Doris's Blog

Caring for others through online media Source: Vectors

The Small Acts We Don’t Notice

Our discussion about profits and money in the media industry makes one forget about an important silent economy. We do not think about the care economy often, especially when we think about the negative sides of the media and technology companies. Last week, I read a news article from The Mirror that talks about how social media users send random Christmas cards to strangers online, people who are complete strangers. The article made me realise the care that the internet sometimes promotes. Discussions about digital media are usually centred on profit, extraction, and control, but in the background of every platform, there is another, more silent economy: care. 

According to Tronto and Fisher, care refers to everything we do to keep, sustain, and fix our world. In media systems, this is not just professional labour, editing, moderating, and maintenance of servers, but the unpaid labour of sustaining communities. The sharing of resources, commenting, and consoling strangers on social sites are considered social care work by the users. However, the value of care may not be noticed. The platform economies do not measure the value in terms of the well-being of users but in terms of the number of clicks and data.

Kindness that Doesn’t Show up in the Metrics 

This type of care can be observed in my online usage quite frequently. As an example, I follow several creators on Instagram who write about mental health. I even leave positive remarks or repost their posts to friends who may be in need of them. It is little things, but this assists in making a kinder atmosphere in which individuals feel appreciated. Although these actions do not very often get money or appreciation in return, they allow me to feel that my time on the internet is not wasted. It helps me remember that kindness in everyday life, in online spaces, is in demand rather than some automated systems.

Platform capitalism is built around rewarding interaction rather than compassion. However, I think there are micro-practices of care that exist beneath the metrics. Shimauchi talks about “transnational fandom”, she describes how fans form emotional connections across borders—connections shaped by affection, attachment, and simply recognising each other’s presence. These forms of engagement may still happen within economic platforms, but the relationships themselves feel relational rather than extractive. The sustainability of creators often depends not just on financial support but on how people acknowledge and value one another. Even though all of this occurs inside commercial platforms, this kind of reciprocity subtly challenges the dominant logic of platform capitalism.

Other forms of media care are technical practices and activist practices. There is the so-called “algorithmic repair”, when users and vendors personalise digital tools that act against destructive and biased results. The volunteers perform such interventions and restore the responsibility in a system that seems impersonal. The digital environment is made available to the communities and not just to the investors through repair culture, such as fixing the code and keeping open-source projects and unethical data practices accessible.

The care economy shows us that digital spaces are held together by empathy and support, as well as innovation. The cultural environments are made healthy when a creator is concerned about their audience or when a user promotes independent journalism. This act cannot be done with the help of algorithms alone. The fact that these works have been recognised is an opportunity to look at the digital culture in a more humanistic way, and it will no longer be judged by the number of reach and clicks but by the quality of the connection that can be established.

A time I reviewed my activities online made me realize that we might actually been “working” but without knowing it. In the morning around 9:30 am, I stayed online for about 30 minutes on Instagram responding to messages and liking posts. This 30 minutes activity is a typical example of relational labor, as I did not want to “disappear” from the people’s feed. At lunchtime, I spent 30 minutes scrolling Rednote, hoping that one day, my posts will go viral, which is literally hope labor.

In the evening, when I shared an instagram Story at 9:00 pm, I continued checking on the people viewing it. At this time, I tried to suppress my emotions, appear calm, and put-together, which explains emotional and self-fashioning labor.

Towards the end of the day, I was able to see how each click, view, and reaction acted as a service to the platform: data, watch time, and engagement. They receive the money, but I receive tiny gratifications such as likes, a feeling of connection, or the feeling that people know me. But the truth is, such rewards disappear quickly, and they do not correspond to the time and effort that I spend on these apps. The amount of “work” we perform without pay or even without being noticed is wild.

How your online activity is creating profit Source: Hostinger

Scrolling Feels Free, but it isn’t

I see myself as free to share content and do not realise that I am completing economic tasks. Scrolling through the social media feed, such as Facebook, may seem to be free. But think about it, each of the likes and comments is usually a small portion of a larger production process. In social media, the users are both spectators and a workforce.

The first scholar to come up with the so-called “audience commodity” was Dallas Smythe, who thought that the television viewers were not the product but the labourers whose attention was being sold to advertisers , as Dimitrieff explains. The concept has acquired a new significance today. Social media platforms such as Instagram or TikTok commercialise every gesture of participation and transform our personal expression into quantifiable, marketable information. Terranova basically suggests that what we call “free labour” today includes all kinds of things we do online from the creative stuff we spend way too much time on, to the small routine actions we don’t even think of as work. Whether people are editing their digital spaces, joining conversations in online communities, or just helping information keep flowing, all of this ends up being both enjoyable and kind of exploitative at the same time. It’s weird because it feels voluntary, but also like we’re being used without noticing it.

