2017 International Conference on Social Media & Society (#SMSociety)

Authors: Olga Rodak and Karolina Mikołajewska-Zając

Abstract: ‘Digital labor’ became an umbrella term for the stream of research dealing with ‘users’ participation in the digital culture.’ It critically frames social media participation within a wider political economy of the Internet, where it is captured and translated into value for platform providers and powerful organizations. Though accurately adding critical interpretation to the discussion on this phenomenon, ‘digital labor’ theory does not provide sufficient methodological guidelines for social research. This remark applies especially to the problem of inclusion of so called ‘micro-perspective’ in theory-development, that is, social actors’ experience and perception. After performing the pilot literature study, we found that this challenge is recognized by the majority of scholars conducting empirical research in the spirit of ‘digital labor,’ however, there is little consent of how it could be solved. We argue that this problem may be reframed as an intra-disciplinary ‘paradigm clash’ – the incommensurability of the critical and the interpretive tradition in social science. We collected insights from research papers and call for conceptualizations that will inform empirical researcher of how to involve ‘micro-perspective’ while building the ‘digital labor’ theory.