Domination and the Arts of Digital Resistance in Social Media Creator Labor

Abstract

This article conducts a collaborative qualitative thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with social media content creators (N = 53) based in and/or originated from the United Kingdom. It aims to better understand how creators within one peripheral region in Northern England express their labor experiences as both practices of domination and e-resistance. The article contributes an original typology of the relationships between practices of creator domination and forms of individual or collective e-resistance, encompassing varying levels of visibility, targets, sources, and underlying motives. It develops a novel creator workers’ inquiry methodology to establish this multifaceted typology of creator e-resistance. The findings suggest that creator e-resistance should consider the relationships among practices of material, status, and ideological domination, and forms of non-resistance, individual hidden e-resistance, collective hidden e-resistance, and collective public e-resistance.