Was this IP intended to have us experience intense digital labour? This particular IP surprisingly continuously served me many technical challenges. Below are some of them:
- Realizing the animation app I wanted to use was expensive, and there was no free trial
- Finding an animation app that was free to use – or – had a free trial with sufficient features (I signed up for 4 until I found one that worked – Moovly)
- Figuring out how to use Descript to enhance my audio recordings (on another free trial)
- Realizing that Moovly would limit my videos to 3 minutes – and subsequently figuring out that I could piece my videos together using iMovie
- Also realizing I would have to splice my audio using Garage Band to make it fit
Regardless – an animated video was created! (Thanks to my spouse, Hiller Goodspeed, who let me integrate his life and illustrations with theories of digital labour). The video, and corresponding text are below:
The Digital Labour of an Instagram Influencer Made Freelance Illustrator
The Aspirational Labour Required to Attain Influencer Status
In the third chapter of her book, Duffy focuses on aspirational labour – a kind of digital labour social media influencers engage in when “they approach social media creation with strategy, purpose, and aspirations of career success” (2017, p. 48). Although Duffy’s writing specifically focuses on females, I recognized the representation of my own (male) partner’s lived experience as a social media influencer. He would cringe at such a label, but with a fluctuating Instagram followership of approximately 180,000, it is difficult to deny.
Duffy describes the “patterned narratives” of how influencers found themselves in the social media sphere, and outlines three major themes, “[1] creativity as accidental entrepreneurship, [2] managing uncertainty in the post-recession economy, and [3] breaking into the creative industries” (p. 52). Each of which were relevant at the time my partner, Hiller, initiated his online presence. Hiller is truly creative and a constant (perhaps even obsessive) producer of images and ideas. In the late aughts, many millennials, particularly students of art and design were regularly posting work online, just as Hiller was. Additionally, his ‘blogging’ (in the form of a very active Tumblr) began, when he was a recent design graduate, in a new city looking for work and new friends – his lack of each meant he had the time to continually generate free content. Although he may not have explicitly said so at the time, he also aimed to break into the local, and particularly insular Portland design scene.
Eventually, Hiller expanded his presence to Instagram, and over a 2–3-year period of sharing content online, his work became ubiquitous in certain realms of the internet, a direct result of his prolific and consistent content creation. Throughout this time, he began accepting illustration commissions from individuals and small to mid-sized organizations to big name companies. During this transitional period, it became evident to both of us that Hiller’s digital labour, represented what Crawford (2021) describes as the “…collapse between the distinction of work and leisure” (p. 58). Throughout this period, Hiller maintained separate day jobs and the shift from content creation stemming from personal fulfilment to content creation to maintain followers, or to stay relevant, or to keep receiving contract offers resulted in high stress and a high workload that did not equate to high profits.
Aspirations Become Reality – Is It Worth It?
To avoid a life where his income was directly tied to his leisure/labour efforts, rather than pushing the role of influencer, Hiller decided to let it simmer in the background and pursued a career in library studies. Yet he continues to maintain his social media presence and work on select contract jobs as a side gig. It’s this contract work that recalled Crawford’s explanation of machine and human collaboration during the industrial revolution, “the integration of workers’ bodies with machines was sufficiently thorough that early industrialists could view their employees as a raw material to be managed and controlled like any other resource” (p. 60).
From an uninformed lens, many viewers of Hiller’s work, including his clients, assume he works solely digital, when in fact, his work is a careful assemblage of analogue and digital processes. Analogue integration is what makes Hiller’s work authentically his – to further digitize his process would result in a loss of authenticity, and as the work is so intrinsically tied to his identity of self – working more digitally would alter the outcome, and more importantly, his identity.
The Embarrassment of Hidden Background Labour
The labour Hiller engages in, is not simply his artistic genius, but also marketing, communication, coordination and administrative work and a vast array of repetitive technical work that can take hours. This additional, hidden labour is the kind of work larger companies outsource or create departments to facilitate. This reminds me of Crawford’s description of Babbage’s “disassembly line,” an automated process so efficiently designed, that “the human techniques required at any point… could be performed by just about anyone” (p. 72). Yet in our even more dystopic present reality, all processes are expected to be performed, for minuscule wages, when the totality of work is factored in.
Crawford explains how many artificial intelligence systems – systems that seem fully digitized, are supplemented with “unseen…” human background labour, and without this collaboration, “…AI systems won’t function” (p. 63-64), misleading users to believe in seamless technologies that do not actually exist. Perhaps the internalization of this falsified idea of an advanced technological reality compels freelance workers, such as Hiller, to keep the full extent of their labour hidden, as it would be almost embarrassing to admit that so much of the necessary and hidden work is not automated, but in fact, painstakingly completed by them – and how are they to convince their clients of their value, when their value has already been deceptively determined in society?
References:
Crawford, K. (2021). Digital labor. The atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. (pp. 53-88). Yale University Press.
Duffy, B. E. (2017). (Not) just for the fun of it: The labor of social media production. (Not) getting paid to do what you love: Gender, social media, and aspirational work. (pp. 45-97). Yale University Press.
Goodspeed, H. (2017.a, July 06). [Good but not the best]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/BWOFBLHh5hL/?hl=en
Goodspeed, H. (2017.b, November 01). [Too much can’t do]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/Ba9vrmuhLw5/?hl=en
Goodspeed, H. (2017.c, December 09). [Another clueless millenium]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/BcfzsLNh_Al/?hl=en
Goodspeed, H. (2018.a, March 27). [No one understands me like computer]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg2gXselCh_/?hl=en
Goodspeed, H. (2018.b, September 14). [OK]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/BntxXXYF4vb/?hl=en
Goodspeed, H. (2018.c, September 29). [Your email…]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/BoVAVksFJrq/?hl=en
Goodspeed, H. (2019.a, January 18). [I am learning so much today]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bsyh2flgwAq/?hl=en
Goodspeed, H. (2019.b, February 22). [Don’t tell them they hurt your feelings]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/BuMsLlDHK9u/?hl=en
Goodspeed, H. (2019.c, November 03). [Save your best ideas for yourself]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/B4b4OfZD0dh/?hl=en
Goodspeed, H. (2019.d, December 26). [Be more efficient]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/B6jUjeOHIJ4/?hl=en
Goodspeed, H. (2021.a, September 29). [Still me]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/CUbd55wFhEc/?hl=en
Goodspeed, H. (2022.a, September 29). [Hiding under couch]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/CjHOvzsrBCB/?hl=en
Goodspeed, H. (2022.b, November 24). [Just another day]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/ClXCFWVytli/?hl=en