Social media: are we users or workers?

The screen-time application on my phone shows that I spend approximatively 2 hours per day on social media such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter and so on. I swipe, like, comment, scroll, text and sometimes post content; and this activity is, according to Tiziana Terranova, ‘labour’.  

As social media users, we are active and in multiple ways; scrolling down, posting content, updating our profiles, texting, liking or commenting content, are, according to Tiziana Terranova – Italian theorist and activist –, ‘labour’. She argues that prosumers produce content which generates data that is collected by social media platforms and then made profit of. She explains how, this way, users’ activity on socials become commodified. Terranova establishes a parallel between factory-work and digital economy practices to show how much our activity on social media actually benefits the platforms, and arises the issue that we might not be adequately rewarded for the profit we create for them.

After doing some research, I came to wonder how those platforms manage to extract value from users’ activity on social media. In what way can my pictures, stories, likes or comments be possibly profitable to them? One of the reasons why social networks create these complex and interactive platforms is to regroup as many social relations as possible on them; all the content and interactions flows generated on social media are carefully watched, controlled and gathered. This enormous amount of data allows the platforms to constantly adapt to the users’ needs so that they generate the most activity –data– possible. It also provides accurate information on social media users’ profile, making it possible to target potential users better; but they also extract value from data by using it for targeted advertising through influencing and so on, making an innovative form of advertising –specific to social media– possible.

This process of analysing my social media activity over the past week made me notice that even though it takes some of my leisure time, it is a choice that I make, and I am aware of the consequences of it. Tiziana Terranova’s ‘free labour’ bothers me a little as I consider labour as a mandatory form of work accomplished by workers for wages in a given place and time; however, I go on social media on my own accord and also choose deliberately to give this much time and effort to those platforms. Even though it is undeniable that the content users generate on social media is a precious source of profit for the platforms, and that this process commodifies our social networking activity, – and also us as users to some extent –, it seems important tome to qualify the term ‘labour’. 

Yet, the question of what the benefits for social media consumers in using those platforms could be still prevails. Other forms of rewards such as cultural, social but also sometimes political benefits are greatly valuable since unique to social media. Those networks make the creation of online communities that transcend traditional social norms and boundaries and allow new modes of expression possible. Making the building of new spaces for debate, individual voices matter more, and interactions with your friends happen in a more effective and creative way are assets peculiar to social media that make them an emancipating and liberating space for an extremely wide range of users. 

In the end, I would insist on the fact that most users – even myself few months ago –, are not aware that all our comings and goings on socials are carefully collected as data that produce considerable value for the platforms; and this, is, in my opinion, what creates the inadequacy between what we, as users, provide and what the platforms reward us with in return. A better transparency on the purposes and systems of those companies would be appropriate for the data collection process not to seem too unethical or ‘unfair’ to us users.