NEGOTIATING PROFESSIONAL BELONGINGS: FINNISH ACTORS’ AFFECTIVE ENGAGEMENTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

This study addresses how creative workers’ social media presenceaffects their understandings of professional agency. Focusing on Finnish professionalactors, we ask how social media practices inform and shape actors’ occupationalself-conceptions and professional belongings. In the theoretical framework, we employ Baym’snotion of relational labour and read it through Berlant’s (1998) conceptualisation ofintimacy as mobile attachments. The data is collected from 15 Finnish actors, eightfreelancers and seven theatre employees, from June 2020 to March 2021 by using thediary-interview method. The analysis is based on a close reading of the interview materialand diary entries in which participants describe their experiences and feelings concerningtheir presence, work-related connections, and promotion on Facebook and Instagram. The studyindicates that for both theatre actors and freelancers their social media activities areentwined in their sense of professionalism and belongings to occupational communities ofpeers. They negotiate and speculate about their social media presence in relation to peerassessments in a way that involves continuous movements between visibility and invisibilityand between independence and interdependence. Our study suggests that to understand theambivalences involved in creative workers’ presence on social media platforms, it isimportant to broaden the investigation from strategic self-promotion and audience engagementto questions of professional identities and communities.