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.