Social media makes users unwaged image managers and avatars.

Evidence

Social media platforms, along with communications and network technology, furnish infrastructure for this networked blurring. Immediatism issues from developments in hardware and software that alter the landscape of representation. The suite of i-tech—including the smart phone and social media—began broadly in 2006–7, with the iPhone launch in June 2007 and the opening of Facebook beyond Harvard University’s walls in September 2006. In 2010, Instagram kicked off, gaining 10 million users within its first year and selling to Facebook in 2012. Twitter started in 2006, adding photo sharing in 2011, growing to 330 million users at its peak. These technologies facilitate the circulation of images for and by the masses, since everyone has a camera in their pocket and a ready-made platform to accommodate uploads and distributions, and the image-hosting functionality of the technology melds with the image-generating vocation of the users. Over one-third of the earth’s population uses Facebook; the platform teaches these individuals to think of themselves as image managers and avatars, performing exhaustive unwaged digital labor as brand-identity consultants and data producers. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 70

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that platform users are ‘unwaged digital labor as brand-identity consultants and data producers’ connects to the reader’s interest in why immediacy sustains economically — the attention/extraction engine behind the aesthetic. Links to the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s treatment of labor value extraction. — connects to: Social media users actively produce images rather than passively consuming them — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 272; Posting party images online makes users unpaid workers for platforms — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 463