Abstract
In the United States, young adults are surrounded by advice on how to be happy workers—do what you love—at the same time they are constantly urged to love what they can buy. Brooke Erin Duffy’s book evocatively looks at the women (and a few men) who try to combine both injunctions about passion—to be passionate about one’s work and to be passionate about one’s consumption—and examines the conundrums that emerge as a consequence. Not surprisingly in this digital age, all too often they answer the ubiquitous work-centric question, “What do you want to do?” by enthusiastically turning to social media advertising, for example, blogging, vlogging, and in general circulating information online about products. Duffy shows, in one of the most teachable books I have read this year, how much we can learn about the hazards of contemporary capitalism by analyzing the quandaries these digital workers face when they try to make a living letting others know about the commodities they love.
Many of the 53 people Duffy interviewed are not yet making a sustainable living through their perpetual blogging and posting, so much of what they do is motivated by the belief that somehow, someday all this effort will turn into financial success. They do not understand what they are doing in terms of leisure, they are hoping that their work will be the foundation for a career in the creative industries. At the same time, their work cannot be described purely as exploitation by the companies seeking to promote their products. After all, part of the trap for these women is the promise that they are participating in a meritocracy in which labor well done will eventually be rewarded. How precisely this will happen is elusive. But this promise is compelling enough for women to devote long hours toward constantly promoting themselves and products online. They are caught in what Andrew Ross describes as the “jackpot economy” (Nice Work If You Can Get It, 2009), a labor market in which some people, seemingly at random, will be chosen to be successful among a veritable army of workers all striving far too hard under precarious conditions.
What Duffy conveys with sharp and captivating anecdotes is precisely how much labor is involved in being a social media producer. The administrative labor is considerable: These women are constantly doing the behind-the-scenes work of coordinating with companies and monitoring intellectual property violations. Taking a photograph is never a simple task: It takes considerable thought and effort to choose how to pose, to arrange for the photograph to be taken, and to ensure that enough good photographs are reliably and frequently uploaded to reward curious audiences. These women are never in the moment, they are constantly orienting themselves toward how they might document the moment, and trying to manage how the textual and visual traces of these moments will be received. In addition, Duffy’s research interlocutors report feeling as though they should always be involved in the many tasks of self-promotion. This aspirational labor is a labor without limits—at parties, on holiday, at night, and on weekends one can always be doing something to entice or amuse one’s online audiences. As one interviewee explained, “being me is the job” (p. 203). And when being a specific someone is the job, one is trapped both in always having to work and in the philosophically challenging position of having to know what it means to be one’s self.
All this aspirational labor is part and parcel of personal branding, and here Duffy adds a valuable contribution to a long-standing scholarly discussion on the role of authenticity in late capitalism. Duffy points out that not only are these women attempting to create a brand whose effectiveness lies in an aura of authenticity but also this is the basis for their critique of others. She discusses how much these women are constantly monitoring and criticizing each other using this highly charged rubric of authenticity. This process is occurring in gendered and classed contexts, in which how one is read as authentic depends both on larger presumptions about how one should best embody one’s identity, and on how many resources one should have with which to do all the labor required. They have to construct a sense of realness at the same time they have to self-promote in a cultural context in which self-promotion is automatically seen as suspect, as inauthentic. “Those in privileged positions seemed to veil their existing reserves of social and economic capital by sifting through various constructions of ‘ordinariness’ or ‘relatability’ that aligned with elements of their social media personae. . . . The investments of time, energy, and money exacted of aspirants leave the playing field highly uneven” (p. 134). Authenticity becomes a double-edged sword especially in this context in which everyone competes with each other without any clear sense of the rules of the game, yet individuals are taken to be wholly responsible for any of their successes or failures.
In general, Duffy does a superb job illustrating with an accessible and engaging writing style how “social media producers must reconcile the tensions between labor and leisure, between the internal self and external publics, between authenticity and self-promotion, and between creativity and commerce” (p. 219). This book will be a welcome addition on the bookshelves of scholars interested in the intersection of new media and labor, in personal branding, and in how young middle-class women imagine working for passion under precarious labor conditions.