- Autonomist Marxism, The Self, Self and Identity, Brand and identity design, Reality television, Branding, and 30 moreNeoliberalism, New Media, Public Universities, Marxism, Web Promotion, Marketing, Digital Media, Market Research, SEO, Analytics, Web Design, Consumption Studies, Social Media, Television Studies, Interdisciplinarity, Online social networks, Consumer Culture, Interdisciplinary Studies, University, Consumer Culture Theory, History of Communism, Political Theory, Adorno/Horkheimer, Transition in Central and Eastern Europe, European political cultures, Media and Politics, Populism, Michel Foucault, Critical Theory, and Frankfurt Schooledit
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Research Interests: Sociology, Algorithms, Aesthetics, Art, Transformative Learning, and 14 morePopular Culture, Digital Media, Feminism, Cyber Aesthetics, Affect Studies, Platform Studies, Promotional Culture, Ambivalence, New Media and Digital Culture, Glamour, Cultural Production, Advertising and Branding, Culutral Studies, and Culture and Creative Industries
While several critics have analyzed the rise of the “micro-celebrity” in the online era (Senft 2008, Marwick 2013, Marwick and boyd 2011, van Dijk 2013), few have worked to historicize these developments, or to situate them within broader... more
While several critics have analyzed the rise of the “micro-celebrity” in the online era (Senft 2008, Marwick 2013, Marwick and boyd 2011, van Dijk 2013), few have worked to historicize these developments, or to situate them within broader political economic transformations in the nature of work and value in the contemporary moment. Assessments of “micro-celebrity” also tend to ignore the central role played by celebrity/brand measurement mechanisms, such as the Nielsen ratings or the Q score, in and through which celebrity value is identified and determined. This paper will attempt to fill these gaps by providing an historical sketch of expressions of celebrity value: as product, industry, property, endorser and brand in the 20th century. It will trace these processes as they appear in the phenomenon of the reality television participant in the 1990s and 2000s and the Internet micro-celebrity, specifically the social media 'influencer' (SMI), in the 21rst century. The paper then focuses on contemporary ‘influence’ measurement metrics, such as Klout, examining the ways in which both the traditional celebrity and the SMI have responded to and been conditioned by these metrics. Finally, the paper will critically assess how and in what ways celebrity value may have changed, and who really benefits from the dispersal of the logics of celebrity value-production in the age of social media.
Research Interests: Psychology, Television Studies, Digital Media, Celebrity Culture, Reality television, and 12 moreConsumer Culture, Work and Labour, Branding, Social Media Marketing, Personal Branding, Diffusion, Celebrity Studies, Tracing, Celebrity Endorsement, Micro-Celebrity, Marketing metrics, and Celebrity Politics
In a world marked by deepening political, economic, cultural and environmental insecurity, it is little wonder that fairytale stories of personal and material transformation proliferate on the airwaves. Transformation, or makeover,... more
In a world marked by deepening political, economic, cultural and environmental insecurity, it is little wonder that fairytale stories of personal and material transformation proliferate on the airwaves. Transformation, or makeover, television might be seen as narrative palliative for ...
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I n the days following Donald Trump’s election, I found myself sporadically weeping. I teared up while speaking in front of a room full of students. I wept at the grocery store and at the doctor’s office. My emotional reaction seemed... more
I n the days following Donald Trump’s election, I found myself sporadically weeping. I teared up while speaking in front of a room full of students. I wept at the grocery store and at the doctor’s office. My emotional reaction seemed extreme. But then friends told me that they too had had unaccountable emotional responses to the election tears, shaking, insomnia. After the first six months of Trump’s administration, the tears have been replaced by a terrifying kind of vertigo for many of us, induced by a dizzying array of racist and sexist appointments, postures and policies and a steady barrage of self-aggrandising lies, incompetence, petulance, baseless accusations, wastefulness and self indulgence, as well as the certain knowledge that, behind it all, there is just ... nothing. In hindsight it’s become clear that the extreme and visceral responses to Trump’s election were, quite simply, the symptoms of whatever faith we had left in electoral politics being fully and finally shattered. Trump’s election severed us entirely from any flimsy pretence, conscious or unconscious, that traditional politics still matters. The (neo)liberal democratic experiment in the United States has failed, as it is failing in Europe and Canada. Polite company refers to it as a ‘democratic deficit’, but we all know the truth. After Trump, all bets are off.
