Influencer commerce has experienced an exponential growth, resulting in new forms of digital practices among young women. Influencers are one form of microcelebrity who accumulate a following on blogs and social media through textual and visual narrations of their personal, everyday lives, upon which advertorials for products and services are premised. In Singapore, Influencers are predominantly young women whose commercial practices are most noted on Instagram. In response, everyday users are beginning to model after Influencers through tags, reposts and #OOTDs (Outfit Of The Day), unwittingly producing volumes of advertising content that is not only encouraged by Influencers and brands but also publicly utilised with little compensation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Instagram Influencers and followers in Singapore, this article investigates the visibility labour in which followers engage on follower-anchored Instagram advertorials, in an attention economy that has swiftly profited off work that is quietly creative but insidiously exploitative.

The movement toward what is often described as Web 2.0 is usually understood as a large-scale shift toward a participatory and collaborative version of the web, where users are able to get involved and create content. As things stand we have so far had little opportunity to explore how new forms of power play out in this context of apparent ‘empowerment’ and ‘democratization’. This article suggests that this is a pressing issue that requires urgent attention. To begin to open up this topic this article situates Web 2.0 in the context of the broader transformations that are occurring in new media by drawing on the work of a number of leading writers who, in various ways, consider the implications of software ‘sinking’ into and ‘sorting’ aspects of our everyday lives. The article begins with this broader literature before exploring in detail Scott Lash’s notion of ‘post-hegemonic power’ and more specifically his concept of ‘power through the algorithm’. The piece concludes by discussing how this relates to work on Web 2.0 and how this work might be developed in the future.

This article explores the new modalities of visibility engendered by new media, with a focus on the social networking site Facebook. Influenced by Foucault’s writings on Panopticism – that is, the architectural structuring of visibility – this article argues for understanding the construction of visibility on Facebook through an architectural framework that pays particular attention to underlying software processes and algorithmic power. Through an analysis of EdgeRank, the algorithm structuring the flow of information and communication on Facebook’s ‘News Feed’, I argue that the regime of visibility constructed imposes a perceived ‘threat of invisibility’ on the part of the participatory subject. As a result, I reverse Foucault’s notion of surveillance as a form of permanent visibility, arguing that participatory subjectivity is not constituted through the imposed threat of an all-seeing vision machine, but by the constant possibility of disappearing and becoming obsolete.

This article examines how brands have iteratively experimented with mobile and social media. The activities of brands – including Coca-Cola, Virgin and Smirnoff – at music festivals in Australia since 2005 are used as an instructive case. The article demonstrates how these brands imagined social media, attempted to instruct consumers to use mobile devices, and used cultural events to stimulate image production tuned to the decision-making of social media algorithms. The article contributes to debate by articulating how brands are important actors in the development of algorithmic media infrastructure and devices. Accounts of algorithmic media need to examine how the analytic capacities of social and mobile media are interdependent with orchestrating the creative participation of users.

Algorithms are said to affect social realities, often in unseen ways. This article explores conscious, instrumental interactions with algorithms, as a window into the complexities and extent of algorithmic power. Through a thematic analysis of online discussions among Instagram influencers, I observed that influencers’ pursuit of influence resembles a game constructed around “rules” encoded in algorithms. Within the “visibility game,” influencers’ interpretations of Instagram’s algorithmic architecture—and the “game” more broadly—act as a lens through which to view and mechanize the rules of the game. Illustrating this point, this article describes two prominent interpretations, which combine information influencers glean about Instagram’s algorithms with preexisting discourses within influencer communities on authenticity and entrepreneurship. This article shows how directing inquiries toward the visibility game makes present the interdependency between users, algorithms, and platform owners and demonstrates how algorithms structure, but do not unilaterally determine user behavior.

In attempting to break with a ‘fall from grace’ narrative that may structure analysis of the rapid professionalization and monetization of previously amateur online video content on the main global platform, YouTube, this article outlines histories of key institutions in the new screen ecology as outcomes of the increased interpenetration of very different, often clashing industry cultures. Google/YouTube, Apple’s iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, Yahoo! and Facebook (‘NoCal’) are largely Internet ‘pure-play’ companies, whilst Hollywood’s incumbents (‘SoCal’) practice time-honoured mass media and premium content strategies. The ‘history of the present’ of the new screen ecology is the history of the clash of these cultures. The less than 10-year history of Google’s YouTube can be written as a history of Google seeking to come to terms with the conditions of possibility for entertainment, content and talent development from its base as an IT company dedicated to scale, automation, permanent beta, rapid prototyping and iteration. These efforts reflect both continuities and contestations with traditional media models, particularly business models. As emerging intermediaries in the middle of the convergent space between NoCal and SoCal, multichannel networks’ (MCNs’) placement sees them needing to innovate on both the NoCal and SoCal side. On the former side, MCNs are attempting to provide value-added services superior to basic YouTube analytics, with programmatics and pioneering attempts at management of scale and volume. On the latter side, they are managing a quite different class of entry- to mid-level talent, who bring successful audience development and clear ideas about the roots of their success with them. The new screen ecology is a space of unimagined scale and scope of flourishing online creativity and culture, which is at the same time turbulent and precarious for creators and MCNs alike.

