Learning to Like the Likes and the Hate: The Labor of Internet Fame in the New Attention Economy

ABSTRACT How do people experience internet fame? Whereas public visibility and reputation were once tightly coupled, these can be decoupled in the new media attention economy. We illustrate this with an ethnography of virality. Going viral on social media can be a destabilizing experience, given the problems of hyper-visibility, context collapse, and hateful commentary from unknown audiences. Yet many people pursue online virality, reporting the experience to be pleasurable, even addictive. Bridging classic theories of deviance and emotions with science and technology studies, we examine how content creators learn to experience virality as affectively rewarding, akin to getting high on drugs. Through immersive ethnography and interviews with high-performing content creators, we develop a phenomenology of virality. We trace how platforms afford affective experiences with the strategic delivery of metrics, which creators learn to interpret as pleasurable as they interact with each other and with their screens. By documenting the embodied and affective experience of work on social media, we show a novel mode of labor control in the age of platforms.