“Our Struggles Are Unequal”

Digital User Labor

Research has pointed us to the occurrence of “fan labor” as viewers or users do specific sorts of work for networks in the process of connected viewing (Andrejevic, 2008). Within this line of research, I put forth that Black women offer both television networks and online sites particular kinds of labor based on their intersected marginalization. Andrejevic (2002) points out the “asymmetries of power and control over information technologies and resources” (p. 230) as users self-disclose online. The consumerism inherent in social networking, in other words, both target and depend on this peer-to-peer sharing of information. This “rationalization of consumption” extends the reach of surveillance and connects capitalism to control (Andrejevic, 2002, p. 232). Citing Foucault, Andrejevic continues, “capitalism ‘would not be possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes’” (pp. 234–235). In other words, disciplinary surveillance enhances economic productivity. From an intersectional critical race perspective, the work of users of color, and Black women in particular, especially functions as economic productivity in Western capitalism and civilization (Noble, 2013). “These labor pools are often racialized and gendered,” Noble wrote, “as are the values upon which [content] moderation takes place” (Noble, 2013). Building on this knowledge, I investigate media’s dependence on the work of Black women both in the consumption and mediation of television on one hand and the rearticulation of that content online on the other hand.

Black women’s affective labor is translated into productivity both for social network sites, in continuing its reliance on “grassroots,” on-the-ground users, and television in its strategies of incorporation of live feedback to its content. These arguments surface through a look at the material functions and corporate goals of Twitter and the network integration of social media and Black users’ reification of the television narrative. I begin with a brief look into my use of affective labor before describing Light Girls as a case study.

Affect and Affective Labor

Building from Tomkin’s psychobiology of differential affects and Deleuze’s take on the ethology of bodily capacities, the trajectory of the study of affect can be thought of as one of directionality (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 6). Through these two entry points “affect [is theorized] as the prime ‘interest’ motivator that comes to put the drive in bodily forces (Tomkins); [or] affect as an entire, vital, and modulating field of myriad becomings across human and nonhuman (Deleuze)” (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 6). ¹ Beyond these influencers, the multiple entry points to affect allow for an “in-between,” a “yet-ness.” Drawing from 17th century Spinoza in Ethics (1996), this “‘not yet,’ convey[s] a sense of urgency that transforms the matter and matterings of affect into an ethical, aesthetic, and political task all at once” (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 3). I draw from this multidirectionality, as I examine the intersection of media and the affective work of Black women. I specifically draw from the work of feminist and subaltern scholars who analyze the work of “living under the thumb of a normativizing power” and focus on the collective and external experience of women (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 7; Vora, 2015).

Vora (2015) attends to the production and circulation of subjectivities, commodities, and representations as she traces India’s affective labor history, specifically its racialized and gendered labor. Vora highlights the affective labor of industries such as call center agents in India as a part of a global biocapital process. Franklin and Lock (2003) foundationally describe this sort of biocapital as “a form of extraction that involves isolating and mobilizing the primary reproductive agency of specific body parts” (p. 8). In Vora’s (2015) account, specific bodies are used as “vital energy” that supply life “from areas of life depletion to areas of life enrichment” (p. 3). In this way, the brown call center agents are trained to adopt specific vernaculars and cultural mores from parts of the United States in order to serve their Western clients. Their emotions, lives, and subjecthood are transformed from depletion to others’ enrichment in service of the global machine of capitalism. In drawing from affective labor from Vora’s work, I examine how Black women online and their affective labor function as a similar sort of “vital energy” for (new) media industries through the work of reifying the television narrative to being transformed into Twitter’s larger corporate goals and the television industry’s integration into multiple sites of productivity.

