Abstract
Brooke Erin Duffy’s (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love explores the complex terrain of what Duffy terms “aspirational labor”—the free labor that today’s young women (especially) expend on producing social media content in the hopes of building a professional brand, feeding a personal passion, living the entrepreneurial dream, or breaking into the big time. (Think Hearst and Condé Nast.) Thoughtful and nuanced, both practical and theoretical, the book is of interest to scholars of digital media, gender studies, and contemporary labor as well as to anyone whose classes include young women producing content for sites such as College Fashionista, personal fashion blogs, and Instagram.
(Not) Getting Paid is an extension of an earlier work, Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age, in which Duffy, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, surveyed the changes facing the women’s magazine industry in an age of digital disruption. One of that book’s major themes—the challenge that a legion of young fashion bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagram influencers poses to the cultural authority of traditional women’s magazines—serves as the focus for this book as Duffy turns her attention squarely to the working and personal lives of young female content creators who yield to the “siren call” of doing what they love by embracing digital technologies and the entrepreneurial ethos.
Central to the book’s analysis are the more than 50 interviews Duffy conducted with fashion and lifestyle bloggers, vloggers, Instagrammers, and other creatives, many of whom are young women in their mid-20s. These interviews allow Duffy to surface the variety of reasons that young women seek out such work. For some, the goal is creative self-expression; others follow their passion in the hopes of weathering a tough job market or positioning themselves as stand-out candidates for positions at trendy magazines or websites. The interviews attest, too, to realities of the new digital fashion world. Doing what you love, Duffy’s interviewees observe, requires technical expertise, a sizable following that will attract the attention of major brands, and a considerable amount of time to create, post, comment, and generally maintain a personal brand in a competitive market.
Financial success is elusive, though, and the gap between the few who make it financially and the many who do not is great. As Duffy writes, “[M]edia trend pieces tend to spotlight those who ascend to the digital economies’ highest echelons: the six-figure-salary bloggers and vloggers who have achieved celebrity status. For the rest, the financial success is paltry.” Just how paltry? Duffy cites one estimate from the Independent Fashion Bloggers coalition, indicating that less than 15% of bloggers earn a salary from their sites, and another from Blogging.com showing that 81% of the bloggers surveyed did not make more than US$100 for their work.
Duffy’s analysis of the role that the advertising and marketing industries play in the new digital economy is similarly strong. Calling attention to the “deep-set power imbalances” facing today’s young creatives, Duffy details the efforts of national brands to enlist producers of creative content to promote their products, seemingly organically, through word-of-mouth advertising and brand evangelism. Influencer marketing and affiliate programs—in which digital content providers are paid to promote various products to their followers—rule the industry. Increasingly, too, firms specializing in recruitment have emerged to identify and promote social media stars for such lucrative contracts. Duffy speaks, too, of a “torrent” of marketing campaigns that offer the chance to be “discovered” in return for free content. A day-long Madewell campaign asking fashion bloggers, magazines, and others to tag a favorite denim piece from the brand resulted in nearly 2,000 tagged posts and 8.5 million impressions—a bonanza of free advertising.
For marketers and advertisers, such strategies are inexpensive ways to build their own high-profile brands. For the content creators Duffy interviewed, the practices often challenge the agency and autonomy that attracted them to content production in the first place. As one of Duffy’s interviewees notes, [The brand] chose me because I was authentic but then tried to—I don’t think they were trying to make me less authentic, but I think they really wanted my authenticity to kind of coincide with their desires perfectly. . . . [But] it doesn’t work like that. It’s one thing if you hire someone and you say, ‘Okay, you’re going to write our [company] blog.’ But then that person who writes this blog is separate from the blog. It’s just their job, okay, and they get to stay anonymous and behind the scenes, and they’ll turn out whatever bullshit you want written.
The profit at stake in that push-and-pull of creativity and commerce can be high: Brands spend an estimated US$1 billion a year on incentives on Instagram alone.
Duffy contextualizes her analysis of aspirational labor against the historical background of 19th-century women’s magazines and the rise of consumer culture. French theorist Pierre Bourdieu and Progressive Era economist Thorstein Veblen—the first on cultural capital, the second on conspicuous consumption—figure in their argument, as does the more recent work of scholars such as sociologist Arlie Hochschild that explores the intersections of work and gender. That mixture of theory, history, and fieldwork allows Duffy to complicate any techno-optimism proclaiming that social media will set workers free. It also paints a telling picture of the work lives and hopes of young women seeking to play a role in today’s cultural industries despite the odds stacked against them.