- Cornell University
Mann Library Building
Ithaca, NY 14853
Phone: 267.210.3886
Brooke Erin Duffy
Cornell University, Communication, Faculty Member
- Digital Media, Social Media, Creative Labour, Feminist Media Studies, Media Industries, Labour Studies, and 19 moreGender and Media, New Media, Media Production, Media, Communication, Cultural Studies, Media and Communication Studies, Media Convergence, Fashion Blogs, Media Culture and Creative Industries, Work and Occupations, Creative Industries, Participatory Culture, Media Studies, Digital Culture, Neoliberalism, Cultural Industries, Work and Labour, and Media and Cultural Studiesedit
- Brooke Erin Duffy, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in Communicat... moreBrooke Erin Duffy, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in Communication and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies. She conducts research at the intersection of media, technology, and society. Her particular areas of interest include digital and social media; creative labor and cultural work; gender and feminism; and promotional culture.
Her forthcoming book, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017), draws on research with fashion bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagrammers to explore the culture and politics of the digital labor market. Despite the rousing assurance that anyone can succeed in the creative “gig economy,” Duffy reveals how gender, class, and status inequalities endure.
Her first book, Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013), examines the rapidly changing technologies and political economies of cultural production through an analysis of the women’s magazine industry. She is also co-editor of Key Readings in Media Today: Mass Communication in Contexts with Joseph Turow (Routledge, 2009).
Duffy’s research has been published in such journals as Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Social Media + Society, and The Communication Review. In addition to her academic work, Duffy has written for or provided commentary to The Atlantic (with Emily Hund), The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Poynter, among others. For more information about her publications, visit her profile on Academia.edu.edit - Joseph Turowedit
Amidst profound transformations in our digital society, many young women are turning to social media platforms—from blogs to YouTube to Instagram—in hopes of channeling their talents into fulfilling careers. In this eye-opening book,... more
Amidst profound transformations in our digital society, many young women are turning to social media platforms—from blogs to YouTube to Instagram—in hopes of channeling their talents into fulfilling careers. In this eye-opening book, Brooke Erin Duffy draws much-needed attention to the gap between the handful who secure lucrative work as “influencers”—and the rest, whose passion projects amount to free labor for corporate brands. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork, Duffy offers fascinating insights into the work and lives of fashion bloggers, beauty vloggers, designers, and more. She connects their activities to larger shifts in unpaid and gendered labor, offering a lens through which to understand, anticipate, and critique broader transformations in the creative economy. At a moment when social media offer the rousing assurance that anyone can “make it”—and stand out among freelancers, temps, and gig workers—Duffy urges us to consider the stakes of not getting paid to do what you love.
Research Interests:
"What is a magazine?" For decades, women's magazines were regularly published, print-bound guidebooks aimed at neatly defined segments of the female audience. Crisp pages, a well-composed visual aesthetic, an intimate tone, and a... more
"What is a magazine?" For decades, women's magazines were regularly published, print-bound guidebooks aimed at neatly defined segments of the female audience. Crisp pages, a well-composed visual aesthetic, an intimate tone, and a distinctive editorial voice were among the hallmarks of women's glossies up through the start of the twenty-first century. Yet in an era of convergent media technologies, participatory culture, and new economic demands, producers are confronting vexing questions about the identity of women's magazines.
Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age offers a unique glimpse inside the industry and reveals how executives and content creators are working tirelessly to remake their processes and products. Through in-depth interviews with women's magazine producers, an examination of hundreds of trade press reports, and in-person observations at industry summits, Brooke Erin Duffy chronicles a fascinating transformation in print culture and technology from the magazine as object to the magazine as brand. She draws on these findings to contribute to critical debates about media professionals' labor conditions, workplace cultures and gender hierarchies, and creative processes.
Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age offers a unique glimpse inside the industry and reveals how executives and content creators are working tirelessly to remake their processes and products. Through in-depth interviews with women's magazine producers, an examination of hundreds of trade press reports, and in-person observations at industry summits, Brooke Erin Duffy chronicles a fascinating transformation in print culture and technology from the magazine as object to the magazine as brand. She draws on these findings to contribute to critical debates about media professionals' labor conditions, workplace cultures and gender hierarchies, and creative processes.
Research Interests:
While metrics have long played an important, albeit fraught, role in the media and cultural industries, quantified indices of online visibility-likes, favorites, subscribers, and shares-have been indelibly cast as routes to professional... more
While metrics have long played an important, albeit fraught, role in the media and cultural industries, quantified indices of online visibility-likes, favorites, subscribers, and shares-have been indelibly cast as routes to professional success and status in the digital creative economy. Against this backdrop, this study sought to examine how creative laborers' pursuit of social media visibility impacts their processes and products. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 30 aspiring and professional content creators on a range of social media platforms-Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Twitter-we contend that their experiences are not only shaped by the promise of visibility, but also by its precarity. As such, we present a framework for assessing the volatile nature of visibility in platformized creative labor, which includes unpredictability across three levels: (1) markets, (2) industries, and (3) platform features and algorithms. After mapping out this ecological model of the nested precarities of visibility, we conclude by addressing both continuities with-and departures from-the earlier modes of instability that characterized cultural production, with a focus on the guiding logic of platform capitalism.
