Wirtualna praca afektywna celebrytów — przechwytywanie interakcji społecznych i mikrocelebryctwo
Virtual Affective Labour of Celebrities — The Capture of Social Interactions and Micro-Celebrity

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the phenomenon of virtual affective labour as a form of immaterial labour centred on the production and maintenance of interpersonal bonds and the commodification of social relations through media-mediated communication and emotion facilitated by the Internet. The article demonstrates how this concept may be employed to advance our understanding of celebrities as a social category within the context of post-industrial transformations of labour. Social media platforms, by providing infrastructure that virtualises social interactions, capture, monetise, and render those interactions economically productive. Consequently, virtual affective labour — once confined to a small number of media figures — is becoming a mass phenomenon. Digitalised social relations, and above all the data generated through them and the attention invested in them, constitute the foundation of profit for contemporary digital affective industries. These industries generate parasocial relations in a twofold sense: they commercially exploit the emotions of the recipients of celebrity posts by simulating the creation of personal bonds, and they employ digital algorithms and bots to sustain communication with audiences. The article further describes how social media platforms, ostensibly democratising access to the tools of visibility-building, incentivise prosumers to perform affective labour on their behalf through the promise of celebrity fame and intermittent rewards dispensed by Skinnerian algorithms, thereby contributing to the proliferation of behavioural addictions.

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