Vitamine CCC

You know all about online media and just thinking about social networks makes your eyes sparkle? If you have also been dreaming about working in this field, we have the perfect job for you! We are currently looking for Content Managers (m/f) in full-time with a knowledge of Albanian, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish or Turkish.

Vitamine CCC is an investigative research project in which Cécile Kobel approaches the position of content manager through various channels: through phone interviews with content managers, extensive online research as well as direct contact with an agency where applicants are tested for their suitability and told. Gathering information on the job profile proved to be like searching for the needle in a haystack, as content management as a profession has only been around for a few years, and yet it has been practiced unseen for many years by thousands of people in the furthest of countries world-wide. Until a few years ago, these were mainly countries where they are currently not the center of their respective online content production; for instance, the Philippines, which recently caught the attention of a larger audience through the film The Cleaners (2018).
The term content management or community management is misleading and obscures the actual content of the work, acting almost like a code name. The title suggests a senior position (management) dealing with the editing or thematic direction of content or community. In reality, their work entails erasing brutal, violent, offensive and sexist content that do not comply with the regulations from social media platforms. A content manager is just a small cog in the big content manager industry, who wants to, and must attempt to edit the internet.
The work Vitamin CCC is motivated above all by the mismatch between the erasure of content for the eyes of the general public on the one hand, which on the other hand can only be guaranteed by the screening conducted by the content managers, i.e. by the viewing of the content. Content managers have also been employed in Germany and in Europe for a few years and are not allowed to talk about the content they manage outside of their workplace – so investigative means had to be employed also for this perspective.

The five-minute loop Vitamin CCC approaches the research material through a narrator who talks about the day-to-day of the job, while visually, clips of screenshots of the work can be seen. At first it appears as if you are watching somebody perform their work of sorting through images. Increasingly, however, unlinked fragments move across the “screen,” some recognizable as parts of the body, mostly hidden behind their pictorial estrangement.