Welcome to Me-Mart

Abstract

This article uses a discursive analysis of personal blogging handbooks and personal blogs to reflect on the politics of user-generated content (UGC) as it is created, circulated, valuated, quantified, and monetized by different social media platforms. In doing so, this article traces the contours of an increasingly commercialized blogosphere and the tensions and perceived trade-offs that ensue for professional and quotidian bloggers. By reconstructing the ecology of platforms that form the sociotechnical machinery of the blogosphere, the rifts between the empowerment rhetoric of Web 2.0 and the statistical and experiential realities faced by quotidian bloggers become palpable. Suspended between a vibrant vision of blogging as a surefire ticket to fame and fortune and a sobering structural reality of obscurity and tedium, bloggers are recalibrating their collective delusions of grandeur by constructing alternative economies of exchange. Instead of valuating their self-professed labor monetarily or quantitatively, bloggers are reverting to more attainable small-scale social exchanges that are qualitative in form. More than hits, links, and votes, bloggers appear to value a virtual pat on the back, a reassuring remark, a sincere conversation. However, as the machinery of the blogosphere chugs on, the sociotechnical biases of its architectures of participation will be increasingly unable to cater to these bloggers’ needs. This article demonstrates how the politics of UGC can illuminate the infectious rhetoric of Web 2.0, situate the enterprise of blogging within the socioeconomic logic of prosumption, and pave the way toward a better understanding of our communal media futures.

Expertise and Collaboration: Cultural Workers’ Performance on Social Media

“…This is an example of reciprocity, which is a common practice on social media as a form of mutually beneficial online social relation (Chia, 2012) driven by the idea that people will eventually be rewarded for their own engagement. In Abi's case, her reward for retweeting others' work is an enhancement of her own profile by telling her followers a little more about herself, through the work of others.…”

The Coming of Age of the Prosumer

“…In the end, McDonald's, IKEA, Amazon.com, eBay, Google, and Facebook (Wikipedia is an example of an exception) are all capitalist businesses oriented, as is true of all such businesses, to maximizing profits. In this context, Chia (2012) is quite helpful in her discussion in this issue of the prosumer on the Internet, who is seen as existing between mediated lifeworlds and corporate pocketbooks. This is the scene of contestation and complicity, where subjects' consumptive energies on discrete social media platforms are milled through a digital ecosystem to be repurposed through a variety of monetization schemes, for which contextual advertising is only a small part.…”

Effects of Disclosing Sponsored Content in Blogs

“…Native advertising, which is advertising in the form and function of nonadvertising content, has mushroomed in the past years (Faber, Lee, & Nan, 2004; Rosin, 2015; Wojdynski, 2016). In native advertising, there is no distinction between commercial content and real or authentic opinions, feelings, and experiences of the journalist or sender (Chia, 2012; Pollit, 2015). Critics argue that native advertising is unethical and misleading, because it is unclear for the audience that this is a form of advertising that is masked as editorial content.…”