An Investigation of Exploitation and Labour Within Memes Production: A Case Study of South African Student Meme Pages

ABSTRACT

This study investigates labour, and exploitation within the production and consumption of student memes in South Africa. Using two case studies of two prominent South African student meme pages found on Instagram, UCT Just Kidding (@uctjustkidding) and Wits Just Kidding (@witsjustkidding), and critical political economy theory coupled with interviews conducted with administrators and meme creators from both pages, the study interrogated the notion of labour and the forms in which exploitation occurs in the memes production and distribution process. The study found that labour was conceived from the traditional Marx perspective by the administrators of both pages, which doesn’t recognise creative, cultural, affective, and free labour. Therefore, paving the way for exploitation of the meme creators’ labour which remains unchallenged due to the dynamic power imbalance between the meme creators and administrators. The study calls for a nuanced perspective in labour discourse within the South African student memes context.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour
• Exploitation
• Memes
• Social media
• Student memes
• South Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Soweto Uprising were a series of demonstrations and protests in South Africa (Tin 2001).

2 The Fees Must Fall movement was a mobilisation of students with the aim of demanding free higher education (Hodes 2017).

3 Loadshedding is a South African colloquial term which refers to power outages which occur to prevent the collapse of the power system country-wide.

4 A memelord is a term used by Cohen and Kenny (2020) to describe an individual that consistently posts or create their own memes while they concurrently keep track of their specific community of followers.

5 This will be discussed in detail in the subsequent sections of the analysis.

6 The rates are only applicable to students and small businesses. They are subject to change depending on the individual or corporation which approaches the page.

7 A pseudo-name used to protect the identity of the participant in this instance as the participant was not comfortable revealing his name post-interview.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation (NRF) South Africa.