EmilyElaborates

The Information Age, taking place among increasing globalization, repetitive and monopolized pop culture, and the decline of personal satisfaction under late capitalism, has driven younger generations to seek refuge on the Internet; it’s where we get our daily news, avocado toast recipes, and easily-consumable entertainment. It’s how we communicate with friends and family in different parts of the country or on a separate continent altogether. When sharing a thought or piece of content with a more general virtual audience, we say, “The Internet will love this.”

​

We ascribe properties to a network that it does not inherently possess. Though it was created for and is used primarily by human beings, the mechanisms behind the Web’s coded curtain are just elusive enough to invite scrutiny. This place has its own mythology, tales to be exchanged over pixelated campfires.

 

But what else can be exchanged over and through the Web? And how?

 

“Where the production of the soul is concerned [...] we should no longer look to the soil and organic development, [...] nor to the factory and mechanical development, but rather to today’s dominant economic forms, that is, to production defined by a combination of cybernetics and affect.”
Michael Hardt, 1999

 

Affect is commonly known in the field of anthropology as encompassing how one conducts themselves in a deliberate or performative way. Affective labor, according to Karl Marx, is “the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production of wealth” (Marx 1973). In a rapidly-changing capitalist economy, one that is moving toward an information economy that requires “a change in the quality of labor and the nature of laboring processes” (Hardt 1999:93), affective labor has become immaterial in that it produces an immaterial good, such as knowledge, communication, or attention (Hardt 1999:94), and does not necessarily require a product external to the producer to show for it.

 

Affective labor is extremely similar to emotional labor and its product, emotional capital. While emotional labor is seen as the act of managing affect in a “publicly observable facial and bodily display” (Hochschild 2003:7) in exchange for a form of compensation—a behavior typically observed in industries that fall back on the maxim, “service with a smile”—Pierre Bourdieu sees its accumulation, emotional capital, as a subset of cultural capital (Cottingham 2016), and it can be used to understand the emotional resources that individuals hold, activate and embody in distinct fields. Bourdieu’s forms of capital—economic (money and property rights), cultural (qualifications and experiences), and social (obligations and connections)—are necessary for understanding “the structure and functioning of the social world” (Bourdieu 1986) as it stands.

 

The key difference here is that emotional labor is embedded in human interaction and communication across all different mediums by all kinds of actors. Affective labor, on the other hand, is almost exclusively performance-based. In advertising, affective labor is both “a symptom of the dissociation between the reality of a capitalist economy and the alienation it produces,” as well as a means to manage “the emotional states of the consumers, who also serve as the labor reserve,” in order to sell a product (Betancourt 2010). On video sharing sites such as YouTube, content creators sell themselves; studies have shown that the performance of emotional vulnerability, whether positive or negative, is used to boost audience belief in the performer’s authenticity (Ferchaud 2018), which in turn brings them affective capital (which, in this case, takes the form of audience attention) that can then be exchanged through the platform for economic capital.

 

The link between authenticity and audience attention is anyone’s guess, but mine is as follows: Despite the connectivity that the Internet brings, its use is fundamentally a solitary practice; for every hour spent with friends watching an entertaining compilation or playing a co-op game, there are several more hours that one spends alone, trying to fill the empty air around them with something that feels real.