Digital Labor in the Industrious Family: Neighborhood Influencers in Naples

Abstract

Around the world, TikTok has provided visibility to small-scale local businesses with popular origins, integrating local vernaculars and traditional family life into a popular social media economy. In this article, we draw on 80 interviews with small-scale content creators in Naples, Italy, to investigate how digital labor is reconfigured within this TikTok-centered social media economy rooted in the everyday life of street, family, and neighborhood. We suggest that social media content creation has been integrated within increasingly industrious family units, providing one of several income streams that contribute to everyday making do. Families support content creation by providing both an economic safety net and a moral economy grounded in notions of “decency” and “hard work.” Both serve to safeguard against the constant “nested precarities” content creators face. Through such mechanisms of re-embedding, the exploitative elements of digital labor are veiled by a Smithian ‘market populism’ based on the ideal of equal exchange, and its alienating aspects are counteracted by reinforced local identities.