So I’m working on a project about celebrity use of Twitter. Here are a few recent tools I’ve found to be endlessly entertaining when looking at celebs, status, and social norms on Twitter:
Who Celebs Tweet, with the tagline: Have they tweeted you? I find this the most interesting because they have a very clear demarcation between who is a celeb and who isn’t. Like, according to them, Heidi Montag is not a celeb. I don’t necessarily think she should be a celeb, but to deny that she’s famous seems odd. Maybe the proprietors never read the tabloids.
TweetingTooHard.com - this is sort of like Texts From Last Night minus all the drunk skulduggery and adding a lot of self-aggrandizing obnoxiousness. Tops now is “fan belt light came on in the 911 so now I’m driving the Cayenne Turbo S - the backup, backup car. Trying not to think about the Tesla…” That’s pretty bad.
Truth Tweet attempts to verify celebrity Twitter accounts, using all sorts of sources to do so. Extremely useful for my purposes (e.g. nerdily making lists of what signals celebrity “authenticity” on Twitter).
If she’s sincere about avoiding fame, Culver will have to reform more than her work life. Granted, San Francisco’s pool of straight men is on the small side. But besides Burka and Fitzpatrick, Culver also dated Cal Henderson, an engineering director at Flickr; MG Siegler, a writer at tech blog VentureBeat; and Nick Douglas, a former editor at Valleywag and Gawker. If she doesn’t want to be famous, Culver might want to take a look at her relentless technosexuality, which more than hints at the acquisition of influence rather than intimacy as its goal.
The misogyny of this article is obvious; I don’t think I need to point out that the men of Silicon Valley/Web 2.0 serial date as much as the women. Since there are fewer women in power in tech than men, this is not usually seen as a way to get ahead. I suppose since it’s no longer considered OK to smear women for having sex lives, Valleywag had to come up with something else to salaciously comment on, namely, this claim that she slept her way to the top.
I think it’s interesting that I hear, over and over again (from women in tech), that there is no sexism in tech, that women in tech have no feminist agenda, and that they want to be judged on their accomplishments. Unfortunately, women are judged on their looks, their sexuality, and their male partners in a way that men are just not, in Silicon Valley as they are in “regular life.” For example, the vitriol directed at, say, Julia Allison is completely disproportional to her actual impact on the technology scene. There are plenty of fame-seeking men in SV, but they don’t get nasty comments on their body and their looks every time they post a narcissistic Twitter.
Full disclosure is that I know everyone involved in this article through my dissertation research (and I think the accusations against Leah are ridiculous).
You can see a sneak preview of part of the talk here:
I may or may not upload the deck - it’s enormous, most of the pictures aren’t credited (which isn’t very fair to the creators) and I think the talk stands fine alone, as the deck mostly just added humor for the audience. Enjoy!
About tiara.org
Alice E. Marwick (alicetiara) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. This summer I'm interning with danah boyd at Microsoft Research. I study social technology. This blog focuses on that, pop culture, communication, and media studies. Click on "About Me" for more blathering.
What is this “Fake” in the Fake Sartorialist? « threadbared But it isn’t just Web 2.0 technologies that have opened up a space in the fashion world for those outside to enter and occupy it. For the past 8 or 9 years, cheap chic fashion and democratic design have been valorized as enabling non-elite consumers to access and own the look of elite classes. The democratization of fashion ushered in a new cultural politic that values and legitimizes (some) knockoffs. It is against this political economic and cultural backdrop that the real and virtual consumption and circulation of fashion images, objects, and discourses are given new meaning.
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