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Although social media influencers enjoy a coveted status position in the popular imagination, their requisite career visibility opens them up to intensified public scrutiny and-more pointedly-networked hate and harassment. Key... more
Although social media influencers enjoy a coveted status position in the popular imagination, their requisite career visibility opens them up to intensified public scrutiny and-more pointedly-networked hate and harassment. Key repositories of such critique are influencer "hateblogs"-forums for anti-fandom often dismissed as frivolous gossip or, alternatively, denigrated as conduits for cyberbullying and misogyny. This article draws upon an analysis of a women-dominated community of anti-fans, Get Off My Internets (GOMIBLOG), to show instead how influencer hateblogs are discursive sites of gendered authenticity policing. Findings reveal that GOMI participants wage patterned accusations of duplicity across three domains where women influencers seemingly "have it all": career, relationships, and appearance. But while antifans' policing of "fake" femininity may purport to dismantle the artifice of social media self-enterprise, such expressions fail to advance progressive gender politics, as they target individual-level-rather than structural-inequities.
Research Interests:
While champions of the “new” creative economy consistently hype the career possibilities furnished by YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and the like, critics have cast a spotlight on the less auspicious elements of platform-dependent creative... more
While champions of the “new” creative economy consistently hype the career possibilities furnished by YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and the like, critics have cast a spotlight on the less auspicious elements of platform-dependent creative labor: exploitation, insecurity, and a culture of overwork. Social media creators are, moreover, beholden to the vagaries of platforms’ “inscrutable” socio-technical systems, particularly the algorithms that enable (or – conversely – thwart) their visibility. This article draws upon in-depth interviews with 30 social media creators – sampled from historically marginalized identities and/or stigmatized content genres – to explore their perceptions of, and experiences with, algorithmic (in)visibility. Together, their accounts evince a shared understanding that platforms enact governance unevenly – be it through formal (human and/or automated content moderation) or informal (shadowbans, biased algorithmic boosts) means. Creators’ understandings are implicated in experiential practices ranging from self-censorship to concerted efforts to circumvent algorithmic intervention. In closing, we consider how the regimes of discipline and punishment that structure the social media economy systematically disadvantage marginalized creators and cultural expressions deemed non-normative.
Research Interests:
While work in the media and cultural industries has long been considered precarious, the processes and logics of platformization have injected new sources of instability into the creative labor economy. Among the sources of such... more
While work in the media and cultural industries has long been considered precarious, the processes and logics of
platformization have injected new sources of instability into the creative labor economy. Among the sources of such
insecurity are platforms’ algorithms, which structure the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural content
in capricious, enigmatic, even biased ways. Accordingly, cultural producers’ conditions and experiences are increasingly
wrought by their understandings—and moreover their anticipation—of platforms’ ever-evolving algorithmic systems.
Against this backdrop, I urge fellow researchers of digital culture and society to consider how this mode of “algorithmic
precarity” exacerbates the instability of cultural work in the platform era. Considering the volatility of algorithms and the
wider cross-platform ecology can help us to develop critical interventions into a creative economy marked by a profoundly
uneven allocation of power between platforms and the laborers who populate—and increasingly—power them.
platformization have injected new sources of instability into the creative labor economy. Among the sources of such
insecurity are platforms’ algorithms, which structure the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural content
in capricious, enigmatic, even biased ways. Accordingly, cultural producers’ conditions and experiences are increasingly
wrought by their understandings—and moreover their anticipation—of platforms’ ever-evolving algorithmic systems.
Against this backdrop, I urge fellow researchers of digital culture and society to consider how this mode of “algorithmic
precarity” exacerbates the instability of cultural work in the platform era. Considering the volatility of algorithms and the
wider cross-platform ecology can help us to develop critical interventions into a creative economy marked by a profoundly
uneven allocation of power between platforms and the laborers who populate—and increasingly—power them.
Research Interests:
The rise of contemporary platforms—from GAFAM in the West to the “three kingdoms” of the Chinese Internet—is reconfiguring the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural content in staggering and complex ways. Given the nature... more
The rise of contemporary platforms—from GAFAM in the West to the “three kingdoms” of the Chinese Internet—is
reconfiguring the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural content in staggering and complex ways. Given the
nature and extent of these transformations, how can we systematically examine the platformization of cultural production?
In this introduction, we propose that a comprehensive understanding of this process is as much institutional (markets,
governance, and infrastructures), as it is rooted in everyday cultural practices. It is in this vein that we present fourteen
original articles that reveal how platformization involves key shifts in practices of labor, creativity, and citizenship. Diverse in
their methodological approaches and topical foci, these contributions allow us to see how platformization is unfolding across
cultural, geographic, and sectoral-industrial contexts. Despite their breadth and scope, these articles can be mapped along
four thematic clusters: continuity and change; diversity and creativity; labor in an age of algorithmic systems; and power,
autonomy, and citizenship.
reconfiguring the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural content in staggering and complex ways. Given the
nature and extent of these transformations, how can we systematically examine the platformization of cultural production?
In this introduction, we propose that a comprehensive understanding of this process is as much institutional (markets,
governance, and infrastructures), as it is rooted in everyday cultural practices. It is in this vein that we present fourteen
original articles that reveal how platformization involves key shifts in practices of labor, creativity, and citizenship. Diverse in
their methodological approaches and topical foci, these contributions allow us to see how platformization is unfolding across
cultural, geographic, and sectoral-industrial contexts. Despite their breadth and scope, these articles can be mapped along
four thematic clusters: continuity and change; diversity and creativity; labor in an age of algorithmic systems; and power,
autonomy, and citizenship.
