With the widespread uptake of social media, discourses and practices of self-branding have become a pervasive feature of social and economic life. However, the way in which the digital self-brand gets reproduced across a sprawling social media landscape remains comparatively under-theorized. Our paper therefore draws upon in-depth interviews with 52 online content creators-including designers, artists, writers, and marketing consultants-to examine how cultural workers present themselves across the panoply of social networking sites. As we show, workers' self-presentation activities were structured through the production of a platform-specific self-brand, which was based upon the imaginations of (1) platform affordances, (2) audiences, and (3) the producer's own self-concept. Our findings highlight producers' compulsion to engage in continuous, cross-platform labor-despite widespread uncertainty about its economic outcomes. We conclude by addressing the stakes of a social media moment when workers of all stripes are prodded to incessantly curate, monitor, and ultimately invest in their online personae.
While the portfolio-building narrative has long been established as central to work in the creative industries, the evolving form of the creative portfolio as a key component of the self-brand and the implications on creative work in the age of social media have been comparatively underexplored. This empirical project draws on a year-long qualitative study composed of in-depth interviews of 56 graphic design professionals about their use of social media platforms that cater to creative professionals. This study identifies the social media logics of the design portfolio as multi-platformed, connected, and temporally dynamic, suggesting a new pace, constancy, and subjectivity of what it means for cultural producers to build, maintain, and distribute their portfolio of projects to sustain their creative careers. As the portfolio becomes digitally distributed across a social media ecology, the labor of portfolio production for creative aspirants becomes never-ending and requires an intensified performative of “always designing.”
The U.S. Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (Tobacco Control Act) of 2009 paved the way for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to propose nine different graphic warning labels (GWLs) intended for prominent placement on the front and back of cigarette packs and on cigarette advertisements. Those GWLs were adjudicated as unconstitutional on the ground that they unnecessarily infringed tobacco companies' free speech without sufficiently advancing the government's public health interests. This study examines whether less extensive alternatives to the original full-color GWLs, including black-and-white GWLs and text-only options, have similar or divergent effects on visual attention, negative affect, and health risk beliefs. We used a mobile media research lab to conduct a randomized experiment with two populations residing in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities: biochemically confirmed adult smokers (N = 313) and middle school youth (N = 340). Results indicate that full-color GWLs capture attention for longer than black-and-white GWLs among both youth and adult smokers. Among adults, packages with GWLs (in either color or black-and-white) engendered more negative affect than those with text-only labels, while text-only produced greater negative affect than the packages with brand imagery only. Among youth, GWLs and text-only labels produced comparable levels of negative affect, albeit more so than brand imagery. We thus offer mixed findings related to the claim that a less extensive alternative could satisfy the government's compelling public health interest to reduce cigarette smoking rates.
This research shows that 30% GWLs on cigarette packages increase negative affect relative to packages without front-of-package GWLs. Larger GWLs on cigarette packages (50% vs. 30%) increase visual attention to the warning and its pictorial content among low-SES smokers and at-risk youth but do not further increase negative affect. A 50% GWL increased adults' quit intention compared to no GWL at all, but we were underpowered to detect modest differences in quit intentions between a 50% and 30% GWL. Future work should thus continue to explore the boundary conditions under which relatively larger GWLs influence cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes.
Pinterest describes itself as a "visual discovery tool that you can use to find ideas for all your projects and interests" (Pinterest, 2015). With over 72.8 million users (Mangalindan, 2015), Pinterest is a fast-growing online image-sharing platform that allows users to collect and display ideas by "pinning" images to thematic boards around projects, hobbies, and inspiration. Users can pin their own photos or images from websites outside of Pinterest or they can repin images from other users' boards within Pinterest. Unlike other image-sharing or social network sites like Flickr or Facebook, Pinterest users do not tend to upload and share their own images, but circulate images found within Pinterest or elsewhere on the web (Hall & Zarro, 2012; Moore, 2014; Zarro & Hall, 2012). Indeed, the most common activity on Pinterest is repinning images from other Pinterest users' boards rather than pinning personal images or images from websites outside of Pinterest (Moore, 2014). The sharing of videos or photos found online with others is a popular activity not just on Pinterest. Pew Research Center's Internet Project found that 47% of adult Internet users have shared videos or photos that they found online with others (Duggan & Smith, 2014). The sharing of online content through various social media platforms has been referred to as curation (Duggan & Smith, 2014). Because Pinterest is a site that is primarily used for online content sharing, as opposed to content creation, it is a unique platform through which to explore curatorial practices. Pinterest is increasingly used by organizations, brands, and professionals to circulate images of their products and services to potential consumers (Silberman, 2013). While research has begun to explore general Pinterest use (e.g. Gilbert, Bakhshi, Chang, and Terveen, 2013; Linder, Snodgrass & Kerne, 2014), there is little understanding of how professionals think about and use Pinterest. Nevertheless, there is a growing literature surrounding how creative professionals more broadly adopt and adapt to social media platforms (e.g.
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