Maybe you have heard of this before.
A customer, or an employee at a shop gets their reaction recorded.
One such content creator is Xiaomanyc 小马在纽约. He has hundreds of videos of people being recorded their reaction to someone speaking a language they didn’t expect to. And they’re usually set up into this situation, not just a stranger passing by.
Yet ― none of them get compensated for their emotional labour. Creators such as Xiaomanyc 小马在纽约 earn thousands of dollars per video. Seemingly none of them thought that at least in small scale projects they compensate people, even if it was just $50 per person, for their emotional labour.
Actors, for example, would be paid much more. So why do people not get paid for earning you money? And why are people like that seen so positively, when they show they don’t care about the others at all, they just want their ‘act’ captured?