Research Interests:
Social media users are routinely counseled to cultivate their online personae with acumen and diligence. But universal prescriptions for impression management may prove for vexing for college students, who confront oft-conflicting codes... more
Social media users are routinely counseled to cultivate their online personae with acumen and diligence. But universal prescriptions for impression management may prove for vexing for college students, who confront oft-conflicting codes of normative self-presentation in digital contexts. Against this backdrop, our research sought to examine the online self-presentation activities of emerging adults (18-24) across an expansive social media ecology that included Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Twitter. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 28 college-aged youth, we highlight how the imagined surveillance of various social actors steered their self-presentation practices in patterned ways. After exploring three distinct responses to imagined surveillance—including the use of privacy settings, self-monitoring, and pseudonymous accounts (including " finstas, " or fake + Instagram)—we consider the wider implications of a cultural moment wherein users are socialized to anticipate the incessant monitoring of social institutions: family, education, and above all, (future) employers.
Research Interests:
With the widespread uptake of social media, discourses and practices of self-branding have become a pervasive feature of social and economic life. However, the way in which the digital self-brand gets reproduced across a sprawling social... more
With the widespread uptake of social media, discourses and practices of self-branding have become a pervasive feature of social and economic life. However, the way in which the digital self-brand gets reproduced across a sprawling social media landscape remains comparatively under-theorized. Our paper therefore draws upon in-depth interviews with 52 online content creators—including designers, artists, writers, and marketing consultants—to examine how cultural workers present themselves across the panoply of social networking sites. As we show, workers’ self-presentation activities were structured through the production of a platform-specific self-brand, which was based upon the imaginations of (1) platform affordances, (2) audiences, and (3) the producer’s own self-concept. Our findings highlight producers’ compulsion to engage in continuous, cross-platform labor—despite widespread uncertainty about its economic outcomes. We conclude by addressing the stakes of a social media moment when workers of all stripes are prodded to incessantly curate, monitor, and ultimately invest in their online personae.
Research Interests:
In the wake of profound transformations in digital media markets and economies, the structures and conditions of cultural production are being radically reconfigured. This study explores the nascent field of social media work through an... more
In the wake of profound transformations in digital media markets and economies, the structures and conditions of cultural production are being radically reconfigured. This study explores the nascent field of social media work through an analysis of job recruitment ads—texts, we contend, that provide insight into a key discursive site of imagining the ideal digital laborer. Drawing upon a qualitative textual analysis of 150 adverts, we show how employers construct workers through a patterned set of features, including sociability, deft emotional management, and flexibility. Such industrial imaginings incite workers to remain ever available, juggle various roles and responsibilities, and engage in persistent emotional labor—both online and off. These expectations, we argue, allude to the increasingly feminized nature of social media employment, with its characteristic invisibility, lower pay, and marginal status within the technology field.
Research Interests:
Over the last decade, work in the cultural sector has grown evermore precarious amidst heightened competition, rampant insecurity, and the individualization of risk. Despite this, social media personalities—including bloggers, vloggers,... more
Over the last decade, work in the cultural sector has grown evermore precarious amidst heightened competition, rampant insecurity, and the individualization of risk. Despite this, social media personalities—including bloggers, vloggers, Instagrammers—seem to have attained a much-vaunted career dream: they get paid to do what they love. Accounting for this disparity, we highlight the role of popular media discourses that hype the possibilities of a career fashioned online. Our study draws upon a qualitative analysis of more than 200 articles to reveal how influencers circulate a patterned set of mythologies about creative work in the social media age. Such narratives about the fun, free, and authentic nature of their self-starter careers conceal less auspicious realities, including the demands for emotional labor, self-branding labor, and an always-on mode of entrepreneurial labor. Together, these myths help perpetuate an image of glamour within these industries as part of a “creativity dispositif” that both disciplines and incites cultural workers and aspirants.
Research Interests:
The profound growth of independent employment in post-industrial economies has paralleled a vibrant ethos of self-enterprise — one captured by the prodding assertion that “we’re all entrepreneurs now.” Amidst ubiquitous technologies of... more
The profound growth of independent employment in post-industrial economies has paralleled a vibrant ethos of self-enterprise — one captured by the prodding assertion that “we’re all entrepreneurs now.” Amidst ubiquitous technologies of production, distribution, and promotion, the ideal of entrepreneurialism has taken on a political valance: that is, individuals are ostensibly “empowered” to pursue their passion projects in digital environments. This project brings gender politics to the fore of contemporary discourses of online entrepreneurship. We draw upon in-depth interviews with twenty-two independently-employed female professionals, the majority of whom work in digital media and other creative fields, to understand the role of social media in their self-starter careers. We found that many interviewees felt compelled to develop and present online personae that conformed to traditional prescriptions for femininity—a quandary that we term the digital double bind. An updated version of the career impasse that female workers face in traditional work environments, the digital double bind is structured through three distinct, yet interrelated, social media imperatives: (1). soft self-promotion; (2). interactive intimacy; and (3). compulsory visibility. Participants’ reflections on these imperatives emerge from the traditionally masculine-coded nature of entrepreneurship and its markers of success, which require female workers to assume additional risk and engage in invisible labor. The digital double bind is thus a testament to enduring structural inequalities that render female self-enterprise an inferior category of entrepreneurship; promises of digitally-enabled meritocracy, we conclude, are largely superficial.