Marxist critiques have pointed to the fissure in relegating labor and the privileging of commodity manufacturing over service labor. In her book on the proletarization of sex, Lee (2010) explains, “… any kind of hard fast distinction between productive and reproductive labor is difficult to maintain. As all labors produce either services or commodities that service, all labors are, at a fundamental level, ‘service labors’” (pp. 11–12). In other words, focusing on the human body and affect as a particular sort of labor for capitalism acts as a service, a commodity in much the same way that a material product would. Lee (2010) further points to the human body and the inanimate object as inextricably linked as commodity—both serve to provide “service labor” (p. 12). Although connected, commodity and service labor have distinct plights:

In contrast to commodity production, in which human labor is preserved and transformed into the object produced, service labor, in its very re-productive capacity, must erase itself on behalf of the other who consumes the labor. The very evaporation of service in its performance sustains the consumer. (Lee, 2010, p. 12) (emphasis added)

This disappearance or deliberate erasure of reproductive labor is also linked to the erasure of Black women as both “vulnerable to oversight” and profitable in its appropriation (Gaunt, 2015). Gathered on social media sites around the promise and euphoria of connection, these specific users are solicited around a common, cultural (television) text; subsequently, their affective responses are mined for the purpose of furthering the production of television content as well as the use (value) of that social network site. As Cooper (2008) points out in her work on bioeconomy and capitalism’s contradictions: “where capitalism promises on the one hand, it destroys on the other” (p. 61). How then can we balance the promise of community and solace of social network sites, rich with race-specific culture, with realities of service affective labor? I briefly turn to colorism and the instance of Black Twitter before addressing these points.

Color Stratification and Black Twitter

Color stratification has existed within communities of color for centuries and points to the privileging of whiteness and “othering” of people of color. Many African Americans, in particular, struggle against this privileging of whiteness “but they recognize that light skin is associated in many ways with the American opportunity structure” (Thompson, 2014, p. 148). In other words, African Americans, in this context, both act and exist within this structure while they might resist its ideology. Colorism, then, is directly related to the larger system of racism in the United States and around the world where some Anglo-European features, such as light eyes and fair skin tone, are often heralded as superior to others (Hunter, 2007, p. 240). Lighter skinned individuals might have clear advantages in “passing” to the Western standard of beauty while also struggling with “not being Black enough” (Hunter, 2007, p. 240). People with darker skin are often seen as more authentic to their race but usually carry the brunt of many stereotypes of their race, such as aggressiveness (Hunter, 2007, p. 245). The irony and complexity in this privileging of whiteness, of course, lays in the subsequent appropriation of Black features and culture (Johnson, 2003).

“Gendered colorism” adds another layer as research has suggested that lighter skin tones serve different functions for women (Thompson, 2014, p. 144). Critically, many Black women experience “double-discrimination” as “the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex” (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 149). Thus, it could be argued (and colloquially is), that being closer to the European physical standards might help to alleviate some of these discriminations and cause colorism to function in specific ways for Black women of different hues. It might be no surprise that the topic of hair surfaces during discussion of colorism with discourses of “good” hair often mirroring straight, lengthy hair typical of Caucasians (Thompson, 2014, p. 144). The responses of Black users on Twitter, and women in particular, to Light Girls spanned the gamut as complex as the history of colorism itself.

Rich research on what has been dubbed “Black Twitter” has uncovered the cultural understandings of African Americans as they manifest in specific ways online. To be clear, I follow critical race scholars who warn against homogenizing a group of people who identify as Black on Twitter as all belonging to “Black Twitter” (Florini, 2013; Senft & Noble, 2014). According to a Pew Research Center report, 27% of Black users make up Twitter’s user base, in comparison to 21% of White users and 25% of Hispanic users (Duggan, Ellison, Lampe, Lenhart, & Madden, 2015). With high rates of African Americans on Twitter and shared cultural understandings, Black Twitter acts as Twitter’s mediation of Black cultural discourse (Brock, 2012). This often includes instances of signifyin’, drawing from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s concept of linguistic performance “that allows for the communication of multiple levels of meaning simultaneously, most frequently involving wordplay and misdirection” (Florini, 2013, p. 224). Here, these Black users are able to connect and relate to others like them, an occurrence that transcends physical space (Brock, 2012). Virtually coming together around social topics, Black users employ common discursive styles, such as call and response and signifyin.’ As we know from the digital labor and critical race literatures, these online communities certainly do not evade the gaze of the television or social media profit industries.

