Visibility and vulnerability

Concepts, values and ambivalence of digital cultural labour

This paper aims to describe and analyse how the values of cultural labour is affected by its increasingly digital context and infrastructure. More specifically, we investigate how cultural producers performing digital cultural labour describe their work, their perceived value of it and the work strategies they employ. In this paper, we investigate digital cultural labour from the perspective of content creators. In short, this group of cultural producers is characterized by the fact that their product is solely produced and distributed by digital platforms, having no existence outside of the digital domain. Our analysis is based on qualitative interviews with 41 creatives working as performing artists, visual artists and as digital creative workers (youtubers, gamers, influencers, bloggers, tiktokers, instagrammers etc.). The final category is the main focus of this paper.

We ask the following questions: What are the conditions, ambitions, motivations and rewards of digital cultural labour? How is digital cultural labour conceptualized, legitimated and evaluated? What is the cultural policy relevance for this kind of cultural labour?