Research Interests:
Despite widespread interest in the changing technologies, economies and politics of creative labour, much of the recent cultural production scholarship overlooks the social positioning of gender. This article draws upon in-depth... more
Despite widespread interest in the changing technologies, economies and politics of creative labour, much of the recent cultural production scholarship overlooks the social positioning of gender. This article draws upon in-depth interviews with 18 participants in highly feminized sites of digital cultural production (e.g. fashion, beauty and retail) to examine how they articulate and derive value from their passionate activities. I argue that the discourses of authenticity, community building and brand devotion that they draw on are symptomatic of a highly gendered, forward-looking and entrepreneurial enactment of creativity that I term ‘aspirational labour’. Aspirational labourers pursue productive activities that hold the promise of social and economic capital; yet the reward system for these aspirants is highly uneven. Indeed, while a select few may realize their professional goals – namely to get paid doing what they love – this worker ideology obscures problematic constructions of gender and class subjectivities.
Research Interests:
Against the backdrop of the widespread individualization of the creative workforce, various genres of social media production have emerged from the traditionally feminine domains of fashion, beauty, domesticity, and craft. Fashion... more
Against the backdrop of the widespread individualization of the creative workforce, various genres of social media production have emerged from the traditionally feminine domains of fashion, beauty, domesticity, and craft. Fashion blogging, in particular, is considered one of the most commercially successful and publicly visible forms of digital cultural production. To explore how fashion bloggers represent their branded personae as enterprising feminine subjects, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the textual (n = 38 author narratives) and visual (n = 760 Instagram images) content published by leading fashion bloggers; we supplement this with in-depth interviews with eight full-time fashion/beauty bloggers. Through this data, we show how top- ranked bloggers depict the ideal of “having it all” through three interrelated tropes: the destiny of passionate work, staging the glam life, and carefully curated social sharing. Together, these tropes articulate a form of entrepreneurial femininity that draws upon post-feminist sensibilities and the contemporary logic of self-branding. We argue, however, that this socially mediated version of self-enterprise obscures the labor, discipline, and capital necessary to emulate these standards, while deploying the unshakable myth that women should work through and for consumption. We conclude by addressing how these findings are symptomatic of a digital media economy marked by the persistence of social inequalities of gender, race, class, and more.
Link: http://sms.sagepub.com/content/1/2/2056305115604337.full
Link: http://sms.sagepub.com/content/1/2/2056305115604337.full
Research Interests:
Although some have cited user-generated marketing campaigns as evidence of the “newly empowered consumer,” others have emphasized their exploitative nature. This debate becomes increasingly complicated when brought into dialog with a... more
Although some have cited user-generated marketing campaigns as evidence of the “newly empowered consumer,” others have emphasized their exploitative nature. This debate becomes increasingly complicated when brought into dialog with a feminist rhetoric of empowerment, such as that underpinning a recent Dove user-generated ad contest. This paper examines how issues of power, labor, and leisure were articulated among various contest participants through interviews, analysis, and observation. Emergent from the data are themes of creativity, authenticity, and empowerment that converge and diverge. It is precisely because of the polysemic nature of these themes that the contest was able to simultaneously endorse the product, exploit participant labor, and give consumers a sense of power as individuals, as women, and as creative professionals.
Research Interests:
In recent years and against the backdrop of a creative economy marked by rapid innovation, a mushrooming independent workforce, and the much-vaunted ideal of entrepreneurialism, social media platforms are being valorized as springboards... more
In recent years and against the backdrop of a creative economy marked by rapid innovation, a mushrooming independent workforce, and the much-vaunted ideal of entrepreneurialism, social media platforms are being valorized as springboards to successful and rewarding careers. Here, I refer not to professional social networks such as LinkedIn and Xing (although many career-seekers utilize these services) but, rather, to sites designed for the production, distribution, and promotion of creative content. Indeed, for individuals aspiring to capitalize on their talents and passions, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram seemingly provide unfettered access to potential fans and employers alike. The triumphant tales of Michelle Phan, the makeup vlogger who was catapulted to fame through her eponymous YouTube channel, or singer-songwriter Colbie Caillat, who used MySpace to garner a remarkable fan base, have helped to fuel the manic rhetoric of “getting discovered” on social media. But to what extent may various forms of social media production be understood as gendered?
Research Interests:
Discourses of democratization, authenticity, and collaboration have become increasingly salient in the web 2.0 era of amateur content creation and distribution. However, these narratives sit uneasily with strategic, individualized... more
Discourses of democratization, authenticity, and collaboration have become increasingly salient in the web 2.0 era of amateur content creation and distribution. However,
these narratives sit uneasily with strategic, individualized self-branding practices undertaken by cultural workers in an unstable and precarious economy. This article uses the case of fashion blogging to explore the extent to which these
contradictions get reconciled through three interrelated myths: amateurism, creative autonomy, and collaboration. The strategic deployment of such myths, I argue, effectively conceals the very real ways that digitally enabled forms of creative production emulate traditional industry structures and logics. Indeed, far from being authentic, autonomous, and collaborative, the organization of fashion blogging is increasingly hierarchical, market-driven, and self-promotional. I close by suggesting how fashion blogging and other forms of gendered digital production may be understood as aspirational labor, a term which highlights the potential for these activities to provide social and economic capital while keeping female content creators fully immersed in the consumer culture.
these narratives sit uneasily with strategic, individualized self-branding practices undertaken by cultural workers in an unstable and precarious economy. This article uses the case of fashion blogging to explore the extent to which these
contradictions get reconciled through three interrelated myths: amateurism, creative autonomy, and collaboration. The strategic deployment of such myths, I argue, effectively conceals the very real ways that digitally enabled forms of creative production emulate traditional industry structures and logics. Indeed, far from being authentic, autonomous, and collaborative, the organization of fashion blogging is increasingly hierarchical, market-driven, and self-promotional. I close by suggesting how fashion blogging and other forms of gendered digital production may be understood as aspirational labor, a term which highlights the potential for these activities to provide social and economic capital while keeping female content creators fully immersed in the consumer culture.
