Brooke Erin Duffy — (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work

50 published claims from this book.

• 76 percent of women under thirty have experienced online abuse or harassment
• A content creator’s crafted persona can outgrow her private self
• Academia parallels creative industries in precarity and contingent labor
• Academic blogging shifted from collective politics to individual self-promotion
• Academic metrics mirror social media influence metrics
• Academic schedule flexibility masks ever-accessible unbounded work hours
• Aspirational consumption projects a future self rather than signaling present status
• Bloggers cultivate padded follower ratios through ritual unfollowing
• Brands hired women as sales agents to exploit perceived female trustworthiness
• Calculated authenticity as promotion emerged in early twentieth-century America
• Click farms exploit laborers paid a dollar per thousand likes
• Contemporary creative identity no longer opposes commerce to art.
• Content creators’ earnings are piecemeal and far below popular perceptions
• Currency of one’s self-brand can trap producers in unhappy life situations
• Deferred ‘exposure’ and visibility pay most aspirational content creators poorly
• Domestic labor sustains capitalism by reproducing labor power for free
• Early advertisers explicitly targeted women as market subjects
• Emotional labor requires inducing or suppressing feeling for others’ sake
• Emotional performance at work becomes commodified labor when feelings are bought and sold.
• Female bloggers are uniquely chastised for seeking compensation
• Flexible gig work shifts organizational risks onto individual workers
• Ghostly women’s domestic labor frames analysis of digital economy work
• GOMI constructed bloggers as public figures to justify reader scrutiny
• Independent-work boosters frame gig careers as voluntary self-fulfillment
• Influencer marketing amplifies loud privileged voices disproportionately
• Interview subjects can pitch themselves when interviews promise publicity
• Lack of women in tech reflects bias, not a pipeline shortfall
• Meritocratic framing blames workers for failing to profit from hope labor.
• Moral panics about women online repeat Victorian fears of women in stores
• Only conventionally attractive young white or Asian women become top bloggers
• Ordinary people’s media visibility is not inherently democratic.
• Perceived fakeness of curated style blogs drove some bloggers to quit
• Postwar ads co-opted counterculture authenticity to sell conformity
• Researcher roles as educator bleed into the interview process
• Self-promotion violates gendered prescriptions for women’s behavior
• Slash-career workers pursue passion projects chiefly for income in uncertain labor markets
• Social media performers systematically conceal the labor behind curated feminine glamour
• Social media’s democratizing tools coincided with an emphasis on authentic self-expression
• Successful bloggers can become unwitting advertisers posing as authentic people
• The imprecision of ‘authenticity’ conceals class hierarchies in aspirational labor
• The web’s mass reach makes ordinary consumers into potential broadcasters.
• Top marketing influencers skew overwhelmingly male and white
• Top US magazine publishers’ executive teams are overwhelmingly male.
• Veblen held that vicarious consumption shifts from wives to the master as class rises
• Wealthy bloggers willing to work for free justify devaluation of that labor
• Whether unpaid online activity is expression or exploitation structures the digital labor debate
• Women’s leading occupations remained nearly unchanged from 1970 to 2000
• Women’s lower self-citation yields competence-versus-likability penalties in academia
• Worker flexibility often functions as a euphemism for precarity
• Young girls blog and build Web pages more than boys do.