Is what we do on the internet work or pleasure? How can feminist understandings of affective labor help us think about the “social web”? Focusing on the online review platform Yelp, I explore the intersections of gender, affect, and labor in the Web 2.0 era. Looking specifically at Yelp’s marketing around its “Elite” program, I argue that the company leverages ideas of community to incentivize and manage content production while maintaining a position of neutrality as the “invisible” platform “that connects people with great local businesses.” At the same time, I question how Yelp’s “community-first” focus obfuscates another form of labor upon which it depends: the gendered and racialized labor of food service workers.

Annika Butler-Wall is a PhD candidate in the Department of Modern Thought and Literature.