Research Interests:
Discourses of authenticity are symptomatic of an era of destabilized communication hierarchies, participatory media, and reality television programming. Women's magazines are an apt site to examine articulations of authenticity given the... more
Discourses of authenticity are symptomatic of an era of destabilized communication hierarchies, participatory media, and reality television programming. Women's magazines are an apt site to examine articulations of authenticity given the genre's traditional emphases on aspirational consumption and “making up” the external self. This study explores constructions of authenticity in the advertising and editorial content of two top-ranked publications, Glamour and Cosmopolitan. Drawing on a qualitative textual analysis of these magazines, the author conceptualizes three overlapping tropes of authenticity: (a) promoting natural, organic products; (b) the celebration of ordinary-looking women; and (c) the encouragement of inner-directed self-discovery. These striations of real products, real external beauty, and real internal beauty, respectively, allow authenticity to seep throughout the texts without fundamentally disrupting their traditional commercial function.
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This study considers whether television shows depicting the media industries are reflexive about the challenges currently facing traditional media. It draws upon a multi-method qualitative analysis of five series--30 Rock, Entourage, Mad... more
This study considers whether television shows depicting the media industries are reflexive about the challenges currently facing traditional media. It draws upon a multi-method qualitative analysis of five series--30 Rock, Entourage, Mad Men, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and Ugly Betty—to investigate whether reflexivity constitutes an attempt to safeguard these industries’ mythical place at the “mediated centre.” We argue that reflexivity elucidates these shows in three ways: via textual reflexivity (within the shows themselves); producer reflexivity (as articulated by the production staff); and research reflexivity (how we, as researchers, engage with the data and their contradictions). We conclude, however, that reflexivity is used to inoculate these representations from highlighting the very real threats facing traditional media industries.
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From Émile Zola’s fin de siècle novel The Ladies’ Paradise up through contemporary media depictions of suburban malls and urban boutiques (e.g., Mean Girls, Sex and the City, The American Mall), the practice of shopping has been imbued... more
From Émile Zola’s fin de siècle novel The Ladies’ Paradise up through contemporary media depictions of suburban malls and urban boutiques (e.g., Mean Girls, Sex and the City, The American Mall), the practice of shopping has been imbued with ideological connotations. Not only do these constructions suggest who shops, but also how they experience shopping. For example, while department stores have historically been conceptualized as safe public environments for women to socialize (Leach, 1993; Felski, 1995), shopping malls are also considered performative spaces within which female consumers can imagine their identities (Backes, 1997). Yet against the backdrop of the 21st century online economy, one may question whether these constructions of shopping are as relevant to the online world as they are to physical sites of consumption.This essay begins to address this question by turning to the phenomenon of social shopping, a new generation of commerce that brings online retailing and social networking into dialogue. These so-called “social shopping networks” typically encourage members to share product recommendations, provide style guidance, and create and update personal fashion blogs. However, the way in which these sites are structured ostensibly creates boundaries among members’ shopping experience by compelling them to negotiate between individuality and sociality, and between production and consumption
Social media influencers represent a highly visible subset of digital content creator defined by their substantial following, distinctive brand-persona, and patterned relationship with commercial sponsors. Despite widespread variance in... more
Social media influencers represent a highly visible subset of digital content creator defined by their substantial following, distinctive brand-persona, and patterned relationship with commercial sponsors. Despite widespread variance in influencer practices and economies across sites like Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, most earn revenue by promoting branded goods and services to their community of followers. Accordingly, because these endorsements are integrated into creators’ own arsenals of content, influencer marketing is deemed more “authentic” or “organic” than traditional paid advertising. Influencers also function as digital tastemakers, providing their followers with advice, inspiration, and aspiration. Such standards of emulation are often embedded within a wider system of consumer capitalism that casts women as both shoppers and loyal brand advocates. More broadly, the influencer system is marked by disparities in gender, race, class, and aesthetics—inequalities that challenge the democratic framing of the social media economy.
Research Interests:
This chapter draws on in-depth interviews with thirteen Instagram content creators --as well as insights gleaned from a multi-year study of the Instagram community in order to examine how the proto-career of influencer is, above all,... more
This chapter draws on in-depth interviews with thirteen Instagram content creators --as well as insights gleaned from a multi-year study of the Instagram community in order to examine how the proto-career of influencer is, above all, a service that provides value to three distinct stakeholders: audiences, members of the Instagram creator community, and brand partners. In conceptualizing social media content creation as service, we build upon recent interview- and ethnographic-based studies that examine bloggers, vloggers, and influencers as creative laborers. By shifting the analytic focus from labor to service, we aim to highlight how influencers are beholden to distinctive groups who exert competing demands on their time, energy, and creative output. After exploring how service to these various groups shapes the cultural experiences and valuations of influencers, we show how these relations are ultimately structured by the platform itself; that is, Instagrammers are subject to the whims of what Cunningham and Craig (2019) have aptly described as “platform precarity” (p. 94). In some cases, the precarious nature of the site has attracted wider attention, such as when Instagram instituted a major change in its algorithmic ranking in 2017, or later, in 2019, when the company first tested the concealment of “likes.” Consequently, though Instagram’s role in a multi-platform social media economy may ebb and flow, we contend that the continued evolution of the Facebook-owned image-sharing site can not be understood apart from the vernacular of influencer culture.
