scholarly journals “Running the Numbers”: Modes of Microcelebrity Labor in Queer Women’s Self-Representation on Instagram and Vine

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630511989400
Author(s):  
Stefanie Duguay
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Queer Women ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Prominent Component ◽  
Aesthetic Labor ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Microcelebrity, as a set of practices contributing to personalized self-branding, has become an increasingly prominent component of self-representation on social media platforms. While “influencers” who have built lucrative followings through microcelebrity give the appearance of having fun without much exertion, recent studies have uncovered multiple forms of labor involved in their practices of cultural production. In addition, scholars analyzing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) influencers highlight a tension between labor in service of self-commodification and the representation of sexual minorities. This article examines the microcelebrity labor of everyday queer women who aim to increase their social and economic capital by interweaving personal self-representations with entrepreneurial endeavors on Instagram and Vine. Through a close analysis of these platforms’ markets, governance, and infrastructures alongside interviews with queer female users of each platform, attention is given to both platform influences and participants’ experiences of promoting their jobs, side-gigs, hobbies, or passions alongside the rest of their lives. Findings identify three modes of labor specific to participants’ efforts to build a following: (1) intimate affective labor expended in sharing and managing personal disclosures; (2) developmental aesthetic labor as the acquisition and practice of technical skills and bodily displays to achieve a desired appearance or performance; (3) aspiring relational labor in attempts to forge relationships with established influencers or celebrities. Sexual identity was pivotal across these modes of labor, as it enhanced intimacy with followers, provided a niche audience for self-branding, conveyed authenticity through self-revelation, and established a common ground for forging relationships.

scholarly journals The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110213
Author(s):  
Brooke Erin Duffy ◽  
Annika Pinch ◽  
Shruti Sannon ◽  
Megan Sawey
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Ecological Model ◽  
Creative Economy ◽  
Cultural Industries ◽  
Professional Success ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Media ◽  
Depth Interviews

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.

Digital consumers as cultural curators: the irony of Vaporwave

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Schembri ◽  
Jac Tichbon
Keyword(s):  
Research Design ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Digital Natives ◽  
Digital Music ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Underground Music ◽  
Symbolic Production

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address the question of cultural production, consumption and intermediation in the context of digital music. Design/methodology/approach This research adopts an interpretivist, ethnoconsumerist epistemology along with a netnographic research design combined with hermeneutic analysis. Interpreting both the text view and field view of an ethnoconsumerist approach, the netnographic research design includes participant observation across multiple social media platforms as well as virtual interviews and analysis of media material. The context of application is a digital music subculture known as Vaporwave. Vaporwave participants deliberately distort fundamental aspects of modern and postmodern culture in a digital, musical, artistic and storied manner. Findings Hermeneutic analysis has identified a critical and nostalgic narrative of consumerism and hyper-reality, evident as symbolic parallels, intertextual relationships, existential themes and cultural codes. As a techno savvy community embracing lo-fi production, self-releasing promotion and anonymity from within a complexity of aliases and myriad collaborations, the vaporous existentialism of Vaporwave participants skirts copyright liability in the process. Accordingly, Vaporwave is documented as blurring reality and fantasy, material and symbolic, production and consumption. Essentially, Vaporwave participants are shown to be digital natives turned digital rebels and heretical consumers, better described as cultural curators. Research limitations/implications This research demonstrates a more complex notion of cultural production, consumption and intermediation, argued to be more accurately described as cultural curation. Practical implications As digital heretics, Vaporwave participants challenge traditional notions of modernity, such as copyright law, and postmodern notions such as working consumers and consuming producers. Social implications Vaporwave participants present a case of digital natives turned digital rebels and consumer heretics, who are actively curating culture. Originality/value This interpretive ethnoconusmerist study combining netnography and hermeneutic analysis of an online underground music subculture known as Vaporwave shows digital music artists as cultural curators.

scholarly journals A GOOD LIFE? CRITICAL FEMINIST APPROACHES TO INFLUENCER ECOLOGIES

