Status Update

By Alice E. Marwick. 2017

415 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How does the ideology of the digital economy shape the attitudes and experiences of people in the tech world? Based on her ob servation that software companies value profits over political change, former Microsoft researcher and dot-com employee Alice Marwick investigates this question in Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age , an ethnography of the mid-2000s San Francisco tech scene. Researched at a time when pundits like Time ’s Lev Grossman (2006) declared “You” as the magazine’s “Person of the Year” and prophesized that platforms such as YouTube, Wikipedia, and MySpace were going to “change the world” (see also Benkler, 2006; Shirky, 2008; Tapscott & Williams, 2006), Marwick’s book attempts to clean up the “idealistic cyber drool of the digerati” (Terranova, 2000, p. 44) by providing a more sober account of the critical implications of this so-called social media (Aronczyk, 2014). Combining informant interviews with Twitter’s “micro-celebrities” and participant observations from a seemingly endless number of industry meet-ups, drink ups, and star-studded conferences, Marwick constructs social media as a neoliberal technology of subjectivity that produces social status as the ultimate commodity. Focusing specifi cally on the San Francisco based Twitter as a vital piece of industry infrastructure that facilitates this practice, Marwick argues that the logic of marketing and advertising embedded in social software has infiltrated the ways in which we relate to ourselves and to others, teaching us how to be good corporate citizens along the way. In this nar rative, Marwick’s “characters” are ideal neoliberal subjects. They are young and child less, highly entrepreneurial, and justify consumption only when done in the name of self-improvement or work. They tout the techno-utopian party line of the neighbour ing Silicon Valley, which positions social media as a great equalizer destined to “change the world” (“into one where they’re rich,” quips one of her insiders). While Marwick’s argument that the commercial imperatives of social media are eclipsing its democratic potential is hardly news for critics of the information society and the Internet (Dean, 2009; Garnham, 2004; McChesney, 2013; Schiller, 1999; Webster, 2006), her micro-perspective from the lifeworlds of workers skillfully con structs the San Francisco tech scene as a puzzling set of contradictions. The idealistic techno-libertarianism of Web 2.0, for example, emerges from a peculiar West Coast combination of radical activism and business culture that endorses creativity and re bellion so long as they are profitable. Industry perspectives regarding digital social climbing are similarly perplexing. While many of Marwick’s characters feign a blase attitude or express disdain toward those who take Twitter seriously or use it to self-promote, she keenly observes that most are hyper-vigilant about their own Twitter metrics—such as number of followers, retweets, and mentions—in order to evaluate and display their own level of prestige, in

Subfields: Communication, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f76dce07273e474d7b8e8da5adb632e4af5ab0e5

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Citations in the corpus

Why are consumers following social media influencers on Instagram? Exploration of consumers’ motives for following influencers and the role of materialism (2021, background): “This corroborates previous literature that suggests SMIs consciously manage an authentic persona to be perceived as close friends whom consumers can relate to and identify with (Audrezet, De Kerviler, and Moulard 2020; Marwick 2013).”
Capitalizing on the look: insights into the glance, attention economy, and Instagram (2018, methodology): “For instance, click-through rates have often been used as a valuation metric (Marwick, 2013).”
“Teachers Act Like We’re Robots”: TikTok as a Window Into Youth Experiences of Online Learning During COVID-19 (2021, background): “First of all, the content shared by young people on social media needs to be understood through the lens of lifestreaming (Marwick, 2013; Wargo, 2017), as carefully curated “connective identity texts” (Wargo, 2017).”
I Like What She’s #Endorsing: The Impact of Female Social Media Influencers’ Perceived Sincerity, Consumer Envy, and Product Type (2020, methodology): “The sincerity trait is of particular interest for the current research as it is a trait advocated by consumers and marketers as being important in SMIs (Marwick and boyd 2011; Marwick 2013).”