey, 2022. "In/Visibility in Social Media Work: The Hidden Labor Behind the Brands," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 10(1), pages 77-87.
    11. Guillaume Dumont & Stefano de Marco & Ellen Johanna Heslper, 2024. "Online job search discouragement : How employment platforms and digital exclusion shape the experience of low-qualified job seekers?," Post-Print hal-04325753, HAL.
    12. Luzilda C. Arciniega, 2021. "Creating diversity markets through economization: The politics and economics of difference in neoliberal organizations," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 8(2), pages 350-364, June.
    13. Dave Cook, 2020. "The freedom trap: digital nomads and the use of disciplining practices to manage work/leisure boundaries," Information Technology & Tourism, Springer, vol. 22(3), pages 355-390, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cog:meanco:v10:y:2022:i:1:p:77-87. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: António Vieira or IT Department (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cogitatiopress.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.