According to Duffy, this is the so-called “aspirational labour”: working because of passion and need for self-expression, but with the benefits that come with the promise of recognition and not guaranteed income. The sense of involvement can conceal the aspect of exploitation. Social networking sites have caused individuals to associate engagement with payoff, especially the likes, number of followers, and shares, which psychologically relieve the user. However, such rewards will likely obscure another extraction trend. The concept of emotional labour becomes a part of the digital life: we control our emotions to be published, controlling impressions for validation. Time and money are irrelevant in determining the cost; cost is determined by the continuous need to be seen and engage with strangers online. 

After looking back on the whole day, I realised that very little of this actually benefits me as a user. The real value flows upward to the platforms that turn my time, emotions, and interactions into profit. What feels like casual participation is really unpaid work that quietly fuels their business.

How often do you read online news articles? Do you see the “sponsored by” lines between the lines? In most cases, you can scroll through an online news story without paying attention to the tiny print, which states, “sponsored by.” Native advertising has been well incorporated into online media design to the extent that readers do not know the difference between editorial material and promotional content. Even without thinking about it, this creates a media environment where advertisement is disguised beneath the surface and persuasion is practised more like storytelling than salesmanship.

Ads that look like real news
Source : Novak

There was a culture in traditional journalism that differentiated between content and commerce. The connection between media and advertisers was that of integration; media relied on advertisers, but there was a difference between journalism and marketing. Publishers and platforms are financially strained, and native advertising offers them a means of survival. It allows the brands to be credible in the journalism and gives news outlets a reliable source of revenue.

When Ads Pretend to be Journalism

Source : The New York Times

Let me introduce a native advertising piece as a case study so that we can understand better. The case of The New York Times and Netflix collaborating in the year 2014 to promote Orange Is the New Black is one such example. The article, Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work, looked like serious investigative journalism with data visualisation and professional commentary. It was, however, created by the paper’s advertisement department. Such a form of native advertising is a step towards changing the editorial line and turning the tools of journalism into a brand storytelling tool. The format and style are similar to the authentic-reporting type of style because there is no direct differentiation between information and persuasion.

Ferrer-Conill et al. explain the use of the visual cues of colour schemes or layout as an indicator or concealer of whether a piece is commercial. The audience perceives advertising less in situations where such cues are intentionally ambiguous. Openness turns out to be a performance and not an obligation. A legal obligation, such as a “sponsored” text in a small font at the top of a page, can satisfy a legal requirement but leaves the readers ill-informed in any significant sense.

This is a good combination as far as business is concerned. Branded content alters the connection between the media and the advertiser, as it is less of a sale and more of a partnership. Brands do not have to buy the space or airtime to make a statement they simply have to create stories that are in line with their mission. In this case, the consumers are not receiving campaigns but stories.

Once commercial communication becomes the strength of journalism, then the room for criticism is reduced. The media loses its authority as a social institution when sponsors, in the form of advertising, pay for everything. The viewer is transformed into a target group. The brand accomplishment is gauged by the way it transforms the culture into a chain of logos and identities. Native advertising transfers this procedure into the day-to-day reading of the news.

Critics believe that where the disclosures can be seen in an obvious form, then the readers will be in a position to differentiate between actual reporting and branded storytelling. However, the front pages of the media are frequently constructed in such a manner that this action is disguised, as viewers would not notice it. It is not good for the audience but for the advertisers. Part of the journalism ethics is independence, but the aspect of profit makes them engage in unethical practices despite the reputation attached to the most reputable organisations. As they are growing on sponsorship, terminating such contracts would lead to them losing a growth opportunity.

Why Your Feed Looks the Way it Does

Have you ever wondered what the concept of the culture industry means? This concept came from Adorno and Horkheimer In this case, the culture industry is where mass media produce homogeneous entertainment for viewers’ consumption over time. The authors say that instead of giving creators freedom to create the content they produce, the industry prioritises their economic goals by standardising songs and other forms of entertainment. The trend now also seems to have changed, as there are creators who publish on their own, consumers who view the content, and algorithms that define personalised feeds. A recent Hootsuite article also explains how TikTok’s algorithm promotes creators’ content.

In my personal opinion, I think there are changes that capitalism has made to achieve its main purpose of making profits. My thinking is also alike with other concepts developed by earlier thinkers. This change is where capitalism has led to “Fordism,” meaning mass production of standardised content to “post-Fordism,” where experiences are being used to make profits, as explained by Lash and Urry. In my view, the change means that the economy itself has become a commodity because technology companies are making profits just by storing content and monetising people’s attention in platforms such as YouTube. 

