Brand monitoring is exhausting unpaid emotional labor enforcing a dual gaze of self-surveillance

Evidence

A final necessary component of self-branding was brand monitoring. Some people set up Google Alerts that e-mailed them whenever their name popped up online, or used Twitter and third-party software like TweetDeck to track how often they were @replied or re-tweeted. Others spent hours on Facebook, Flickr, or Google tracking search results for their name. Glenda Bautista, then head of product for video at AOL, describes this process: “Your personal brand is being affected by—your online identity is being developed by people around you. And again like it kind of touches on the point where I say, you know, ‘it’s not really within your control.’ You constantly have to police yourself. You constantly have to police other people, police your friends. Like nag them to take photos down. It’s exhausting.” This brand monitoring becomes a form of labor that can be both emotional and taxing. It requires continually imagining oneself through the eyes of others, creating a “dual gaze” of internalized surveillance. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 491

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘dual gaze’ and ‘brand monitoring’ as part of self-branding’s core vocabulary.
• XREF: Internalized surveillance echoes Foucault’s panopticon and ‘control society’ literature (Deleuze), plus ties to self-branding’s foundational claim that the brand is co-constructed by others. — connects to: Online self-monitoring is emotional labor that cannot fully succeed due to constant platform churn — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 637; Self-branding shifts economic risk onto workers while demanding constant unpaid labor — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 524; Managerial surveillance techniques in education deliberately spread anxiety and erode teacher autonomy — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2215 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Online self-monitoring is emotional labor that cannot fully succeed due to constant platform churn #expands (0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 637
• Self-branding shifts economic risk onto workers while demanding constant unpaid labor #complicates (0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 524