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Over the last decade, social media has ushered in shiny new career exemplars: pro bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagram influencers. These digitally enabled models of work differ from employment in more traditional media industries. What are... more
Over the last decade, social media has ushered in shiny new career exemplars: pro bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagram influencers. These digitally enabled models of work differ from employment in more traditional media industries. What are the working conditions and labor requirements for ‘making it’ as an online content creator? This chapter discusses the changing nature of creative work in the social media age.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
As products of the Web 2.0 era, fashion blogs have been celebrated for “democratizing style” and enabling a new generation of creative producers to become “part of the international fashion conversation.” These narratives are often... more
As products of the Web 2.0 era, fashion blogs have been celebrated for “democratizing style” and enabling a new generation of creative producers to become “part of the international fashion conversation.” These narratives are often anchored in discourses of “community” whereby bloggers extol the interactivity and feedback afforded by their participation in both formal and informal blogging circuits. This chapter explores the cultures, practices, and politics of digital feedback within the largest fashion blogging community, the Independent Fashion Bloggers network. Drawing on a textual analysis of more than 200 articles and 1000 comments published on the site, I show how the blogging community proselytizes a culture of commentary defined by active participation, positive feedback, and forms of self-promotion cloaked in expressions of sincerity and authenticity. These norms, I argue, valorize audience interactivity while effectively reproducing traditional structures of cultural production that emphasize self-branding and the valuation of affective relations. Such findings, however, should not obscure the individual benefits that bloggers’ enactments of community and feedback may provide.
Research Interests:
Media Industry Studies has paid scant attention to the magazine publishing industry, particularly its so-called glossy sector. This chapter takes a cultural sociological approach to examining the contemporary magazine industry’s digital... more
Media Industry Studies has paid scant attention to the magazine publishing industry, particularly its so-called glossy sector. This chapter takes a cultural sociological approach to examining the contemporary magazine industry’s digital evolution and some of the effects this transition has had on industry structure, executive mandates, and magazine workers’ professional identities. The chapter considers developments at the three largest U.S.-based magazine publishing companies: Condé Nast, Hearst, and Time, Inc. Closely scrutinizing dynamics of gender, aspiration, and individualization, this chapter searches for definitions of, in the words of one industry executive, “what actually matters” in the work of digitized magazine production.
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This chapter presents case studies of two commercial sites where “real women” are encouraged to participate as interactive subjects and producers: a user-generated contest (Cosmopolitan’s “Fun, Fearless, Female”) and a blogging network... more
This chapter presents case studies of two commercial sites where “real women” are encouraged to participate as interactive subjects and producers: a user-generated contest (Cosmopolitan’s “Fun, Fearless, Female”) and a blogging network (BlogHer), respectively. These sites were selected based on their appeals to “real women” as well as their emphases on fashion and beauty, a market which is considered a place for patriarchal capitalism and individualized pleasure to coexist, though often uneasily (Lazar 2006). Contextualized within an advertising culture that has discursively constructed women above all as consumers, I examine the extent to which these new convergent forums allow access to the other realms on the cultural circuit (production and text/representation). Data come from textual analyses of the sites, company promotional communication (e.g., media kits, press releases), and articles published in trade and mainstream news sources. I argue that while these initiatives do make the realms of cultural production more accessible to “ordinary women,” these appeals to inclusivity often double as a form of “enclosure" (Andrejevic, 2010). By focusing on the nature and limits of enclosure in interactive spaces for women, I use this study to challenge some of the rhetoric about cultural convergence.
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Rethinking Readership: The Digital Challenge of Audience Construction
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The present "24/7" era of news and information poses a dilemma for those in the magazine industry. Because of tradition and technology, they typically work on issues several months before they reach readers' mailboxes. In her recent... more
The present "24/7" era of news and information
poses a dilemma for those in the magazine industry. Because of tradition and technology, they typically work on issues several months before they reach readers' mailboxes. In her recent essay, Brooke Erin Duffy explores the difficulties magazine producers face as they confront the new timing demands of the digital age. Duffy suggests that as producers increasingly turn to the Web to provide more regularly updated content, they face the additional challenge of maintaining synchronicity between the print and online versions.
poses a dilemma for those in the magazine industry. Because of tradition and technology, they typically work on issues several months before they reach readers' mailboxes. In her recent essay, Brooke Erin Duffy explores the difficulties magazine producers face as they confront the new timing demands of the digital age. Duffy suggests that as producers increasingly turn to the Web to provide more regularly updated content, they face the additional challenge of maintaining synchronicity between the print and online versions.
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Despite the recent uptick in literature on self-branding across the fields of internet studies, business/marketing, and media/cultural industries, the ways in which the digital self-brand gets reproduced across a sprawling social media... more
Despite the recent uptick in literature on self-branding across the fields of internet studies, business/marketing, and media/cultural industries, the ways in which the digital self-brand gets reproduced across a sprawling social media ecology remains comparatively under-theorized. Our paper draws upon in-depth interviews with 42 creative workers—including designers/artists, bloggers/writers, online content creators, and marketers/ publicists—to understand how independent professionals present themselves and their work in the digital economy. We show that despite the common refrain of maintaining a " consistent " online persona, creative workers continuously negotiate their self-presentation activities through a logic we term platform-specific self-branding. The platform-specific self-brand, we contend, is based upon the " imagined affordances " [43] of individual platforms and their placement within the larger social media ecology. Such imaginations are constructed through the interplay between: 1). platform features; 2) assumptions about the audience; and 3). and the producer's own self-concept. We conclude that creative workers' incitement to incessantly monitor and re-fashion their digital personae in platform-specific ways marks an intensification of the " always on " laboring subjectivity required to vie for attention in a precarious creative economy.