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Fintech start-ups, such as Zest AI and LenddoEFL, promise enhanced levels of financial inclusion via the creation of “re-socialized” credit profiles derived from accessing clients’ online banking habits and social media accounts. As our... more
Fintech start-ups, such as Zest AI and LenddoEFL, promise enhanced levels of financial inclusion via the creation of “re-socialized” credit profiles derived from accessing clients’ online banking habits and social media accounts. As our social data becomes credit data, the performance of “appropriate” online selfhood can now, quite literally, become money. This article explores the reputational demands, disciplines, and contradictions of ostensibly alternative computational/platformed credit scoring. It argues that the world of “surveillance capitalism” involves the maintenance of a relentlessly promotional value chain. As we are summoned to assiduously self-promote online in pursuit of a creditable reputation and financial inclusion, the self-reflexive promotional logics of the platforms themselves work to remake the world in their own image, paradoxically undermining the productive economic assumptions upon which they are predicated.
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This paper explores the contributions of autonomist Marxist theory to my understanding of reality television, self-branding and social media. Autonomist Marxist ideas help to bridge the classic media studies divide between critical... more
This paper explores the contributions of autonomist Marxist theory to my understanding of reality television, self-branding and social media. Autonomist Marxist ideas help to bridge the classic media studies divide between critical political economy and cultural studies, illuminating the very material connections between television’s mode of production, its texts, and its broader cultural context and impact. Concepts such as the social factory, immaterial labour, the socialized worker, and virtuosity, contributed by thinkers such as Mauricio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, have enabled me to argue that reality television is a privileged site of production in the post-Fordist era; it not only produces texts or ideologies about work and life, but also models the monetization of “being” and produces “branded selves”. While autonomist ideas are extremely useful, the field of thinking is complex and not without its internal debates. This paper also explores contributions by George Caffentzis, Massimo de Angelis and David Harvie, specifically the concept of the war over measure, arguing that this concept helps to frame some of the ways in which the public expression of opinion and feeling online and in social media are being captured, measured and put to work for capital.
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Blogging, twittering, facebooking, posting videos on youtube, providing feedback on newspaper articles online or rating restaurants or hotels on tripadvisor, are often seen to be positive elements in the development of the digital public... more
Blogging, twittering, facebooking, posting videos on youtube, providing feedback on newspaper articles online or rating restaurants or hotels on tripadvisor, are often seen to be positive elements in the development of the digital public sphere. Academics and human ...
