The Labor of Cute: Net Idols, Cute Culture, and the Digital Economy in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

This essay analyzes how the digital media economy harnesses young people's search for meaningful work to develop new apparatuses and mechanisms of extracting value from activities that are not typically recognized as work. Drawing on interviews with net idols and an analysis of the digital infrastructure that evolved around the trend, the essay offers three arguments. First, it claims that the digital economy has adopted a particular mode of accumulation—the social factory—that has expanded sources of value extraction by blurring the boundaries between paid/productive and unpaid/reproductive labor. Second, this essay conceptualizes the net idols' production of cute culture as emotional labor and claims that the digital media economy has effectively expanded the practices through which value is extracted from women's unwaged labor far beyond the domestic sphere. Third, it demonstrates that young women did not uncritically embrace this logic. Rather, they insisted on using digital media to gain leverage in the labor market and improve their chances for upward social mobility. The essay concludes that, resonant with the ways in which women's unwaged labor in the home was instrumental to maintaining the socioeconomic order of the high-growth period, women's unpaid emotional labor remains central to a society in which labor precarity generates a demand for emotional labor. At the same time, by promoting to young people digital media as tools they can utilize to develop new skills, the digital economy makes the idea of unpaid labor more acceptable by repositioning it as a prerequisite to attain lucrative and meaningful work.

No More Handshaking: How have COVID-19 pushed the expansion of computer-mediated communication in Japanese idol culture?

“…Their success is achieved by their marketing strategy of giving emphasis on holding meet-and-greet events to cultivate fans' loyalty to individual members [10]. For example, while "handshaking events" (akushukai) where fans can talk for several seconds and shake hands with an idol member in exchange for buying a single CD are the most popular form [10,57], "photo-session events" (chekikai) where fans can take an instant photo with a member are also common [30]. However, the spread of COVID-19 has made it difcult to continue these events due to the risk of infection, which bereaves idol groups of the opportunity to maintain fan loyalty.…”

The real digital housewives of China’s Kuaishou video-sharing and live-streaming app

“…Compared to its counterparts produced by Japanese net idols (Lukács, 2015), nurses (Hochschild, 1983) and Japanese hosts (Takeyama, 2016), the affective labour of zhubos is already always subjected to exploitation. First, this labour is decentralised and casualised.…”

Artificial Life

“…But this is not to say that our essential attraction to idolatry has abated. Rather, according to some (e.g., Black 2007; Lukacs 2015), our idols have shifted to many of the various forms of AL that have been considered here, including our god-like search engines, digital voice assistants, and humanoid robots. The Great God Google is no longer as far-fetched as it may have once seemed (Geraci 2008; Indick 2015; Prisco 2018).…”