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YouTube stars, Instagram influencers, and other social media personalities have achieved an elevated status in the popular imagination. This work-in-progress situates the valourization of digital fame in a socio-historical context,... more
YouTube stars, Instagram influencers, and other social media personalities have achieved an elevated status in the popular imagination. This work-in-progress situates the valourization of digital fame in a socio-historical context, invoking critical theorist Leo Lowenthal's [20] " mass idols " framework. Examining the content of magazine biographies in the decades preceding World War II, Lowenthal identified a marked shift in cultural exemplars of success: from self-made entrepreneurs, politicians, and other " Idols of Production " —to the stars of cinema and sports, " Idols of Consumption. " As an extension of Lowenthal's analysis, we examine contemporary magazine biographies (in People and Time) and self-authored social media bios (on Instagram and Twitter). Based on a preliminary analysis of the magazine content and social-media profiles—including the crucial shift to self-authorship—we outline a new generation of what we call " Idols of Promotion. " These digitally networked public figures, we argue, straddle the realms of production and consumption as they labor to create and project a distinctive self-brand. We identify three key tropes that shape narrativizations of idols in the social media age: (1) a spirit of self-enterprise that crosses industry boundaries; (2) a promise of meritocracy; and (3) a call to express oneself authentically. After examining these tropes, we conclude with an examination of their ideological function: such mediated hero-worship, we contend, indexes larger anxieties about the individualization of work amidst a precarious economy.
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From fashion bloggers and beauty vloggers to virtual stylists and digital tastemakers, legions of enterprising young women are flocking to social media platforms with aspirations of capitalizing on their passion projects. Increasingly,... more
From fashion bloggers and beauty vloggers to virtual stylists and digital tastemakers, legions of enterprising young women are flocking to social media platforms with aspirations of capitalizing on their passion projects. Increasingly, their digitally mediated activities entail projections of what Banet-Weiser (2012) has called " the post-feminist self-brand, " which recasts self-expression and mediated visibility as conduits to female empowerment. Despite significant attention to the texts and contexts of gendered self-branding in recent years, further insight is needed to better understand the cultural implications for female social media producers. This paper draws upon in-depth interviews with digital content creators to explore the ambivalences and contradictions inherent in discourses of self-branding, authenticity, and social sharing. After mapping out the role of " ordinary people " in contemporary media culture, I address particular manifestations of " authenticity " and " realness " in the intersecting contexts of post-feminist and digital media milieus. I then present interview data to show how a mode of gendered unpaid work—the labor of visibility—increasingly structures activity in the social media imaginary.
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While BeReal has been lauded for its spontaneity, informality, and provision of “unvarnished glimpses into everyday life,” many are wondering if it will outlive the hype. But perhaps a more important question is whether we, the users,... more
While BeReal has been lauded for its spontaneity, informality, and provision of “unvarnished glimpses into everyday life,” many are wondering if it will outlive the hype. But perhaps a more important question is whether we, the users, have outgrown the culture of likes-tallying perfectionism associated with mainstream social networks, most notably Instagram. By some accounts, we have: Researchers have noted a significant uptick in “social media fatigue,” which they attribute in part to the pandemic. But even the tech-weariest among us find it hard to disregard the mandate to put forward our best (digital) selves. And so, despite the pretense of novelty, BeReal represents the latest iteration in the cycle of social media sites that spring from the push-and-pull tension of authenticity and performance.
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This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna.
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This course examines the intersection of media, technology, and society through a critical exploration of the digital creator economy. Though so-called "creators" are astonishingly diverse-spanning TikTok comedians, Instagram influencers,... more
This course examines the intersection of media, technology, and society through a critical exploration of the digital creator economy. Though so-called "creators" are astonishingly diverse-spanning TikTok comedians, Instagram influencers, YouTube educators, and Onlyfans streamers, among many others-they share a dependence on digital platforms for access to audiences, advertisers, and/or other financial opportunities. But digital platforms are evermore dependent on creators, too. It is in this vein that Big Tech companies are propping up the image of the creator economy as an entrepreneurial Promised Land-one that promises autonomy, flexibility, and self-actualization. Such optimism, however, belies the less auspicious realities of a creator career, wherein accounts of burnout, exploitation, and precarity are rife. How, then, are we to understand the flows of power and agency in the creator economy? We begin by exploring changes and continuities with earlier modes of cultural production; to do so, we draw upon writings on media industries, sociologies of cultural labor, and studies of celebrity and fame. We then explore key themes in critical scholarship in platforms and cultural production, spanning topics such as labor, visibility, and authenticity. Although the course foregrounds mainstream, largely Western creatorcentric platforms, students are encouraged to pursue original research that interrogates diverse creator cultures, contexts, and communities of practice.