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The governance of affect by capital has seen its ideological legitimation and emblematic site of production in the mainstream television industry, specifically reality television programs, as they provide templates for affective... more
The governance of affect by capital has seen its ideological legitimation and emblematic site of production in the mainstream television industry, specifically reality television programs, as they provide templates for affective self-presentation to the public at large. As even a cursory glance at most reality television production demonstrates, it is most often women’s bodies and self-concepts that bear the burden of signifying and legitimating the message of this new economic formation: ‘conform to our template, be seen, and build a reputation!’ This article will focus on the Real Housewives franchise, which along with its network Bravo is credited with saving the fortunes of NBC, as the paradigmatic example of these new narrative trends and business models. It will interrogate the historical resonances and discontinuities between the economy of affective visibility now apparent on reality television and its modes of production and the origins of the ‘real’ housewife in early capitalism. At this time, women’s skills, bodies and reproductive capacities were violently restructured; forbidden from earning a wage or having money, women’s work inside and outside the home was simultaneously appropriated and concealed. As reality television inaugurates new kinds of labor and value creation in the 21st century, it does so in ways that are deeply gendered or ‘housewifized’; reality television’s forms of hidden, precarious, and unregulated labour recall the appropriation and denigration of the value of women’s work by systems of capitalist expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Fintech start-ups, such as Zest AI and LenddoEFL, promise enhanced levels of financial inclusion via the creation of “re-socialized” credit profiles derived from accessing clients’ online banking habits and social media accounts. As our... more
Fintech start-ups, such as Zest AI and LenddoEFL, promise enhanced levels of financial inclusion via the creation of “re-socialized” credit profiles derived from accessing clients’ online banking habits and social media accounts. As our social data becomes credit data, the performance of “appropriate” online selfhood can now, quite literally, become money. This article explores the reputational demands, disciplines, and contradictions of ostensibly alternative computational/platformed credit scoring. It argues that the world of “surveillance capitalism” involves the maintenance of a relentlessly promotional value chain. As we are summoned to assiduously self-promote online in pursuit of a creditable reputation and financial inclusion, the self-reflexive promotional logics of the platforms themselves work to remake the world in their own image, paradoxically undermining the productive economic assumptions upon which they are predicated.
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This paper explores the contributions of autonomist Marxist theory to my understanding of reality television, self-branding and social media. Autonomist Marxist ideas help to bridge the classic media studies divide between critical... more
This paper explores the contributions of autonomist Marxist theory to my understanding of reality television, self-branding and social media. Autonomist Marxist ideas help to bridge the classic media studies divide between critical political economy and cultural studies, illuminating the very material connections between television’s mode of production, its texts, and its broader cultural context and impact. Concepts such as the social factory, immaterial labour, the socialized worker, and virtuosity, contributed by thinkers such as Mauricio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, have enabled me to argue that reality television is a privileged site of production in the post-Fordist era; it not only produces texts or ideologies about work and life, but also models the monetization of “being ” and produces “branded selves”. While autonomist ideas are extremely useful, the field of thinking is complex and not without its internal debates. This paper also explores cont...
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The papers in this issue of ephemera have their origins in a conference, 'Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens', held at the University of Western Ontario on October 16-18, 2009. The conference was organized by the Digital... more
The papers in this issue of ephemera have their origins in a conference, 'Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens', held at the University of Western Ontario on October 16-18, 2009. The conference was organized by the Digital Labour Group, an assembly of ...
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Today, how can we not speak of the university? —Jacques Derrida (1983: 3) The two of us wrote this introduction together, but the two of us are many. One of
This article will argue that the ‘reflexive project of the self ’ (Giddens) has become an explicit form of labour under post-Fordist capital in the form of ‘self-branding’. Here, work on the self is purposeful and outer-directed;... more
This article will argue that the ‘reflexive project of the self ’ (Giddens) has become an explicit form of labour under post-Fordist capital in the form of ‘self-branding’. Here, work on the self is purposeful and outer-directed; self-production is heavily narrated, marked by the visual codes of the mainstream culture industry, and subject to the extraction of value. The article will explore inflections of self-branding across several different mediated forms. Contemporary marketing literature identifies the construction of a branded persona as a central strategy in the negotiation of increasingly complex corporate environments. Recently the practice and logic of personal branding has moved out of the boardroom and into the television studio. Television shows such as The Apprentice and American Idol invent a narrative of self-branding and simultaneously produce branded personae.Websites such as 2night.com extract value from partying young people; photographers take pictures at night...
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This brief essay considers the impact of the current conjunctural crisis on ideas about, and access to the ‘future’. It explores ways in which cultural critics and scholars might learn to think ‘scandalously’ in order to imagine and build... more
This brief essay considers the impact of the current conjunctural crisis on ideas about, and access to the ‘future’. It explores ways in which cultural critics and scholars might learn to think ‘scandalously’ in order to imagine and build a more equitable and humane world.
