Making Intimacy:Research On Internet Affective Labor

With the rise of various types of social media,human desires for emotional needs have formed new economic outlets."Virtual lover" refers to a service that sells emotions.The person who provides the service interacts with the person who purchases the service through text,voice and other communication methods on the Internet to meet the buyer's emotional needs and obtain a certain amount of remuneration.The iteration of technology involves people in different social media,which not only changes the way people know the world,but also reconstructs the conditions and patterns of intimacy,making love liquid."Virtual lover" is just one of the manifestations of liquid love at the moment.This research will be based on affective labor and dramaturgical theory,through online ethnographic observations of the "virtual lover" industry,combined with semistructured interviews with 20 "virtual lover" practitioners and 15 customers.The issue of emotional commercialization in cyberspace is studied.This research will be discussed in six parts: the first part,introduction,introduces the research background,research significance,literature review,research questions,and research methods;the second part focuses on the service development process of "Virtual Lover" and the operation of "Virtual Lover" stores;the third part introduces the motivation of "virtual lover" practitioners and customers to contact this industry;the fourth part analyzes how the emotions of "virtual lover" moves from private to commercial,and how "virtual lover" constructs emotional relationships with customers;the fifth part focuses on the affect flattening of "virtual lover" and analyzes the characteristics of the intimate relationship created by virtual love;the sixth part summarizes the research conclusions and shortcomings.With the development of the Internet,social media has changed the basis for people to know and get along with each other,as well as the intimacy and emotional expression between people.Compared with traditional emotional labor,digital affective labor presents more obvious characteristics of monetization and commercialization.The consumer society's use of human emotions has become more concealed and more ingenious,and the resulting intimate relationships gradually show the trend of “liquidization” proposed by Bauman--love becomes more and more like a flowing liquid,fleeting and erratic indefinite.Paying attention to changes in affective labor and intimacy in the digital age can not only glimpse the changes in Chinese society,but also fill the gaps in domestic research on affective labor.