Building an attention-grabbing Instagram feed required unpaid laborious audience-engagement work

Evidence

Like the early blogs, a good Instagram feed was labor-intensive. When she quit, Socality Barbie noted “the insane lengths many of us go to create the perfect Instagram life.” A “fashion” Instagrammer named Amanda Miller who offered an online guide to gaining followers confesses that “getting to 18.5k followers was A LOT of work.” In addition to composing and shooting photos, the feed demands interacting with strangers to make them feel engaged or heard, the way a politician or other public figure might—the way a real celebrity doesn’t have to do. As Miller writes, “Engagement: This is the hardest part because it takes something money can’t buy, and that is TIME. It takes A LOT OF TIME.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1047

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the digital-labor literature (e.g. Taylor, Fuchs) and to the book’s own earlier chapters on turn-of-millennium bloggers doing unpaid attention work. Also previews later arguments about how platforms extract free labor from creators. — connects to: Networked audiences force users into unpaid labor to keep their brand image pure — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 492; Social media participation constitutes unpaid labor from which platforms extract value — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 505; Amateur web creators faced burnout because content production needs paid labor — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 922 (+4 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘Finstagram economics’ — the unpaid affective labor behind the attention economy and how platforms convert it into their own revenue.
• ADDENDUM: Relates specifically to the tree-infrastructure piece’s metaphor of grafting: creators graft their labor onto platform infrastructure that then extracts from them.

Broader Connections

• Instagram users crafted idealized visual narratives with the deliberate intent of seizing attention #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1045
• Voluntary user content creation constitutes unpaid labor enriching platform owners #expands (0.78) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 338