Case Study: Light Girls

In order to ground my intervention, I focused on a case study involving the live tweeting of Light Girls, which ran as a sequel to the 2013 OWN documentary Dark Girls. During the airing of Light Girls, the hashtag #BlackGirls trended on Twitter where the site’s algorithms spotlighted tweets about the show based on, among other factors, the high volume of users participating in the conversation. I functioned as a participant-observer in this case, where I watched the documentary live, along with other viewers. Simultaneously, through my public Twitter account, I observed conversations regarding the show by searching the trending hashtag #BlackGirls as well as the name of the show #LightGirls.

I follow Brock’s (2008) critical technocultural discourse analysis, which “draws from technology studies, communication studies, and critical race theory to understand how culture shapes technologies” (p. 531). Critical technocultural discourse analysis’s strength lies in its coupling of discourse analysis with an investigation of the technology format itself, allowing us to understand culture online as specific technologies afford, while avoiding a strict technological deterministic framework. I cite the users online in their own words throughout this article, while contextualizing their posts through the interpretive framework. In their research on Black women bloggers, Brock, Kvasny, and Hales (2010) signaled their inclusion of “large chunks of user-generated discourse” as a conscious decision to reflect “the methodological desire of representing disadvantaged groups in their own words” which must be “properly contextualized by the interpretative framework in order to maintain narrative cohesion” (p. 1046). Thus, I include users’ tweets throughout this article, primarily in the Reifying Narratives section, coupled with an analysis of the sites of technology themselves (Twitter and television) that enable and rely on the work of Black women online.

I also find germane works such as Reynolds (2015), who used “lurking” online to uncover different constructions of masculinity in online advertisements for men seeking men. In this case study, however, I have participated in the larger conversation on Light Girls, finding value in being involved in the process of live tweeting that I analyze here. As is often the concern with participant-observation, researcher bias can occur when the researcher acts as the author of conversation threads, thus skewing particular conversations in certain directions (Hine, 2000). As the tweets that I use originated from the larger key search terms on Twitter of #BlackGirls and #LightGirls, I was not the beginner of conversation threads of these posts; rather my tweets were a part of the larger public conversation of Light Girls.

During analysis, the grounded theory approach was employed using the open, axial, and selective coding in order to account for repeated patterns as to online posts regarding the television text (Corbin & Strauss, 1990). The first phase of analysis included selecting posts that included the hashtag #DarkGirls or #LightGirls. Second, subcategories were created and compared with larger categories, such as “engaging with users about colorism” or “fixing the television narrative.” Finally, the core category of affective labor was used to unify users’ patterns and subcategories. I was interested in the organic tweets that these viewers and users posted and interacted with regarding the documentary and its focus on colorism. I refrained from informing the users of my role as participant-observer because of the public nature of the observed tweets as well as the possibility of influencing users’ posts (Gaiser & Schreiner, 2009, p. 134). I also focused on first-person usage when referencing reactions to the documentary as indicators of these users’ identification as Black women. Despite the challenges of online research, scholars have encouraged that we not be “deterred from attempting actively to capture the rich data accessible in a blog environment” (Gaiser & Schreiner, 2009, p. 88). To this end, I conducted myself on Twitter as a participant-observer, tweeting about the show to my own followers while observing the reactions of the larger Twitter public, with a specific eye to Black women and affective labor. Rather than make general claims about these tweets or these women online, I used the qualitative data gathered to serve as examples of my larger argument regarding the affective labor of Black women at the crossroads between television and Twitter. As a woman of Afro-Indo-Caribbean descent, I was particularly intrigued at the level of sophistication with which users online contested depictions of their Black womanhood through readings of the Light Girls documentary while performing work.

