Brand yourself, design your future: Portfolio-building in the social media age

Abstract

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.”

Algorithmic precarity in cultural work

“…Fortunately, recent scholarship in the fields of media and communication offers rich insight into platform-specific communities of cultural workers as they navigate the algorithms of various platforms. Often drawing upon in-depth interviews or analyses of community discourses, these studies reveal how socially mediated cultural workers try to make sense of the inscrutable-by-design algorithms that govern YouTube (Bishop, 2020; Caplan & Gillespie, 2020; Cunningham & Craig, 2019; Mehta, 2019), Pinterest (Klawitter & Hargittai, 2018; Scolere, 2019), and Instagram (Cotter, 2019; Duffy & Sawey, in press; O’Meara, 2019; Petre et al, 2019), among others. A constant theme across this research is—rather aphoristically—algorithmic change .…”

The transmedia tourist: A theory of how digitalization reinforces the de-differentiation of tourism and social life

“…Research has also found that transmedia contributes to the blurring of boundaries between different institutions and different geo-social regions; a phenomenon called ‘context collapse’ when it happens online (Marwick and boyd, 2011), but which holds a more general purchase as for example mediated networking and various self-branding activities come to saturate all parts of everyday life (e.g. Fast and Jansson, 2019; Gregg, 2011; Scolere, 2019).…”

Existential advertising in late modernity: Meaningful work in higher education advertisements

“…A key message in the advertisements that focused on employment outcomes and career success, was the ability of HEIs to equip students to succeed in a rapidly changing world; as one advertisement put it, 'empowering' graduates to be responsive to change. This approach draws on widespread societal concern regarding the rise of portfolio careers and precarious labour relations as norms in many industries (Scolere, 2019). For example, an advertisement for a Go8 institution advised students to 'future proof yourself' by completing a degree at their institution.…”

“…The transformation of the global political economy, stemming from the ‘neoliberal’ shifts in the 1970s and 1980s, has seen work become more precarious with the utilisation of short-term and contingent labour and project-based employment (Arnold and Bongiovi, 2013; Scolere, 2019). Even for those in ongoing, full-time employment, career trajectories are often fragmented and unpredictable (Sennett, 2006).…”