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3 oeuvres 56 utilisateurs 3 critiques

A propos de l'auteur

Alice E. Marwick is assistant professor, communication and media studies, Fordham University, and the director of the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center.

Œuvres de Alice E. Marwick

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Alice E. Marwick (alicetiara) is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University in the Department of Communication and Media Studies, where she teaches classes on social media and digital culture. Previously she was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, MA, where she worked closely with danah boyd studying social software. She received her PhD from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU in 2010. Her new book, Status Update: Celebrity and Attention in Social Media (Yale University Press 2013), examines how people use social media to boost social status, focusing on life-streaming, micro-celebrity, and self-branding. This blog focuses on academic work, technology, pop culture, communication, and media studies.

http://www.tiara.org/blog/

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I had gotten a copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway. I enjoyed reading through this book and learning not only methods but a little more about the people who are behind a lot of the good ideas we see everyday.
 
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Terrell_Solano | 2 autres critiques | Oct 7, 2015 |
Status Update, Alice Marwick’s dissertation turned first book is basically the perfect example of dissertation by a series of articles. Marwick approaches the San Francisco tech scene, decides that status is a worthy object of analysis, and then proceeds to write about it in a series of very pointed critiques and revelations. She interviews the width and breadth of the Tech sector, focusing on mid-level and entry level members of the social media scene. Marwick chooses (or perhaps fails; her goals of interviewing are never perfectly articulated) to focus on people who rise and fall via social media, and their feelings to those who rise and fall via engineering and technology. She does not directly interview those who work at Facebook, at Google, at Foursquare or Twitter. And that’s probably a good thing. Instead, she focuses on those people who make their living via social media, presenting very clear images to the world via Twitter, the blogosphere, and seminars & conferences.

Throughout these interviews, as well as close readings of blogs, self-help books, and a lot of observations at parties, Marwick reveals the complexities of the SF tech scene, from its emphasis on those who have made their living by doing, to its leftist egalitarian roots, to the corruption that has occurred since Web 2.0 came to the fore. Marwick’s text is a partial condemnation of the current state of the internet, going so far as to point out the biases in neoliberal values shared by much of the sector. Ultimately, she condemns the industry for not including enough women, or people of color, and shows how their meritocracy is built on wealth and status from an early age.

These conclusions are not the draw of the book, though. The biggest part of it, for me, was the city of San Francisco, it’s elevation to an actual character of the tech scene, from its history to its structure, the way that it can foster change by allowing all these people to bounce off each other and interact. Marwick paints a picture that explains why the tech sector developed, and that picture elevates San Francisco to essentialness. The basic conclusions of her book w/r/t social status and presentation (we manage our images on the internet, in order to succeed, and do so with a keen sense of what can and cannot be regarded as authentic) is somewhat obvious to someone who grew up with Facebook and dealt with the trials and tribulations of online life from an early age. But her images of the city, her descriptions of the scene, or of time use and what that means in the head of programmers? Those are essential.

Like the best nonfiction, I was left with a few more questions. In the case of something this ethnographic, I wanted a few more numbers to bounce my brain off of, but I wouldn’t trade those numbers for a single page of thick description.
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Signalé
Vermilious | 2 autres critiques | Feb 19, 2015 |
Marwick studied the culture of Silicon Valley workers over a period of years and finds certain cultural traits and fundamental beliefs about social status and how it works have embedded themselves in the social media platforms we use every day.Young tech workers who Marwick studied preferred entrepreneurship over working for someone else, believed that creativity and one’s “authentic” public identity are expressed through one’s work, and that such work can lead to a meaningful life (and can also bring great wealth - how very handy!) It’s a version of the American Dream, one that believes self-starters who work hard and have tech skills will succeed, and that anyone who doesn’t simply isn’t smart enough or hasn’t worked hard enough. She unpacks the conflation of work with personal value that is developed and groomed in public and how all of these assumptions play out in terms of gender and class. And does it ever - because it’s a very white, male world in Silicon Valley that rarely recognizes its own privilege.

The social media platforms these smart young professionals have developed are designed to encourage entrepreneurial thinking, branding of the self, and the public performance of an identity, an edited self that dissolves the boundaries between work and not-work. As she puts it in her concluding chapter:

"In fact, the values promoted by users of social media are those of the enterprise business culture. Although the top-down, hierarchical management style of the 1950s and 1960s was replaced in the dot-com era with one that emphasized the leveling of hierarchies in the workplace, creative self-expression through labor, and independent workers, this has not significantly improved the lot of the individual worker. If anything, the free-agent culture of enterprise labor justifies neoliberal policies, which dismantle socioeconomic protections like pension plans and employee-sponsored health insurance, and so both provide less protection to workers and normalize instability."

I thought this was a very good contribution to our understanding of how a certain insrumentalization of status-seeking has influenced our daily technological infrastructure in ways that reflect a very specific world view, informal, freedom-loving if not downright libertarian, and naively devoted to the myth of meritoracy in a plutocratic and increasingly unequal society.
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Signalé
bfister | 2 autres critiques | Apr 19, 2014 |

Statistiques

Œuvres
3
Membres
56
Popularité
#291,557
Évaluation
½ 3.6
Critiques
3
ISBN
6

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