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Glatt ◽  
Sarah Banet-Weiser ◽  
Sophie Bishop ◽  
Francesca Sobande ◽  
Elizabeth Wissinger ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Barriers To Entry ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms are widely lauded as bastions for entrepreneurial self-actualisation and creative autonomy, offering an answer to historically exclusive and hierarchical creative industries as routes to employability and success. Social media influencers are envied by audiences as having achieved ‘the good life’, one in which they are able to ‘do what they love’ for a living (Duffy 2017). Despite this ostensive accessibility and relatability, today’s high-profile influencer culture continues to be shaped by ‘preexisting gendered and racial scripts and their attendant grammars of exclusion’ as Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) argued in the early days of socially mediated entrepreneurship (p. 89; see also Bishop, 2017). In Western contexts only a narrow subset of white, cis-gender, and heterosexual YouTubers, Instagrammers, TikTokers, and Twitch streamers tend to achieve visibility as social media star-creators, and celebratory discourses of diversity and fairness mask problematic structures that exclude marginalized identities from opportunities to attain success. A key aim of this panel is thus to draw attention to marginalized creator communities and subjectivities, including women, non-white, and queer creators, all of whom face higher barriers to entry and success. More broadly, by taking seriously both the practices and discourses of social media influencers, the panellists aim to challenge popular denigrations of influencers as vapid, frivolous, or eager to freeload. We locate such critiques in longstanding dismissals of feminized cultural production (Levine, 2013) and argue, instead, that we need to take seriously the role of influencers in various social, economic, and political configurations.

Public Service Media and Social TV: Bridging or Expanding Gaps in Participation?

2015 ◽  
Vol 154 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathon Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Tv ◽  
Content Consumption ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Cultural Intermediaries ◽  
The Public Sphere

The public service media (PSM) remit requires the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to provide for minorities while fostering national culture and the public sphere. Social media platforms and projects – specifically ‘social TV’ – have enabled greater participation in ABC content consumption and creation; they provide opportunities for social participation in collaborative cultural production. However it can be argued that, instead of deconstructing boundaries, social media platforms may in fact reconstruct participation barriers within PSM production processes. This article explores ABC co-creation between Twitter and the # 7DaysLater television program, a narrative-based comedy program that engaged its audience through social media to produce its weekly program. The article demonstrates why the ABC should engage with social media platforms to collaboratively produce content, with # 7DaysLater providing an innovative example, but suggests skilled cultural intermediaries with experience in community facilitation should carry out the process.

‘Hipster Capitalism’ in the Age of Austerity? Polanyi Meets Bourdieu’s New Petite Bourgeoisie

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Scott
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
Economic Returns ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The World ◽  
Career Strategies ◽  
Petite Bourgeoisie ◽  
New Research ◽  
Iconic Figure

This article dialogues Polanyi and Bourdieu to propose a new research agenda within the sociology of cultural production. Extending recent literature on hipsters, this iconic figure is shifted from the world of consumption to the world of production via Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of the new petite bourgeoisie. Using secondary empirical material of cultural micro-enterprises, two ideal-typical career strategies are sketched: cultural-capital oriented seeking to secure positions within established creative industries, and economic-capital orientated stylising ‘old’ petite bourgeoisie occupations to access economic returns. However, within the context of ongoing austerity policies, Bourdieu’s economic capital does not fully account for the variegated forms of material resources these nascent enterprises draw on. Bringing Polanyi’s modes of economic integration – reciprocity, redistribution and exchange – to Bourdieu opens new questions on how hipster capitalism is the practice of intermediating between these ‘backstage’ material modes and the ‘frontstage’ selling of style.

scholarly journals Streamer-Interface-Viewer Entanglement

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (70) ◽  
pp. 131-150
Author(s):  
Zhen Ye
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Interface Design ◽  
Live Streaming ◽  
Power Relationship ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Two Stages ◽  
The Ideal

In China, the live-streaming industry has a distinctive model of cultural production: showroom live-streaming. It is often adopted by social media platforms to complement other social networking activities. This study reveals the ways in which social media platforms (specifically, Douyin and Momo) design their showroom livestreaming interfaces and aff ordances to normalise and commodify the aff ective interactions between female streamers and their male viewers and to establish a gendered power relationship. Using the walkthrough method during two stages of the apps (entry to live-streaming chatrooms and the everyday use of live-streaming chatrooms), this study analyses various aff ordances regarding their functional, sensory, and cognitive impacts on users. This research thereby demonstrates that the live-streaming interface design constructs two types of subject positions. The ideal user is constructed as a heterosexual male, who is empowered through the consumption of virtual gifts; in contrast, the interface nudges the female streamers to conduct emotional labour and deliver implicitly sexualised performances to maintain an aff ective relationship with viewers.

