[Air-L] Book announcement: Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age

[Alice E. Marwick]

HI all,

I apologize in advance for the completely self-serving and
self-promoting announcement.

My first book, "Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in
the Social Media Age" has just been published by Yale Press.

The book is an ethnography of the San Francisco tech scene, the people
who create social media technologies. It argues that these people use
social media to boost their online status, and includes in-depth
critiques of such status-seeking strategies as self-branding and
life-streaming. I build on AOIR all-star Terri Senft's theory of
"micro-celebrity" to show how it plays out in the tech world in
particular.

There's also a very long chapter called "The Cultural History of Web
2.0" which looks at the rhetoric around social media as participatory,
democratic, etc. and links this to various counter-cultural movements
like punk rock, zines, and cyber-utopianism, as well as
entrepreneurial capitalism.

I also drill down into gender and how the industry's discourses of
meritocracy and authenticity contribute to excluding women from the
upper echelons of tech. Ultimately, I conceptualize social media as a
technology of subjectivity which encourages people to govern
themselves according to neoliberal ideals of the entrepreneurial
individual.

As most of you know, AOIR is very near and dear to my heart and many
portions of this book have been presented at AOIR. Many of the people
on this list were instrumental to how I conceptualize social media use
and technology use in general.

If you read the book, please let me know what you think-- or better
yet write an Amazon or GoodReads review! (Spoken like a true
self-promoter. Call it participant observation.)

You can order it directly from Yale
(http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300176728), from
Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Status-Update-Celebrity-Publicity-Branding/dp/0300176724),
or your favorite bookseller. Reasonably priced! Makes a great gift!

Best,
Alice


-- 
Alice E. Marwick, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication and Media Studies
Fordham University
(718) 817-4861
amarwick at fordham.edu
http://www.tiara.org
http://www.socialmediacollective.org