Creativity vs. Machine Rules

Today, we have what we call “platform capitalism,” where companies like Meta and TikTok are making a profit through controlling systems, not owning them. Content creators carry the biggest burden because they create, while companies just harvest the end product and use viewers’ attention to sell the same content. Unlike in the past, where the internet was decentralised, now it has become a market where a few international companies control access and pricing of content. 

The playlist that claims to “know your taste” could simply be a computerisation of conformity; the playlist editor of the radio has been automated and replaced by a predictive algorithm.

Media platforms control what appears on their feed
Source: Shah

Think about today’s media economy. You can see that it has one main difference: there is no visible boundary between producers and consumers. Users who are not professionals also produce, distribute, and commercialise content; the viewers have become consumers. But, Nieborg and Poell assert that the cultural production cannot be necessarily democratised due to “platformisation of cultural production”. Instead, it reorganises cultural labour into maximising systems of profits, where such measures as engagement going viral define success.

The substitution of the industrial culture by platform capitalism has not nullified the concerns of those early media theorists; they have reorganised them. The factory remains, only this time it operates on servers and not on assembly lines, and the raw material is our attention and behaviour, as well as data. The flexibility of capitalism makes sure that it survives. Once resistance has increased, capitalism absorbs it and reinvents it as a commodity.

Today’s platforms say that they are empowering, but if this is not accompanied by ownership, then there is a problem. Posting a song to Spotify or publishing an article in Medium puts a musician or a writer into a system that monetises their idea more than it rewards their work. Transparency rhetoric hides that same chain of command Adorno and Horkheimer criticised, in which the economic principles dominate the culture.

The question is not whether capitalism has changed media but whether media can be created outside capitalism. According to Carah, meaning is now created in factories utilising the structure of platforms that manage participation. While the twentieth century created consent using broadcasting, the twenty-first century has done the same using engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds. The forms have changed, yet the logic is the same: profit first, culture later.

When I use diverse social media tools, mostly Rednote as well as Instagram, I watch videos, read articles, and listen to songs, assuming that I consume the content free of charge. Last week, when I tried using the free version of Spotify, I recall that I had to watch three advertisements before the playlist commenced. Platforms like Spotify continues to raise prices for many of their premium products, NBC News, with an intention of incentivizing users to pay so that they can escape the very interruptions they create. Even if accessing the content from Instagram incurs no monetary cost, I now realise that I often pay through other means without knowing it. 

How we pay for streaming services
Source: BBC NEWS

What Would Happen if We Had to Pay for Everything?

Let us assume that all media products require direct payment. How could the consumption of content change? I would now prefer to be offered services that feel indispensable to my routines, such as news, music, and on-demand entertainment, and abandon platforms that only provide short-term entertainment. I would not make a decision based solely on the financial ability but on the perceived value of emotional attachment, habit, and trust.

To be honest, this does not mean that decisions to access content are determined only by ability to pay for it. It means that other factors, such as emotional attachment, trust, habit, and the perceived value of a product, impact decisions on what content people prefer.  Media scholar David Hendy explains that traditionally, public service broadcasting combined both profit and cultural interests in a way that resulted developing of information for a common good, not solely with the aim of generating profits. This aim, I think, has been lost with advertising and subscriptions taking over.

My Own Streaming Choices

On a personal scale, based on my personal media usage, I can say that I would still be willing to pay for Spotify and Netflix because they are an integral part of my life. I use Netflix and Spotify to watch movies and listen to music in the evening. I think I would likely stop subscribing to YouTube Premium because I usually use it to watch random clips on the platform. This reflection allowed me to realise that most of the decisions that I make rely on habit and personal attachment and not price alone. Subscribing to content with my own money would allow me to think about what services are really important to me and which I only use conveniently.

The change of media economics is a form of restructuring in how viewers are monetised. De-Lima-Santos et al. say that the industry is changing and moving away from one source of income (advertising or licensing) to a mixed system that includes subscriptions, sponsorship, and data mining. For instance, a combination of product placement, brand association, and user data analytics could currently sponsor one episode of a streaming show. It is not clear here who is being paid and who is paying; we consume but also create the wealth that sustains the platforms.

I believe there is a better way we can change this pattern. I would suggest an open contribution from users and the profit of the corporation. Think about the cooperative streaming model, which would be able to introduce the value in a more even manner. I believe that democratic communication is founded on ending media monopolies and the restoration of the right of state ownership. It not only implies returning to the time of government-monitored broadcasting but also encourages non-profit-making organisations where consumers are members, without focusing only on viewers. It is possible that the economics of media consumption will not be able to revert to the simplicity of a single subscription or a one-off fee. The main problem is to create systems that would consider audiences as not only commodities but also partners in production and sustainability.