Abstract
If you are among the one billion active Facebook users today, check out your latest status update before you proceed with this review. Was it a food-related post? Was it a narrative (or a rant) about how your day went? Was it a selfie?
Alice E. Marwick, an assistant professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, would predict that your last status to quite likely be a self-promotion entry. As a more accessible version of her PhD dissertation, Status Update was conceived when Marwick moved to San Francisco after the first year of her PhD program to study how techies in Silicon Valley use social media to boost their status, so to speak. This book is a work of ethnography that reveals gossips, startup culture, and narcissistic behaviors that Marwick observed in technology enthusiasts through the “tech scene” functions she attended.
From a cultural standpoint, Marwick argues that social media, or Web 2.0, function less as a democratization instrument that revolutionizes human liberation, but rather an insidious platform that is built on a strict social hierarchy. Borrowing from Michel Foucault, she contends that social media constitute “technologies of subjectivity” that turn users into marketers and “micro-celebrities” who engage themselves tirelessly in self-promotion and status-building activities. This phenomenon encourages users to govern themselves into becoming superficial “good corporate citizens,” which Marwick suggests is so valued by technology entrepreneurs. Basically, not only has Web 2.0 failed to provide a “cultural revolution,” it further reinforces power and inequality—a reality no different from any American corporate culture.
In exploring the cultural history of Web 2.0, Marwick examines social media as a discourse and ideology that are firmly embedded in a radical reworking of Silicon Valley beliefs and incorporation of West Coast countercultural rhetoric. She describes Web 2.0 as “a set of applications and general philosophy of information and technology”; it is more so a belief system than a technical development. She further describes what constitutes “high status” and how ethos in Web 2.0 is built. The midsection of this book dissects what Marwick has identified as status-building strategies: micro-celebrity, self-branding, and lifestreaming.
Celebrity is, as Marwick emphasizes, a practice rather than a condition. Micro-celebrity is a concept, a way of thinking, in which the subject views him or herself as a persona presented to an audience or a “fan base,” in which popularity is “maintained through ongoing fan management.” Self-branding is a tactic in which one thinks of oneself as a brand—a “safe-for-work self”—and strategically constructs an “edited” identity that represents the user in an ideal image. In the lifestreaming chapter, Marwick explores the digital, communal culture: those social media fanatics who use programs to track and publicize the minutiae of everyday life—from music to fitness to book reviews to sexual encounter reports.
Throughout her book, Marwick exhibits a discontentment toward a deep male bias that is entrenched in Web 2.0 technology and entrepreneurship. In the second to last chapter of her book, Marwick unpacks gender and the myths of entrepreneurship and meritocracy in Web 2.0, and condemns the “wild-and-crazy lives” of tech entrepreneurs. She highlights the fact that most of the stars of popular social media are men, and that these “young, brash white men” and their obsession with frat-like hanging out are underlining structural sexism and systematic oppression that remove women from “the upper echelons of technology.” She contests that women and men have equal entrepreneurial strength and thus should be given equal attributions for their contributions to technology.
For social media enthusiasts like me, this book does a great service in widening our horizon by providing a critical-cultural lens to understanding and critiquing the self-promotion phenomenon in Web 2.0. The everyday user may not be sensitive to the stakes involved in the commercialization of the self in the social media age. Status Update has complicated and problematized the narcissistic acts of status building, and revealed the ways in which Silicon Valley geeks and technologists use their own inventions to beg for attention.
Furthermore, Marwick’s healthy dose of skepticism about utopian rhetoric in social media discourse is the key to her interrogation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and her trenchant critique of Web 2.0 technology. And because celebrated blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch have tended to focus in overoptimistic ways on the positive contributions that new technology can make to our society, Marwick’s thoughtful arguments about social media as exclusionary and elitist media sketch out an alternative consideration for users, one that encourages them to think more critically about their social media use.
Yet, as Marwick admits, time has moved on since she started this project in 2007; her research is already dated. The individuals Marwick befriended between 2006 and 2010 and identified as “insiders” in this book may have moved on to different careers or positions and so they may no longer be cognoscenti in the discussions of social technology. To put time in context, Steve Jobs had just launched the first-generation iPhone as Marwick began her research, and by the time this book is published, the latest iPhone models—iPhone 5S and 5C—are already the seventh-generation models in the iPhone series, not to mention the social sharing features that are integrated in the newer devices.
Nonetheless, as we would nod in agreement that the academia runs at a slower pace than technological culture, Marwick’s disquisition about social media and elitist culture in Silicon Valley are deeply engrained in American popular culture. For its sophistication, this book is appropriate to be used as a reader for junior- to senior-level mass media and society, critical media theory, and digital media courses. It may also be a resource for those who are interested in understanding online user behaviors.
In just under 140 characters, Status Update is a recommended book for it facilitates conversations around tech entrepreneurs, social media, and self-promotion. #mustread