Relational labour and job insecurity. Online self-branding practices among Millennial journalists

The research proposal will try to investigate the relational labour embedded in online self-branding practices on SNS. The target will be Millennial professionals in journalistic and editorial industries, who often have to face precarious – work condition. Starting from the techno-commercial nature of platforms (van Dijck J.; Poell T., 2015), which produces sense of individual Self through datafication of symbolic materials, I will focus on the concepts of affective intensity (Lindgren S., 2017) and relational labour (Baym N. K., 2015). Indeed, the main research hypothesis is that relational labour is produced by platform design and algorithms, as well as job insecurity. Consequently, the second research hypothesis is that it causes an emotional dissonance between the online self - narrative and the experienced precarious condition. The literature review will refer mostly to cultural and media studies critical approach and I will use the qualitative research method. I will conduct semi-structured interviews from ten to fifteen Millennial professionals in journalistic and editorial industries. More in detail, the subjects will be clustered in three sets: five people will be freelance with a work contract; five people will be freelance without any work contract (entrepreneurs); from three to five people will be employed in news organizations. In order to obtain a comparative perspective, the participants will be from Italy and one or more European country.