Data labour on Workplace by Facebook

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The proposed paper examines the collapse between the role of user and worker in the extraction of data labor on Workplace by Facebook. Workplace, a social media platform for companies, adopts the popular Facebook interface with a few variations. While scholarship on audience labor has explored the idea that user generated content and consumption of advertising can be regarded as labor, this paper examines a modified phenomenon where the creation of content on enterprise social media is incidental to, and required as, part of paid employment. Workers are thus users encouraged and required to perform both the production of work and emotional labor in form of communicative practices like networking and social media engagement. In examining the production of content on Workplace, this paper draws and extends an analogy with work in the twentieth century when, according to some historical accounts, the need to transcend the individual inspired the creation of repositories of knowledge through record keeping and written communication. As such, companies were less sensitive to worker departures because written records made it easy for new workers to gain the knowledge held by the old. I argue that the adoption of enterprise social media like Workplace further blurs the line between work and non-work, leading to the production of social content under surveillance of the company, and extending collection and archival of knowledge to include affective data. The data derives from: (1) Facebook's websites and user interfaces, and (2) Media discourse of Workplace. It analyzes these data with the aim of highlighting how Facebook and Workplace-adopting companies exert their power by extracting affective data from workers; how that data in turn perpetuates the power disparities between capital and labor; and the possibilities for challenging this asymmetry in the capture and usage of workers' affective data.