Charging Fandom in the Digital Age

2018 ◽  
pp. 147-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuojia Guo
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Dynamic Interaction ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Information And Communication

In the digital age, the proliferation of fan-generated content on social media platforms is making the fan culture transitioning from the “static” online consumption to “dynamic” interaction. This is not only a result of the advancement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), but also a cultural phenomenon driving by participatory fandom in cyberspace. The rise of social media has dramatically altered the dynamics of fan practices and spectatorship hence increased vocality and visibility within the fan community as well as the formation and facilitation of fan roles. In this chapter, we will explore why social media have such a profound impact upon fandom. In particular, what is new with these fan communities that social media has done so much to enable. Why there is a blurring in the lines between fandom producers and consumers in the participatory fandom. Given the new forms of cultural production, how fan culture enabled by social media is more powerful than it was ever before.

A Pedagogue's Progress, the Cunningham Turn, and the Birth of Creator Studies

2021 ◽  
pp. 1329878X2110438
Author(s):  
David Craig
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Southern California ◽  
University Of Southern California ◽  
The Past ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
University Of Technology ◽  
Research Initiative ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Global Research

As partners in an ongoing global research initiative over the past 6 years, Queensland University of Technology Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham and University of Southern California Clinical Professor David Craig mapped the rise of two competing communication and media industries, Social Media Entertainment and Wanghong. Alongside other vanguard scholars, Cunningham and Craig identified and framed the emergence of Creator Studies, an interdisciplinary field of studies focused on the dynamics of new forms of cultural production across social media platforms from diverse fields, methods, and epistemologies. These developments are described within a picaresque auto-ethnographic account of Cunningham's influence on the author's progression from Hollywood producer to scholar and pedagogue.

scholarly journals East Asian pop music idol production and the emergence of data fandom in China

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-511
Author(s):  
Qian Zhang ◽  
Keith Negus
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Chain Model ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Supply Chain Model ◽  
Social Media Platforms

This article traces the formation of popular music idol industries in China and the emergence of data fandom. It charts the growth of digital platforms and historicizes the commercial and geopolitical itinerations linking cultural production in Japan, South Korea, and China. It locates data fandom as an integral part of the popular music industries reconfigured by digital social media platforms; a structural change from the production-to-consumption ‘supply chain’ model of the recording era towards emergent circuits of content that integrate industries and audiences. Data fans understand how their online activities are tracked, and adopt individual and collective strategies to influence metric and semantic information reported on digital platforms and social media. This article analyses how the practices of data fans impact upon charts, media and content traffic, illustrating how this activity benefits the idols they are following, and enhances a fan’s sense of achievement and agency.

Making mirrors, making albums and making documentaries: the music of Gotye and negotiating Bourdieu's field of cultural production

Popular Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 669-684
Author(s):  
Pat O'Grady
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Music Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
Equipment Production ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Independent Musicians

AbstractRecent popular music and film studies have revealed the political functions of documentaries about musicians. These studies suggest that such documentaries make powerful interventions into the field of music production as they construct the value of their subjects and their work. Owing to the expense and complexity of broadcast equipment, production companies have tended to favour documentaries about artists and work considered to be popular and historically significant. Over the past 15 years, however, new technologies have allowed musicians to make documentaries themselves, which they can release at the same time as their song or album. Using the example of Gotye and his album Making Mirrors, this article argues that these developments have led to powerful and distinct interventions into debates and themes within home music production for independent musicians. It also argues that the use of this technology on social media platforms challenges the relationships between text and process.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document