There is a blurred line between labour and leisure in the creative industry. According to the Cambridge dictionary, labour is “practical work that involves hard physical effort”, as such creative work isn’t regarded as “labour”, on the contrary, it involves a great deal of hard physical and mental effort.
When the influencing trend took the digital world by storm, I was among many that aspired to experience accidental entrepreneurship. During the process of attempting to fulfil this aspiration, I carried out a lot of physical and mental labour on Instagram. Including but not limited to projecting a specific persona online, working on self-branding 24/7 offline and online, fashion branding, and curating visual content.
Am I Helping The Rich Get Richer?
“If you’re not paying for a product, chances are that you’re the product”
– Tim O’Reilly.
Some believe that platforms like Instagram and Twitter are free, but media scholars like Cohen are telling us otherwise. The role that contents creators play has shifted dramatically; they now provide platforms with personalized information that is sold to the highest bidder. The renowned scholar Smyth highlighted the crucial role that audiences play in helping capitalists accumulate more wealth and widen the already existing inequality gaps. Cohen described the web as a virtual gold mine built on the attention model, a model that depends on a large group of people watching the same thing at the same time. The Power disparities emerge when users have no control over the information that is collected and processed online. That provides marketers with unprecedented precision to study users’ behaviour and improve marketing techniques without asking for users’ consent.
These big platforms collect data about users and sell it to third parties to perform personalized targeting, this intrusive process is taking place at a very fast rate due to the uberization of the economy. The data provided to Instagram helps the platform provide us with tailored advertising, you might have noticed items following you around the web. This isn’t a coincidence; it’s a process that Cohen described as personalized targeting. The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture.
In our contemporary world, communicative capitalism is underway. On one hand, content producers provide large amounts of data and immaterial labour, and on the other hand, platform capitalists employ extensive commodification to generate tremendous amounts of profits and tap into unreachable markets. This seesaw model encapsulates what Cohen describes as “double commodification.” The role of users has shifted from consumers to prosumers. The generation of profit is centred around monetization, commodification, and the exploitation of online data. Systematic surveillance of our communication is at the heart of the profit-generating activity, as it reveals consumption patterns and collects users’ information and creates a reformed type of cybernetic commodity. Cohen explained that nowadays the cybernetic commodity is produced from the details users input when they sign up for social media accounts, he pointed that platforms like Instagram inform users that they collect this data in their terms of use and privacy, however, he mentioned that the legal jargon is too complex for the users to understand. The valorization of surveillance puts more predictive power in the hands of corporate giants. Data mining tactics have recently evolved to monitor in real-time and predict future behaviour; this intense monitoring and dataveillance provide advertisers instant feedback needed to market the right products to the right audience.
Co-Creation or Exploitation?
In today’s gig economy, despite workers creating demand and surplus value they continue to face heightened job insecurity. Undoubtedly, creating content is enjoyable but there is a clear imbalance of benefits and increased invasion of privacy. Cohen believes that the relentless drive of marketers to commodify users data will most likely lead to the development of new techniques that will challenge the boundaries that we thought were the limits on invading users privacy.