This article asks: How can understanding the relationship of exploitation and oppression inform the study of digital labour and digital capitalism? It combines the analysis of capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, and racism in order to analyse digital labour. The approach taken also engages with a generalization of David Roediger’s wages of whiteness approach, Marxist feminism, Angela Davis’s Marxist black feminism, Rosa Luxemburg, Kylie Jarrett’s concept of the digital housewife, Jack Qiu’s notion of iSlavery, Eileen Meehan’s concept of the gendered audience commodity, and Carter Wilson and Audrey Smedley’s historical analyses of racism and class. The article presents a typology of differences and commonalities between wage-labour, slave-labour, reproductive labour, and Facebook labour. It shows that the digital data commodity is both gendered and racialized. It analyses how class, patriarchy, slavery, and racism overgrasp into each other in the realm of digital capitalism. It also introduces the notions of the organic composition of labour and the rate of reproductive labour and shows, based on example data, how to calculate these ratios that provide insights into the reality of unpaid labour in capitalism.

Existing research shows that self-branding in the knowledge economy is a key promotional device for the pursuit of self-realization in a context that reifies entrepreneurialism as the main ideological stance. However, there is still reluctance to fully acknowledge the processes of sociality that constitute self-branding practice. While the relationship between branding and the affective dynamics of social production of value fostered by the diffusion of Web 2.0 is widely acknowledged in the literature, there still seems to be a lack of understanding of the extent to which self-branding relates to social relationships in the production of socialized value for individuals. The study of self-branding practices across digital freelance professions in the knowledge economy reveals how social media has come to represent a working tool that serves the curation of a professional image and the management of social relationships via the enactment of performative practices of sociality, which exist around a shared notion of reputation as value. Here, self-branding becomes an investment in social relationships with expected return for the acquisition of a reputation. This substantially equates self-branding with what social theory calls social capital, being instrumental to secure employment in the freelance-based labour market of the digital knowledge economy.

How has YouTube evolved as a cultural and commercial infrastructure? What institutional forms has it produced? The present article takes up these questions through a discussion of multichannel networks (MCNs) and their role within the digital video system. MCNs are a new breed of intermediary firm that link entrepreneurial YouTubers with the advertising, marketing and screen production industries. This article considers the functions of MCNs vis-à-vis the existing constellation of screen industry professions, including talent agents, managers and media buyers, who perform similar functions offline. Combining structural analysis of the MCN industry with an assessment of its cultural impacts, I show how Google’s decision to open the YouTube back-end to third-party intermediaries is subtly changing the digital video ecology.

Social media platforms play an increasingly important civic role as platforms for discourse, where we discuss, debate, and share information. This article explores how users make sense of the content moderation systems social media platforms use to curate this discourse. Through a survey of users ( n = 519) who have experienced content moderation, I explore users’ folk theories of how content moderation systems work, how they shape the affective relationship between users and platforms, and the steps users take to assert their agency by seeking redress. I find significant impacts of content moderation that go far beyond the questions of freedom of expression that have thus far dominated the debate. Raising questions about what content moderation systems are designed to accomplish, I conclude by conceptualizing an educational, rather than punitive, model for content moderation systems.

This article aims to explain how Web 2.0 platforms in general, and Facebook in particular, engineers online connections. Connectivity has become the material and metaphorical wiring of our culture, a culture in which technologies shape and are shaped not only by economic and legal frames, but also by users and content. The emergence of social media platforms is at the heart of a shifting dynamic, where various actors (technology, users, content, legal and economic actors) are building a connective space for communication and information. In order to comprehend this interwovenness, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory will be invoked to explore how social media platforms can be analysed as techno-socio-cultural artefacts; this theoretical framework will be complemented by Castells’ political-economy approach to arrive at a fuller understanding of how social media operate. The documentary Catfish (2010) serves as an illustration to explore social media platforms in their multiple dimensions.