Reifying Narratives of Light Girls

Cultural aspects of Blackness transcend on to Twitter where Black users form their own set of language and codes around social events and topics, which can speak to broader racial and cultural implications (Brock, 2012). Black users’ responses to the film Light Girls highlighted these larger historical and cultural conversations and required knowledge thereof of color stratification in the Black diaspora.

Users critiqued instances such as the insinuation in the documentary that light-skinned girls and women are sexually abused differently (read: at an increased rate) than darker-skinned girls and women: “What we will NOT do is suggest light skinned girls are more sexually abused than dark skinned girls when ALL black girls are terrorized!!!!!” Another user commented on this color stratification tension: “It’s coming across as very ‘they hate me cuz I’m beautiful’ when it really should be ‘let’s dismantle the white supremacist notions.’” The latter post garnered 97 retweets and 37 favorites in critique of the documentary, while suggesting social action as well. Another user mentioned the unity present in Black women that was missed in the documentary: “I hate that in reference to #darkgirls they keep saying Black Girls. We’re all Black. #LightGirls.” Other responses to the documentary shed light to the complicated history of colorism in the Black community, as many users seemed to be upholding the trope of “together but unequal.” As one user tweeted: “No disrespect to light skinned women with colourism struggles, but our struggles are unequal.” Still, others challenged widely held (sarcastic) beliefs of the “poor light skinned girl:” “The very fact that some aren’t taking the issues fairer skinned women of color face as true issues is baffling. #LightGirls.”

In this way, Black users rewrote and recentered the narrative of the documentary, privileging their experiences over the representation of them on television. These affective responses relied on the trudging up of users’ experiences of color stratification in their community. These posts serve a larger function of affective labor in their movement from conscious experience of colorism to tangible “fixing” of the television narrative. In this sense, Black women not only view the stereotypes in the documentary regarding sexual assault and colorism or the lack of attention on the system of white oppression, but they also move to reify these problematic representations of them through their social network online. In her work on Black women on celebrity gossip blogs, Steele (2016) utilized bell hooks’ instantiation of “talking back” to examine the ways in which “Black women negotiate the intersection of their racial and gender identities, [where] gossip is used as a tool to resist oppression” (p. 88). In a similar sense, the Black women viewers of Light Girls attend to the topic of colorism as a way to resist problematic representations of Black women more generally. Although this analysis focuses on users’ race and gender, it is important to note that, utilizing the digital intersectionality theory, “… users bring not only their racial backgrounds with them online, but they also carry their class, gender, sexuality, religious and other embodied identities and experiences” (Tynes et al., 2016, p. 36).

Television viewing has also been conceptualized as work in similar instances (Andrejevic, 2008), and I suggest that the integration of social networks allows for another layer of such affective labor for Black women. These responses served as examples to the sorts of live tweeting posts in which users attempted to reify some problematic tenets of the documentary, again, as work. In order to better understand how these responses get used up as labor, I provide the material functions of Twitter as a company that allows for, relies on, and creates affective labor as well as an analysis of OWN and its solicitation of these tweets.

Twitter and Corporate Goals

The technical elements and rhetoric of Twitter elucidate its function as fostering the necessary environment for a particular kind of affective labor. The early adoption of a user-centered focus with nouns such as “followers” emphasizes the community engagement aspect of the site. This focus on the user and her actions online further mystifies Twitter as a medium and replaces its corporeality with utility. It also vastly shapes Twitter in contrast to other social network sites, such as Facebook, as community-driven and grassroots focused. As researcher, Van Dijck (2013), noted: “In a very short period, the platform [Twitter] gained a critical mass of users, who wanted to engage in public or community debates, exchanging suggestions and opinions” (p. 71). This user-centered approach not only provides a utilitarian site for users, but it also depends on them to exist. The sustenance of the grassroots model on Twitter falls directly in line with its larger corporate strategies, such as its rhetoric of “followers,” in other words.

