Constructing the Platform-Specific Self-Brand: The Labor of Social Media Promotion

Abstract

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.

“You Need At Least One Picture Daily, if Not, You’re Dead”: Content Creators and Platform Evolution in the Social Media Ecology

“…Content creators bemoaned what they experienced as a circuit of commerce negatively affected by algorithms, resulting in a kind of homogenization in the operation of platforms. While reflecting the findings of Scolere et al (2018) on content creators in the United States, our interviewees lament the loss of spontaneous interactions. As Leonardo describes, "that ability can't be bought" from platforms algorithmic configuration.…”

“You never really know who’s looking”: Imagined surveillance across social media platforms

“…Yet personal branding discourses have seen an astonishing uptick in the social media age as workers of all stripes are prodded to stage an ever-employable front. Researchers and cultural theorists attribute the current personal branding mania to a constellation of social and economic forces, including the cult of personality structured into Silicon Valley social networks (Marwick, 2013); the steady incursion of market logics into various realms of social life (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Hearn, 2010); constructions of online reputation management circulated by the commercial privacy industry (Draper, 2019); and the precarity of the work economy that incites individuals to internalize the demands of self-enterprise (Duffy, 2017; Gandini, 2016; Neff, 2012; Scolere et al, 2018; Vallas and Christin, 2018).…”

“…While discourses of employability highlight the profound stakes of one’s social media activity, the realities of maintaining an ideal self-brand can be quite confounding, particularly given the resonant social media ideal of “consistency” (Gershon, 2017; Marwick, 2013; Scolere et al, 2018). Pinpointing the larger contradiction underpinning personal branding directives and contemporary understandings of identity performance, Gershon (2017) probes, “How can someone always be willing and able to transform and yet remain a cohesive self?” (p. 35).…”

PewDiePie, racism and Youtube’s neoliberalist interpretation of freedom of speech

“…Self-commodification and self-branding are not only related to or encouraged by YouTube, but they have become increasingly dominant in all social media platforms as Internet has turned more explicitly into a marketplace labelled by online advertising and e-commerce (Senft, 2013: 348). Currently, self-branding has become platform-specific as producers try to balance their brand according to their imaginations of platform affordances, audiences and the producer's own self-concept, and they continuously have to rework their digital 'self' (Scolere et al, 2018).…”