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.