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This course explores the intersection of media, technology, and society through an examination of media/creative labor as well as the industrial contexts in which creative products are created and distributed. We’ll begin with a survey of... more
This course explores the intersection of media, technology, and society through an examination of media/creative labor as well as the industrial contexts in which creative products are created and distributed. We’ll begin with a survey of key concepts and approaches from such subfields as critical media industry studies, cultural and creative industries policy, and sociologies of news and entertainment production. This broad overview will provide a useful backdrop for examining changes and continuities in media work related to inequality, industrial transformation linked to globalization/rise of digital technologies, and the individualization of labor. Finally, we will think through the socio-political stakes of contemporary modes of labor through discussions of 1). the tech industry’s impact on media work cultures; 2). the invisible laborers of the online ecology; 3). and emergent political economies of platforms.
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This course will examine the role of advertising and consumerism in our culture and social life. We will begin by exploring the rise of a consumer society and its evolution over the course of the twentieth century; various theoretical and... more
This course will examine the role of advertising and consumerism in our culture and social life. We will begin by exploring the rise of a consumer society and its evolution over the course of the twentieth century; various theoretical and critical perspectives will be introduced to illuminate the changing relationships between advertising, culture, and the economy. We will then examine how advertising “texts” and “producers” represent various social identities: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and more. The final section of the course will focus on promotional culture in the early 21st century; topics will include social media advertising/user-generated content; ideologies and practices of branding the self; and the role of digital media in shaping social trends and style.
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The rapidly evolving technologies and political economies of the digital age are redefining the cultures and processes of media production across institutional contexts. This course will draw upon writings from communication/media... more
The rapidly evolving technologies and political economies of the digital age are redefining the cultures and processes of media production across institutional contexts. This course will draw upon writings from communication/media studies, sociology, and internet studies to explore the changing nature of the media and culture industries. We will begin by surveying key issues and debates across three intersecting subfields: critical media industry studies, cultural studies of creative work, and sociologies of media production. This broad overview will provide a useful backdrop for examining how workers in “traditional” media industries are adapting to the emergent platforms and logics of the digital economy. Particular attention will be devoted to the role of “audience labor” in contemporary media and marketing institutions. This discussion will segue into an in-depth treatment of digitally enabled modes of creative production, which we will investigate through writings on fandom, peer-production, co-creativity, and digital labor, among others. The final section of the course will require us to think through the socio-political stakes of contemporary modes of labor through discussions of 1). socially mediated self-branding; 2). the invisible workers of the online ecosystem; and 3). enduring social hierarchies within (new) media industries.
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The November 2018 Social MediaCulture Conference convened a group of communication scholars and practitioners, students, and public officials for a two day event organized by the School of Communications and Journalism at Universidad... more
The November 2018 Social MediaCulture Conference convened a group of communication scholars and practitioners, students, and public officials for a two day event organized by the School of Communications
and Journalism at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile. While the event explored various dimensions of social media culture, the
implications of digital transformation in political and economic spheres were the main focus.
In this regard, the first central theme was the spread of disinformation, the concurrent rise of computational propaganda challenging democratic systems; a second was the
production, circulation, and monetization of online content by seemingly amateur cultural producers. Conference participants addressed the former with possible solutions, discussing the pros and cons involved – i.e., would increased regulation inadvertently threaten human rights activism in autocratic countries? –, and used the case of social media influencers in the latter to explore themes of value, labor, and commercialism.
On the next pages, the authors reproduce for the reader’s edification the results of the different exchanges that took place during conference
lectures, workshops, and discussions.
and Journalism at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile. While the event explored various dimensions of social media culture, the
implications of digital transformation in political and economic spheres were the main focus.
In this regard, the first central theme was the spread of disinformation, the concurrent rise of computational propaganda challenging democratic systems; a second was the
production, circulation, and monetization of online content by seemingly amateur cultural producers. Conference participants addressed the former with possible solutions, discussing the pros and cons involved – i.e., would increased regulation inadvertently threaten human rights activism in autocratic countries? –, and used the case of social media influencers in the latter to explore themes of value, labor, and commercialism.
On the next pages, the authors reproduce for the reader’s edification the results of the different exchanges that took place during conference
lectures, workshops, and discussions.
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Over the past decade, work in the cultural sector has grown evermore precarious amid heightened competition, rampant insecurity, and the individualization of risk. Despite this, social media personalities-including bloggers, vloggers, and... more
Over the past decade, work in the cultural sector has grown evermore precarious amid heightened competition, rampant insecurity, and the individualization of risk. Despite this, social media personalities-including bloggers, vloggers, and Instagrammers-seem to have attained a much-vaunted career dream: They get paid to do what they love. Accounting for this disparity, we highlight the role of popular media discourses that hype
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Although the digital economy’s guiding logics of attention and visibility rouse social media users to put themselves out there, individuals experience digital visibility in profoundly uneven ways. For women, in particular, the public... more
Although the digital economy’s guiding logics of attention and visibility rouse social media users to put themselves out there, individuals experience digital visibility in profoundly uneven ways. For women, in particular, the public nature of online communication is fraught with risk, opening the potential for ridicule, hate, and harassment. This research explores the vexed nature of visibility among Instagram content creators, a community that is especially beholden to this so-called “visibility mandate.” Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 aspiring and professional Instagrammers, we show how they attempt to stave off potential critique in patterned ways. In their efforts to project themselves as authentic, many sought to deflect accusations of being too real, and, alternatively, as being not real enough. We argue that this uniquely gendered form of a socially mediated “authenticity bind” indexes the wider policing of women and other marginalized communities in digitally networked spaces, wherein they must carefully toe the line between visibility and vulnerability.