Prazer e sofrimento no trabalho de criação de conteúdo em mídias sociais

Abstract

With the spread of internet users, the social media have become a potential working space. Among the various activities that have emerged in the context of platformization, this study turns the view to the creation of digital content. Sometimes, those who produce content to social networks are named according to the platforms with which they work; there are youtubers, instagrammers and tiktokers, for example. Other times, the term “digital influencers” is chosen due to Influencer Marketing, which is strongly present in this job. However, to this research, “digital content creators” was used, considered to be a broader nomenclature and, currently, used by these people. From this choice, the general objective of this study was outlined as being to understand the experiences of pleasure and suffering in the job of content creation in social media in face of the dominant technical logic. More specifically, this research sought: (1) to characterize the kind of work organization of content creation in social media; (2) to describe the pleasure experiences in the job of content creation in social media; (3) to identify the suffering experiences in the job of content creation in social media; and, lastly, (4) to relate the suffering experiences in the job of content creation to the way of organizing the work. For that, the term technique was adopted according to the studies of Ellul (1968) and his perspective on work technification. Regarding the pleasure and suffering experiences, Work Psychodynamics were used as a theoretical basis. Considering that, qualitative research of exploratory nature was conducted by implementing interviews in depth and the data was analyzed through the Content Analysis technique from Bardin (2016). The results showed that the content production in social media is a job that also presents the tensioning of the pleasure-suffering experiences proposed by Dejours (1992, 2014). Still, it was inferred that such dynamic has been even more intense, since the Workers do not understand how the algorithms work and are constantly testing new content models, evaluating their performances through the platforms’ metrics, and they exhibit difficulty in enjoying vacations and breaks. By that, it was observed that, although the content creation may be perceived, initially, as a new work dynamic, it is actually also a production directed to maximum efficiency and has aggravating factors in relation to technical jobs of a more traditional quality. Finally, it was pointed that, even if in a limited way, the content production constitutes an even more efficient way of work exploitation, given its low direct compensation from the platforms.