In the Twitter discussion of Light Girls in January 2015, one user pointed to this kind of grassroots engagement on Twitter as opposed to television: “So. When watching things like this, I get more insight/thought provoking views from tweeters than I do the actual documentary.” The “genuine” and “organic” connection of these users, as they share their experiences and reactions as opposed to the film is evident in this tweet and is strategically constructed through the mechanics of Twitter. The positioning that Twitter has taken allows users to find their commiserating online as more “thought provoking” than the perhaps distant, industrial, and public nature of the documentary. This sort of interactivity, digital labor scholar Andrejevic (2008) found, “allows the viewers to take on the work of finding ways to make a show more interesting” (p. 28). I would add that Black women’s particular historical places in society regarding community engagement and activism (Collins, 1998) position them as “highly favored” not just by a network but also by an online networking site—a “conveyor” of information such as Twitter—as well.

Where users live tweet, Twitter benefits from the questioning of another medium rather than users turning inward to critique Twitter as a corporation, furthering the presumed neutrality of interactivity (Everett, 2008). The site’s corporate goals are twofold: serving the user and providing a space of connectivity while funding a business and making profits from the site. This tightrope becomes problematic, as scholars have pointed out, when users become the commodity (Van Dijck, 2013); more specifically, as Benkler (1999) cautioned much earlier, the users’ information is the commodity (p. 355). The elusiveness of how exactly users are the (affective) commodity continues to serve this function of utility. ²

Specific material functions also create this online environment of real-time, community-like engagement. With the 2008 implementation of “trending topics,” millions of users could now connect over a few keywords in real time. The retweet function was launched in 2009 and allowed users to echo, in a sense, their followers’ tweets while adding their own thoughts. As Van Dijck (2013) points out, the “microsyntax” of Twitter became a sort of currency with the “@” function denoting interaction between users and retweeting as sort of a common language (p. 72). These features foster an online environment that promises not only the ease of connectivity but also the allowance of doing so in real time. The timeline feature of the site with short updates allows for on-the-ground posts, as research on protests and activism has shown (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). These functions, en masse, further Twitter’s goals as the “conveyor” of information, centering the user as the one who is doing the work.

Twitter is unique in the affective labor framework here because it has and continues to market itself as a sort of grassroots organization that allows its users to be the ones to stand up to exploitative capitalism (among other institutions). The site does this through its user-centered rhetoric and its technical, timeline materialities. Twitter here positions Black women online to seek each other out during the airing of a television program about them, resulting in them “fixing” the narrative in an “organic” space. Twitter, then, fosters the affective labor of Black women through its rhetoric and technical functions of being the “neutral” site that simply “conveys” information (Everett, 2008). In this way, the work that these women do online as they “fix” the narrative of Light Girls is required for the sustenance of a social networking site that relies on the grassroots engagement of its Black women users.

OWN and Its Solicitation of Users’ Affective Labor

The colorism-centered documentaries, Dark Girls and Light Girls, brought new heights to OWN. Dark Girls, produced by Bill Duke and D. Channsin Berry, drew one million viewers when it first aired on Sunday, June 23, 2013 and “was the highest rated documentary in [Oprah Winfrey Network] history” (Obenson, 2013). As one writer mentioned, “clearly, OWN has the attention of black women, maybe more-so than the network’s first year, with shows that continue to rank highly amongst African American women audiences” (Obenson, 2013). By the close of 2014, OWN was on its third consecutive year of double-digit growth, with a 12% increase in African American viewers ages 25 to 54 (Obenson, 2013). Additionally, Nielsen reported that the network was number three on all of television for African American women. As Light Girls aired, thousands of tweets poured in evaluating and reifying the show.

The age range and gender of those online closely mirror the viewership reported during the airing of both documentaries—young adults (18–29) are most likely to use social network sites though usage among those 65 and older has more than tripled since 2010 to 2015 from 11% to 35% (Perrin, 2015). Women are also more likely to use online social media sites though the disparities are close with men: 68% of all women use social network sites as compared with 62% of men (Perrin, 2015). Specific to Twitter, 21% of Twitter users on the Internet are women in comparison to 25% of men and 28% are Black in comparison to 20% of Whites and 28% of Hispanics, according to Pew Internet Research (Duggan, 2015).

