The Hidden Cost: Section 2

What the work
actually is

The seven conditions that generate hidden digital work, and the six forms it takes.

We’ll answer the following questions (and some more)

  • What conditions generate this work?Six structural conditions, and a seventh that is cultural — and how they compound each other.
  • What forms does the work take?Firefighting, maintenance, translation, memory, capability absorption and legitimation.
  • How much of it is the systems?Why the website, the CMS and the integrations generate a specific and avoidable share of it.
  • How visible is it, and to whom?A four-level scale, from work that is actively suppressed to work that is seen but unresourced.

Chapter 1

A wider pattern

The hidden labour this research documents in digital roles is part of a wider pattern. Writing about socially engaged arts practitioners working on UK publicly funded projects, Eleanora Belfiore has documented what she calls the “invisible subsidy” of creative professionals — that is the unacknowledged labour that practitioners absorb beyond their contracted obligations because the funding infrastructure does not account for it. The hidden costs she has mapped “take working practices in these areas far away from notions of ‘good work’”.

Her argument is made in a specific context (UK arts funding, and the particular pressures of working with disadvantaged communities) but the structural dynamic she identifies is the same as the one this project documents across digital roles, and that is that work that is genuinely necessary to the delivery of publicly funded cultural activity is consistently left outside the budget, the plan, the conversation, and therefore the understanding, about what the work actually involves.

Of course every job contains some work that goes unrecognised, that is not unique to digital roles, or to the cultural sector. But the evidence from this research is that the invisible load in digital work is high, and that the gap between what is seen and understood, and what is actually required to do the job is significant.

The research for this project has found that hidden digital work is not just one thing but the different forms it takes are not random either. They are the result of a small number of specific structural conditions that many cultural organisations share.