Register Login
Flaga wersji językowej  English Flaga wersji językowej  Język Polski Flaga wersji językowej  Русский
Published: 2025-12-31
Vol. 16 (2025)

Virtual Affective Labour of Celebrities — The Capture of Social Interactions and Micro-Celebrity

Tomasz Olczyk Logo ORCID
Section: Articles
https://doi.org/10.31261/GSS_SN.2025.16.09

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of virtual affective labour as a form of immaterial labour centred on the production and maintenance of interpersonal bonds and the commodification of social relations through media-mediated communication and emotion facilitated by the Internet. The article demonstrates how this concept may be employed to advance our understanding of celebrities as a social category within the context of post-industrial transformations of labour. Social media platforms, by providing infrastructure that virtualises social interactions, capture, monetise, and render those interactions economically productive. Consequently, virtual affective labour — once confined to a small number of media figures — is becoming a mass phenomenon. Digitalised social relations, and above all the data generated through them and the attention invested in them, constitute the foundation of profit for contemporary digital affective industries. These industries generate parasocial relations in a twofold sense: they commercially exploit the emotions of the recipients of celebrity posts by simulating the creation of personal bonds, and they employ digital algorithms and bots to sustain communication with audiences. The article further describes how social media platforms, ostensibly democratising access to the tools of visibility-building, incentivise prosumers to perform affective labour on their behalf through the promise of celebrity fame and intermittent rewards dispensed by Skinnerian algorithms, thereby contributing to the proliferation of behavioural addictions.

Keywords:

affective labor , emotional labor , celebritization , celebrity , micro-celebrity

Download files

Citation rules

Olczyk, T. (2025). Virtual Affective Labour of Celebrities — The Capture of Social Interactions and Micro-Celebrity. Górnośląskie Studia Socjologiczne. Seria Nowa, 16, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.31261/GSS_SN.2025.16.09

Cited by / Share

Crossref
Scopus
Google Scholar
Europe PMC

Licence

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.

1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

2. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

3. User Rights

Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

4. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.

Vol. 16 (2025)
Published: 2026-09-16

eISSN: 2353-9658
Publisher
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press
Licence CC Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Submit
This website uses cookies for proper operation, in order to use the portal fully you must accept cookies.