These numbers connect the site of Twitter to OWN in order to illuminate the relationship of this network with the demographics online. ³ Social media functions here as a strategic integration with television, further boosting the appeal of a show (McPherson et al., 2012). This productive process displaces the work of the producer on to the viewer “who is increasingly becoming responsible for developing a unique demographic profile and relaying information it contains to producers” (Andrejevic, 2008, p. 30). The OWN network further crafted their film’s presence online with an official Twitter user profile, “@LightGirlsMovie” accompanied by tweets such as “We will be live tweeting!” and “Has any statements or experiences on #LightGirls resonated with anybody yet?” The focus here is not to highlight the novelty of television viewers as a commodity or as discursive agent, a train of research that has long been attended to (Fuchs, 2014; Gray, 2004; Smythe, 1981). Instead, I point to the juncture of television and Twitter and the affective labor that Black women viewers or users are performing.

In critiquing OWN’s portrayal of colorism in the Black community, Black women online simultaneously separated themselves from this televisual representation of race while engaging with it as consumers. In other words, even in reifying the documentary, users online not only performed the work but also became a part of the target demographic of the film and its reach online. For instance, Black women online called out specific people that the film chose to interview as a part of Light Girls, while negotiating the specificities of what constitutes lightness: “Tatyana Ali isn’t light though. #LightGirls”; another user tweeted, “Tatyana Ali is considered light-skinned? I must be transparent. #LightGirls”; and, in quintessential Black Twitter fashion, a third user posted, “I don’t get it, why is Tatyana Ali on #LightGirls though? Do we need this confusion on #MLK day?” Other critiques were made of the film in its lack of addressing larger issues and causes of color stratification. One user posted a photo of a skeleton with the words superimposed, “Waiting for Light Girls to discuss white supremacy like.” This meme has the implication, then, that viewers had been waiting for the documentary to discuss larger societal issues, like White supremacy, and would have to wait forever (as signified through the image of the skeleton) before it was brought up.

The tweets critiquing the choices in production of the film serve to put these women to work as they conduct the labor of market researchers. As Andrejevic (2008) writes regarding audience participation to television shows

The result is the merging of two forms of audience participation: the effort viewers put into making the show interesting to themselves and the effort they devote to taking on the role of production assistants and attempting to provide feedback to writers and producers. (p. 26)

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (2015) theoretical and practical works point to the occurrence of (in)visibility of Black women through the intersectional framework. For example, Crenshaw’s “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected” highlights the erasure of Black girls and women in the discourse of police killings. As such, the intersectional framework and application to the digital field allows a deeper look into, in this case, the means of production, extraction, and erasure involving conjoining identities. The sites of television and Twitter create the text and the “organic” space to then solicit users’ reification of the narrative. Where the relationship between Black women and television has included a long history of contention and opportunities for openness (Smith-Shomade, 2002), the use of their affective labor between these two media highlights troubling exploitation of these media’s reliance on bodies of color. The television text’s role in this labor includes the connection of their programming to online content with which they solicit from users only to use in their own marketing (as seen on their Twitter page).

Cooper (2008) writes about “capitalist delirium” (p. 31) as, first, the drive to push beyond the limits and, second, to reimpose these limits. This, she writes, leads to surplus value, where certain lives are supposed to give for the regeneration of other lives. The work that these Black women viewers and users put in to consume a documentary about them, only to speak and fix the representative errors therein, feeds this “capitalist delirium.” Congregating around and analyzing a television text has widely been practiced, especially in communities of color. With the “celebratory promise of the interactive era” (i.e., social network sites), however, users become a part of a larger process of production and commodification (Andrejevic, 2008, p. 37). The affect of these women, as they rewrite the narrative of colorism that was originally marketed to them, are fed into the online machine(s) to provide “vital energy”—that which sustains life elsewhere.

