While metrics have long played an important, albeit fraught, role in the media and cultural industries, quantified indices of online visibility—likes, favorites, subscribers, and shares—have been indelibly cast as routes to professional success and status in the digital creative economy. Against this backdrop, this study sought to examine how creative laborers’ pursuit of social media visibility impacts their processes and products. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 30 aspiring and professional content creators on a range of social media platforms—Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Twitter—we contend that their experiences are not only shaped by the promise of visibility, but also by its precarity. As such, we present a framework for assessing the volatile nature of visibility in platformized creative labor, which includes unpredictability across three levels: (1) markets, (2) industries, and (3) platform features and algorithms. After mapping out this ecological model of the nested precarities of visibility, we conclude by addressing both continuities with—and departures from—the earlier modes of instability that characterized cultural production, with a focus on the guiding logic of platform capitalism.

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Queer people increasingly use geosocial networking apps (GSNAs), such as Grindr and Blued, to find connections. These apps play a particularly important role in countries such as India, where being visibly queer can carry social stigma, and same-sex intercourse was criminalized until 2018. A key challenge on these apps is self-disclosing enough information to appear authentic and build trust with other users, without drawing unwanted attention, stigma, and safety threats. Careful consideration of when to share information and what to share is critical, but we have a limited understanding of how users make these decisions. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 36 queer men in 4 smaller urban environments in and near the state of Maharashtra, India, we sought to understand how queer men think about their visibility while using GSNAs. We find that they are primarily concerned with the visibility of the actual GSNA on their phone, especially given many users in this context live with their families and assumptions common in the West, such as one person per device, may not hold. They also worry about the information they disclose on the app itself given this visibility can lead to dangerous situations. We detail how participants try to resolve the tensions around visibility and discuss our findings in relation to conceptualizations of privacy and signaling theory. We conclude with practical guidelines related to the use of these apps in the Indian context.

While metrics have long played an important, albeit fraught, role in the media and cultural industries, quantified indices of visibility—likes, favorites, subscribers, and shares—are indelibly cast as routes to professional success and status in the digital creative economy. Against this backdrop, this study sought to examine how creative laborers’ pursuit of social media visibility impacts their processes and products. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 30 aspiring and professional content creators—including Instagrammers, YouTubers, TikTok creators, and those seeking monetization through Pinterest and Twitter—we contend that their experiences are not only shaped by the promise of visibility, but also by its precarity. As such, we present a framework for assessing the volatile nature of visibility in platformized creative labor, which includes unpredictability across three levels: (1) markets, (2) industries, and (3) platform features and algorithms. After mapping out this ecological model of the nested precarities of visibility, we conclude by addressing both continuities with—and departures from—the earlier modes of instability that characterized cultural production, most especially the guiding logic of platform capitalism.