Footnotes
1. Another response to exploitation is to use demands to expose and destabilize unequal power conditions. Such was the logic behind the feminist “Wages for Housework” campaign; presumably the art project “Wages for Facebook” was similarly inspired. For an excellent discussion of Wages for Housework and its roots in autonomist philosophy, see Weeks (2011) and the work cited therein.
2. Tiziana Terranova (2013) seeks to recognize value-generating labor where it has previously been unseen as such; namely in the social maintenance efforts of online network users. Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus (2007) similarly argue that the building of social networks and online subjectivities on social network platforms is a kind of immaterial labor in line with Maurizio Lazzarato's oft-cited definition, as that which "produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity" (1996, 133). Readers interested in these arguments should also consult the contributions to Trebor Scholz's 2013 collection, Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, Brown (2013), as well as the entire ourvre of Mark Andrejevic. Andrejevic (2011) and other critics of digital labor take up a tradition in media studies of attempting to unveil the unequal conditions that structure the relationship between media owners and media users. A foundational work in this tradition is Dallas Smythe's "On the Audience Commodity and its Work" (2006), an essay generally credited with being the source of the idea that the audience is a commodity which is generated by television programming and then sold for a profit to advertisers. Bill Livant (1979) took up this work, highlighting the parallels between the modern media audience and the labor force theorized by Marx and Engels. With Sut Jhally, Livant elaborated on the labor performed by audiences in producing the commodity of their attention. Jhally and Livant developed the concept of "watching extra" (1986, 126) to capture the value-generating labor undertaken by commercial television audiences. We might understand the activities of online social network users as a kind of "socializing extra," in which control the biggest networks—the owners of the means of communication—are best poised to take the upper hand in such an exchange. Once users are recruited to the dominant networks, they are pushed to socialize "harder," so to speak. To give just one example of this, when one doesn't log in to Facebook regularly, one is inundated with emails reminding one of specific individuals with whom one is missing out on interacting.
3. Of course, such work is not only or always performed by women (a contentious term in itself for feminist theorists).