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I n the days following Donald Trump’s election, I found myself sporadically weeping. I teared up while speaking in front of a room full of students. I wept at the grocery store and at the doctor’s office. My emotional reaction seemed... more
I n the days following Donald Trump’s election, I found myself sporadically weeping. I teared up while speaking in front of a room full of students. I wept at the grocery store and at the doctor’s office. My emotional reaction seemed extreme. But then friends told me that they too had had unaccountable emotional responses to the election tears, shaking, insomnia. After the first six months of Trump’s administration, the tears have been replaced by a terrifying kind of vertigo for many of us, induced by a dizzying array of racist and sexist appointments, postures and policies and a steady barrage of self-aggrandising lies, incompetence, petulance, baseless accusations, wastefulness and self indulgence, as well as the certain knowledge that, behind it all, there is just ... nothing. In hindsight it’s become clear that the extreme and visceral responses to Trump’s election were, quite simply, the symptoms of whatever faith we had left in electoral politics being fully and finally shatt...
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Various multiple-disciplinary terms and concepts (although most commonly “interdisciplinarity,” which is used herein) are used to frame education, scholarship, research, and interactions within and outside academia. In principle, the... more
Various multiple-disciplinary terms and concepts (although most commonly “interdisciplinarity,” which is used herein) are used to frame education, scholarship, research, and interactions within and outside academia. In principle, the premise of interdisciplinarity may appear to have many strengths; yet, the extent to which interdisciplinarity is embraced by the current generation of academics, the benefits and risks for doing so, and the barriers and facilitators to achieving interdisciplinarity, represent inherent challenges. Much has been written on the topic of interdisciplinarity, but to our knowledge there have been few attempts to consider and present diverse perspectives from scholars, artists, and scientists in a cohesive manner. As a team of 57 members from the Canadian College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (the College) who self-identify as being engaged or interested in interdisciplinarity, we provide diverse intellectual, cultura...
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Arguing that questions of power expressed through aesthetic form are too often left out of current approaches to digital culture, this article revives the modernist aesthetic category of glamour in order to analyze contemporary forms of... more
Arguing that questions of power expressed through aesthetic form are too often left out of current approaches to digital culture, this article revives the modernist aesthetic category of glamour in order to analyze contemporary forms of platformed cultural production. Through a case study of popular feminism, the article traces the ways in which glamour, defined as a beguiling affective force linked to promotional capitalist logics, suffuses digital content, metrics, and platforms. From the formal aesthetic codes of the ubiquitous beauty and lifestyle Instagram feeds that perpetuate the beguiling promise of popular feminism, to the enticing simplicity of online metrics and scores that promise transformative social connection and approbation, to the political economic drive for total information awareness and concomitant disciplining, predicting and optimizing of consumer-citizens, the article argues that the ambivalent aesthetic of glamour provides an apt descriptor and compelling h...
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The governance of affect by capital has seen its ideological legitimation and emblematic site of production in the mainstream television industry, specifically reality television programs, as they provide templates for affective... more
The governance of affect by capital has seen its ideological legitimation and emblematic site of production in the mainstream television industry, specifically reality television programs, as they provide templates for affective self-presentation to the public at large. As even a cursory glance at most reality television production demonstrates, it is most often women’s bodies and self-concepts that bear the burden of signifying and legitimating the message of this new economic formation: ‘conform to our template, be seen, and build a reputation!’ This article will focus on the Real Housewives franchise, which along with its network Bravo is credited with saving the fortunes of NBC, as the paradigmatic example of these new narrative trends and business models. It will interrogate the historical resonances and discontinuities between the economy of affective visibility now apparent on reality television and its modes of production and the origins of the ‘real’ housewife in early capi...
