Low Visibility Practices: Reconsidering Visibility and Value on Social Media Jessica Maddox(1), Arturo Arriagada(2), Jeehyun {Jenny} Lee(3), Pranav Malhotra(4), Colten Meisner(5) 1: University of Alabama; 2: Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez; 3: University of Washington; 4: University of Michigan; 5: Cornell University
On social media, visibility is thought of as both a strategic game (Cotter, 2018) and a form of labor (Duffy and Hund, 2015) that individuals must grapple with to achieve success through attention and metrics. But as social media shift from networked to refracted spaces dominated by ephemerality, private groups, and locked platforms (Abidin, 2021), negotiating visibility becomes complicated. Additionally, platforms like Patreon, Substack, Discord, and Bindery provide online actors alternatives to monetize their work and create private spaces to cultivate meaningful relationships with smaller audiences. By providing audiences with paid, tiered options to buy into more content and gain additional access to the creator and a community of fellow subscribers, the proliferation of these platforms demonstrates how lower visibility may lead to greater intimacy and more consistent revenue for creators. For this fishbowl, we conceive of engagement in these spaces as low-visibility social media practices and bring together scholars from communication, internet studies, and creator studies. Drawing on our experience of studying creators and audiences in various contexts, including Asian women creators, freelance journalists, and transnational social media audiences, we consider the following: How refracted publics and online spaces challenge the idea that visibility is always desirable; the ethics of studying private social media; the inverse relationship between visibility and intimacy for creators and audiences; and the enhanced commodification of intimacy. While Internet users of color have long engaged in deliberate visibility work (Steele, 2018), the proliferation of these practices within refracted publics compels a reconsideration of the logics of visibility labor, especially in relation to advertisers’ interests, algorithmic feeds, and other recommendation systems embraced by powerful social media platforms. A fishbowl allows us to invite interdisciplinary audience participation on these topics, with initial participant provocations by Arturo Arriagada, Jeehyun Jenny Lee, Jessica Maddox, Pranav Malhotra, and Colten Meisner.
