RR7: Nakamura

Lisa Nakamura’s paper, “The Unwanted Labour of Social Media: Women of Colour Call out Culture As Venture Community Management,” calls attention to an important group of unpaid laborers whose work often goes unnoticed and unappreciated: women of color and other marginalized groups who call out racism, homophobia and misogyny on internet platforms. This form of unpaid labor does a service to the general social media community, as well as to the platform itself—which makes these workers particularly susceptible to exploitation. The only currency they’re gaining comes in the form of likes, followers, and general praise, but these workers also face backlash, threats, and harassment. Their work is necessary and important because it helps to make the internet a safer, more inclusive place, and it keeps racists/homophobes/misogynists in check. Nakamura argues that people who do this labor of responding to problematic posts are venture community managers who are essentially unpaid, reproductive laborers. They’re gendered and racialized which makes them subject to exploitation by social media platforms, as well as internet users. Nakamura acknowledges that this kind of work, although necessary, is not sustainable. I’m wondering if there are steps social media platforms could take to help protect these workers, although, it’s probably a naive thought to think that the platforms that benefit from this unpaid labor would care about the protection of these workers. I just wonder if there are ways that these workers could be better acknowledged and protected from harassment. This paper also reminded me of Deborah Brandt’s paper: “Writing for a Living: Literacy and the Knowledge Economy.” This social media labor seems like an offshoot of our knowledge economy, but a type of labor that is not getting proper compensation because it’s volunteer. Maybe it’s being compensated in the form of attention, like Richard Lanham’s theories on the attention economy. However, since the attention social media laborers are gaining is both positive and negative, the latter sometimes life-threatening, I’m not sure if we can really count it as compensation. Nakamura’s paper is really eye-opening because it sheds light on the important work that women of color do to protect our safety in social media platforms, that we often don’t notice or acknowledge.