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ABSTRACT What new styles of selfhood and self-presentation, forms of social status, and arbiters of “authenticity” are being authorized and propagated in the wake of big data and affective capitalism? How are they functioning, for whom,... more
ABSTRACT What new styles of selfhood and self-presentation, forms of social status, and arbiters of “authenticity” are being authorized and propagated in the wake of big data and affective capitalism? How are they functioning, for whom, and to what end? This article takes up these questions via an examination of a sought-after user identity badge, the Twitter verification checkmark, figuring it as both an affective lure that incentivizes specific styles of self-presentation and a disciplinary means through which capitalist logics work to condition and subsume the significance of the millions of forms of self-presentation generated daily. Beneath the promise of democratized access to social status and fame, the business practices of the social platforms in and through which we self-present draw us into privatized strategies of social sorting, identity management, and control. To conclude, the article will posit a new “ideal type” of selfhood for the big data age.
Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Self and Identity, Social Media, Twitter, and 10 moreAffect (Cultural Theory), Presentation of Self in Digital Life, Identity management, Selfhood, Self Branding, Communication and media Studies, Quantified Self, Popular Communication, Routledge, and Affective Capitalism
Drawing on critical cultural theory, the industry trade press, and an exploratory content analysis of prime-time television, this article examines the under-researched phenomenon of “internal network promotions.” The authors argue that... more
Drawing on critical cultural theory, the industry trade press, and an exploratory content analysis of prime-time television, this article examines the under-researched phenomenon of “internal network promotions.” The authors argue that internal promotions constitute a central component of the growing promotional orientation of Canadian prime-time television. They provide a theoretical overview of the practices of branding and a general description of the rise of “advertainment” on Canadian television. They then focus on the ways in whichn internal network promotions comprise a taken-for-granted “branded” backdrop against which television content, already heavily infiltrated by promotional interests, is mounted. The article concludes with a call for more research into the promotional nature of Canadian primetime television and its social, political, and cultural implications.Cet article a recours à la presse spécialisée pertinente, la théorie critique sur la culture et une analyse de...
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This brief editorial links Trump’s popularity to reality television’s messages of promotionalism and the spread of overt forms of self-branding and reputation-seeking across the population at large thanks to social media. Against the... more
This brief editorial links Trump’s popularity to reality television’s messages of promotionalism and the spread of overt forms of self-branding and reputation-seeking across the population at large thanks to social media. Against the backdrop of growing economic insecurity, most people must now assiduously self-promote and hustle in order to find or protect their jobs. Trump supporters are not ‘dupes’ buying the hype then; they recognize that Trump’s brand is his skill set, admire it, and see it as all the qualification he needs to become president. While Trump’s ‘brand’ is figured as the result of his own personal style and power, it is actually the product of the underpaid, highly exploited labour of thousands of workers. Trump the Brand and reality television’s gauzy promise of mini-celebrity are symptoms of, and alibis for a flawed and failing political economic system. It will take the concerted, collective power of people in the streets, demanding something better, to stop him.
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While several critics have analyzed the rise of the “micro-celebrity” in the online era (Senft 2008, Marwick 2013, Marwick and boyd 2011, van Dijk 2013), few have worked to historicize these developments, or to situate them within broader... more
While several critics have analyzed the rise of the “micro-celebrity” in the online era (Senft 2008, Marwick 2013, Marwick and boyd 2011, van Dijk 2013), few have worked to historicize these developments, or to situate them within broader political economic transformations in the nature of work and value in the contemporary moment. Assessments of “micro-celebrity” also tend to ignore the central role played by celebrity/brand measurement mechanisms, such as the Nielsen ratings or the Q score, in and through which celebrity value is identified and determined. This paper will attempt to fill these gaps by providing an historical sketch of expressions of celebrity value: as product, industry, property, endorser and brand in the 20th century. It will trace these processes as they appear in the phenomenon of the reality television participant in the 1990s and 2000s and the Internet micro-celebrity, specifically the social media 'influencer' (SMI), in the 21rst century. The paper then focuses on contemporary ‘influence’ measurement metrics, such as Klout, examining the ways in which both the traditional celebrity and the SMI have responded to and been conditioned by these metrics. Finally, the paper will critically assess how and in what ways celebrity value may have changed, and who really benefits from the dispersal of the logics of celebrity value-production in the age of social media.