While researching her forthcoming book on the promises and perils of visibility in the content creator economy, Brooke Erin Duffy noticed a surprising pattern.
"I wanted to understand the nuances of social media content creation from a sociological perspective," said Duffy, associate professor of communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "But interview participants kept pointing me toward harms from the psychological domain—'I can't take a break. I'm exhausted. I'm beholden to platforms, sponsors and audiences.'"
Worse, Duffy said, creators have few mechanisms for protection from work-related harms, given their status as independent contractors.
For the most part, these admissions go unsaid, although the world's biggest YouTube star, MrBeast—the 28-year-old who boasts more than 500 million followers in a career that started when he was 11—opened up in an interview last year: "There [were] definitely times where I would cry. But if my mental health was a priority, I wouldn't be as successful as I am."
Duffy understood, though, that the performative nature of the job means creators generally don't admit in public—not in media interviews, and certainly not on their TikTok and YouTube accounts—what they would share confidentially to a researcher. That got Duffy thinking about the contradictory way that work in the creator economy is framed, while also raising questions about who can speak out, how and to whom.