Discussion and Conclusion

This “life elsewhere” tends to seem obtuse or elusive, particularly in the conversation of capitalism and labor. However, there is a clear sort of regeneration present in this process: Viewers are marketed a television show, encouraged to “live tweet” and respond, then subsequently their comments online can be used to gauge the product for later production. The labor that goes into this sort of process involves historical violence concerning Black women as erased, at risk of injury, denied, vulnerable. As these women trudge up these affective responses through the Light Girls documentary, they are doing the work of the film: “Sharing the untold stories and experiences of lighter-skinned women” as the documentary claims to do (emphasis added). Throughout this discussion, I will return to Kalindi Vora’s reading of affective labor as I further connect television and Twitter.

Vora (2015) writes, “Structures of race and gender continue to disguise the transmission of vital energy, that is, the value imparted by labor and more, between bodies and communities” (p. 26). In her analysis, call center agents and other laborers, such as information technology workers, served to uphold “India’s continuing racialized role as a primary provider in the gendered global service economy” (p. 26). In a similar way, I have analyzed the intersection of media as seeking out Black women online, as primary audience targets only to be always already relied upon as the source of labor. The fact of Oprah Winfrey’s race and gender does little to belie this critique, as we know that networks, and race, operate at a structural level rather than an individual one (Lotz, 2004). Between television and Twitter, Black women are sought out as necessary labor for the frameworks of both industries. From the bottom-up framework of Twitter to the solicitation of Black women’s issues (around colorism in this case), the affective labor of these women function in specific ways that digital labor frameworks have yet to acknowledge.

Black Twitter, here, functions as more than a commonplace safe haven for the disenfranchised in its makeup. Twitter’s mechanics and marketing (such as its retweet functionalities and “grassroots” goals) create a specific online environment for Black women to challenge normative structures. In other words, the marginalized gravitating toward Twitter and its technical affordances is by no means due solely to taste of users or by happenstance. As this article has argued, the intersection of race and gender along with television and social media brings to the surface Black users as a specific kind of commodity in the process of media consumption and production. As news sites reported after the airing of Light Girls, Twitter users’ involvement and interaction with the show serves to bolster general interest about the film and OWN more broadly. Where are the Black women in this conversation? Where are they left after watching representations of themselves on television and trying to (re)negotiate these images and messages through their online social network? What is to come of their affective work?

In her analysis, Vora (2015) writes of the call center agent’s labor as “supporting a projected persona who occupies an alien world that the agent must learn and then inhabit through fantasy” (p. 35). In a similar vein, Twitter fosters a sense of alienation: Black Twitter users project a persona into a sphere where their voices are heard, they are acknowledged and change is proposed (addressing White supremacy in Light Girls, for instance). Although identity work has shown that this is fruitful in the maintenance of marginalized communities, we need to push for more in our analyses of new media as users get exploited outside of social networks through the use of other media where systems of oppression persist.

This case study has focused on OWN and Light Girls through a digital intersectionality framework to highlight the larger intersection between media (television and social network sites) as the juncture at which Black women become solicited and used up as labor. Certainly, extending this analysis of Black women’s response to Light Girls to other media contexts and geographic regions would be fruitful. Further work can extend the affective labor framework to the larger Black diaspora as social network sites and television allow for and extend unique connections spatially and temporally. We also need to pay close attention to other, less studied, sites of online connection. For instance, with the increased use of messaging applications that delete sent messages, such as Snapchat, the mining of users’ affective labor literally disappears. Where these messages might be stored and how companies are tapping into the commodification of these users suggest a trajectory furthering the promises of interaction and simultaneously the means of erasing the labor inherent therein. Through this critical case study, I have contended that we scholars need to pay closer attention to social media and other media intersections, as we understand how users, and some targeted users, become commodified. Black women have seen injury and disdain. As scholars and activists, it is our role to assess and disrupt how these women get swept up in the auspices of re-production into the “magical disappearance” of (online) labor.