Facebook for Professors: Academia.edu and the Converging Logics of Social Media and Academic Self-Branding

Given widespread labor-market precarity, contemporary workers—especially those in the media and creative industries—are increasingly called upon to brand themselves. As universities become progressively more market-driven, academics are experiencing a parallel pressure to engage in self-promotional practices. Academia.edu, a paper-sharing social network that has been informally dubbed “Facebook for academics,” has grown rapidly by adopting many of the conventions of popular social-media sites. This paper argues that the widespread uptake of Academia.edu both reflects and amplifies the self-branding imperatives that many academics experience. Drawing on the Academia.edu’s corporate history, design decisions, and marketing communications, we analyze two overlapping facets of Academia.edu: (1) the site’s business model; (2) its social affordances. We contend that the company, like mainstream social networks, harnesses the content and immaterial labor of users under the guise of “sharing.” In addition, the site’s fixation on analytics reinforces a culture of incessant self-monitoring, one already encouraged by university policies to measure quantifiable impact. We conclude by identifying the stakes for academic life, when entrepreneurial and self-promotional demands brush up against the university's knowledge-making ideals

Policing “Fake” femininity:Authenticity, accountability, and influencer antifandom

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

Strategisches Handeln von Startups im Kontext der Mediatisierung

Junge Gründer und Start-ups müssen sich in einer schnell wandelnden und mediatisierten Wettbewerbsumwelt behaupten. Ihr Handeln wird geprägt von sozialen Netzwerkmedien wie Facebook, LinkedIn oder Instagram. Um auf diesen Medien-plattformen erfolgreich zu sein, müssen Markenführung und Markenkommunikation strategisch verankert sein. Der Aufsatz präsentiert daher eine qualitative Analyse empirischer Daten aus dem Kontext des Start-up-Incubator neudeli der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar und verdeutlicht, dass die Mediatisierung grundlegend in die strategische Entwicklung der Marke von jungen Gründern und Start-ups eingreift. Die Studie verdeutlicht das Verständnis strategischer Markenführung in mediatisierten Kontexten und zeigt, dass drei idealtypische Praktiken zur Markenführung und strategischen Entwicklung beitragen: 1) Bürokratische Medienarbeit, 2) Mediale Kreativarbeit, 3) Netzwerkarbeit durch Medien

“Regular People with a Passion for Fashion”: Authenticity, Community, and Other Social Media Myths

Fashion blogging represents a distinct culture and practice of social media production that involves the creation and public distribution of style-related images, information, and personal commentary. Mainstream media coverage of fashion blogs situates them within a distinct moment of digital cultural production defined by destabilized, decentralized, and democratized flows of media. However, these narratives are both limited and limiting in that they fail to provide a productive framework to understand the nuanced cultures and political economies of fashion blogging. This research draws upon a textual analysis of the Independent Fashion Bloggers online community to show how fashion blogging is constructed through an interrelated series of “identity myths”: 1). The authenticity myth; 2). The autonomy myth; and 3). The egality myth. These myths, I argue, effectively conceal those social media practices that tend to appropriate—rather than resist—capitalist infrastructures and traditional media industry logics. Far from being authentic, self-directed, and democratic, the emergent organization of fashion blogging is increasingly hierarchical, market-driven, quantifiable, and self-promotional

Social Media Influencers

Social Media Influencer

Brooke Erin Duffy's Quick Files

The Quick Files feature was discontinued and it’s files were migrated into this Project on March 11, 2022. The file URL’s will still resolve properly, and the Quick Files logs are available in the Project’s Recent Activity

In/Visibility in Social Media Work: The Hidden Labor Behind the Brands

Despite the staggering uptick in social media employment over the last decade, this nascent category of cultural labor remains comparatively under-theorized. In this article, we contend that social media work is configured by a visibility paradox: While workers are tasked with elevating the presence - or visibility - of their employers' brands across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more, their identities, and much of their labor, remain hidden behind branded social media accounts. To illuminate how this ostensible paradox impacts laborers' conditions and experiences of work, we present data from in-depth interviews with more than 40 social media professionals. Their accounts make clear that social media work is not just materially concealed, but rendered socially invisible through its lack of crediting, marginal status, and incessant demands for un/under-compensated emotional labor. This patterned devaluation of social media employment can, we show, be situated along two gender-coded axes that have long structured the value of labor in the media and cultural industries: a) technical-communication and b) creation-circulation. After detailing these in/visibility mechanisms, we conclude by addressing the implications of our findings for the politics and subjectivities of work in the digital media economy

Production Politics: Gender, Feminism, and Social Media Labor

Amidst radical transformations in the technologies, politics, and markets of cultural labor, critical studies of the so-called digital economy abound. This project brings considerations of gender, femininity, and feminism to the fore of debates about emergent worker subjectivities in an age of social media. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with digital/social media producers across genres and platforms, we explore some of the key tensions and contradictions that structure gendered work in online contexts: feminist politics and post-feminist articulations of selfhood; individualized self-branding and collective mobilization; and empowerment and exploitation

Idols of Promotion: The Triumph of Self-Branding in an Age of Precarity

By analyzing the “mass idols” (Lowenthal, 1944) of contemporary media culture, this study contributes to our understanding of popular communication, branding, and social media self-presentation. Leo Lowenthal, in his well-known analysis of popular magazine biographies, identified a marked shift in mass-mediated exemplars of success: from self-made industrialists and politicians (idols of production) to screen stars and athletes (idols of consumption). Adapting his approach, we draw upon a qualitative analysis of magazine biographies (People and Time, n = 127) and social media bios (Instagram and Twitter, n = 200), supplemented by an inventory of television talk show guests (n = 462). Today's idols, we show, blend Lowenthal's predecessor types: they hail from the sphere of consumption, but get described –and describe themselves –in production terms. We term these new figures “idols of promotion,” and contend that their stories of self-made success –the celebrations of promotional pluck –are parables for making it in a precarious employment economy