Despite the staggering uptick in social media employment over the last decade, this nascent category of cultural labor remains comparatively under-theorized. In this article, we contend that social media work is configured by a visibility paradox: While workers are tasked with elevating the presence—or <em>visibility</em>—of their employers’ brands across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more, their identities, and much of their labor, remain <em>hidden </em>behind branded social media accounts. To illuminate how this ostensible paradox impacts laborers’ conditions and experiences of work, we present data from in-depth interviews with more than 40 social media professionals. Their accounts make clear that social media work is not just materially concealed, but rendered socially invisible through its lack of crediting, marginal status, and incessant demands for un/under-compensated emotional labor. This patterned devaluation of social media employment can, we show, be situated along two gender-coded axes that have long structured the value of labor in the media and cultural industries: a) technical‒communication and b) creation‒circulation. After detailing these in/visibility mechanisms, we conclude by addressing the implications of our findings for the politics and subjectivities of work in the digital media economy.

中文翻译：

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社交媒体工作中的可见性：品牌背后的隐藏劳动力

尽管在过去十年中社交媒体的就业人数出现了惊人的增长，但这种新兴的文化劳动力类别仍然相对缺乏理论化。在本文中，我们认为社交媒体工作是由一个可见性悖论构成的：虽然员工的任务是提升其雇主品牌在 Facebook、Twitter、Instagram 等平台上的存在或<em>知名度</em> ，他们的身份，以及他们的大部分劳动，仍然<em>隐藏</em>在品牌社交媒体账户的背后。为了阐明这种表面上的悖论如何影响劳动者的工作条件和经验，我们提供了对 40 多名社交媒体专业人士的深度访谈数据。他们的叙述清楚地表明，社交媒体工作不仅在物质上被掩盖，而且由于缺乏信用而在社会上不可见，边缘地位，以及对未/补偿不足的情绪劳动的不断要求。我们表明，这种对社交媒体就业的模式贬值可以沿着两个性别编码轴定位，这些轴长期以来一直构成媒体和文化产业中劳动力的价值：a) 技术-传播和 b) 创造-流通。在详细介绍了这些不可见/可见性机制之后，我们最后讨论了我们的研究结果对数字媒体经济中工作的政治和主观性的影响。