Choice Reviews Online· 2014
Status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age
- 1,171citations
- 2014year
Short summary
Social media technologies, despite promises of participatory culture, primarily foster a preoccupation with status and attention, turning users into self-promoters and reinforcing existing social inequalities.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Social media technologies primarily promote status and attention-seeking, not participatory culture.
- Users are increasingly turned into self-promoters and marketers of their own lives.
- Techniques like self-branding and micro-celebrity are central to social media engagement.
- Web 2.0 has reinforced, rather than dismantled, existing social inequalities related to race, class, and gender.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Social media technologies such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook promised a new participatory online culture. Yet, technology insider Alice Marwick contends in this insightful book, only encouraged a preoccupation with status and attention. Her original research-which includes conversations with entrepreneurs, Internet celebrities, and Silicon Valley journalists-explores the culture and ideology of San Francisco's tech community in the period between the dot com boom and the App store, when the city was the world's center of social media development. Marwick argues that early revolutionary goals have failed to materialize: while many continue to view social media as democratic, these technologies instead turn users into marketers and self-promoters, and leave technology companies poised to violate privacy and to prioritize profits over participation. Marwick analyzes status-building techniques-such as self-branding, micro-celebrity, and life-streaming-to show that Web 2.0 did not provide a cultural revolution, but only furthered inequality and reinforced traditional social stratification, demarcated by race, class, and gender.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Choice Reviews Online, 2014 · DOI ↗
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Field: Gender Studies
Gender StudiesSocial Sciences