Social media broadcast disciplined lifestyle routines as status-signaling bragging

Evidence

The parallels to athletics were explicit. The “grind” language appeared in a 2012 motivational video created for the Texas Christian University baseball team. Its narrator intoned, “A legion of voices are shouting their unanimous permission for you to hit the snooze button and go back to dreamland—but you didn’t ask their opinion. The voice you’ve chosen to listen to is one of defiance…. Welcome to the grind.” Social media served as a virtual clubhouse for bragging about disciplined lifestyle routines. During a week in June 2014, Twitter users were posting 9.3 “rise and grind” tweets per minute during peak hours. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 315

Categorization

• SHARE: The 9.3 ‘rise and grind’ tweets per minute figure and the TCU baseball video origin are exactly the kind of data a media-studies friend would use in a lecture.
• XREF: connects to: Social media’s design rewards visibility and self-promotion with social status. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 39; Social media metrics reduce complex relationships to visible status rankings; Unfollowing serves as a status-driven act of social protest — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 242 (+7 more)