WORKS IN PROGRESS

Marwick, A. (under contract) Status Update: How Social Media Changes Celebrity, Popularity, and Publicity (subtitle changes like every day). Yale Press.

Marwick, A. and danah boyd. (in review). "It's Just Drama": Teen Perspectives on Conflict and Bullying in a Networked Era. (Unrevised conference paper version available on SSRN)

Contemporary teenage conflict often plays out in social media like Facebook and Twitter. While adults often label these practices "bullying", teens are more likely to describe them as "drama." Drama is a performative set of actions incorporating elements of bullying, gossip, and relational aggression but operating distinctly. Using ethnographic data, this paper examines how American teens conceptualize drama, motivations for engaging in drama, and its relationship to networked technologies. The emic use of "drama" allows teens to distance themselves from practices conceptualized by adults as bullying, retain agency, and save face rather than accepting a victim narrative. Understanding how "drama" operates is necessary to recognize teens' defenses against the realities of aggression, gossip, and bullying in everyday life.

Marwick, A. and Ellison, N. (in review). "There Isn't Wifi in Heaven!" Negotiating Visibility on Facebook Memorial Pages

Social media have reshaped the process of both public and private mourning, as mourners weigh the benefits of publicness with the problems associated with granting voice and visibility to diverse, often unknown, audience members. Today, social network sites are a key site for public displays of connection and grieving. The replicability, scalability, persistence, and searchability features of networked publics influence both how mourners grieve and their control over depictions of the deceased. In this paper, we analyze a corpus of posts and comments on Facebook memorial pages (N=37). We examine how the affordances of social media, and the technical mechanisms of Facebook in particular, affect public displays of grief and portrayals of the deceased. While many public expressions of grief follow similar patterns as traditional rituals around death (funerals, memorials), the visibility of social media both encourages performative displays of mourning and allows spaces for acquaintances to pay respects. Simultaneously, the openness of such spaces allows for context collapse and larger audiences that may include unwelcome participants such as "trolls." We consider the ways in which the publicness of the SNS memorial page affects displays of grieving, specifically around efforts to engage in impression management of the deceased.

Conference Papers Being Reworked for Publication As We Speak

Marwick, A., Gray, M. and M. Ananny. (2011). "Dolphins are Just Gay Sharks": Transmediating Queer Audiences and Characters on Glee. Presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada.

The FOX television series Glee has been lauded for its progressive portrayals of gay characters and criticized for trafficking in stereotypes. We position Glee within a transmedia framework, using textual analysis of program storylines, ethnographic fieldwork, and messages about Glee circulated on the microblogging site Twitter, to examine fan responses to and uses of Glee. We find that young adults experience and deploy Glee in two ways. First, they use Glee as a text to interpret their own life experiences, and imagine how they might articulate queer desires and acceptance of them. Second, as a mobile, malleable symbolic object, Glee acts a strategic device used to signal identifications with and levels of awareness and acceptance of LGBT-identifying people. While some of the engagement with Glee on social media echoed textual themes, we also find devoted fan engagement which diverges from that of our ethnographic observations

boyd, danah & Marwick, A. (2011) Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens' Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies. Presented at the Privacy Law Scholar's Conference, Berkeley, CA. [PDF]

This paper examines how teens understand privacy and what strategies they take in their efforts to achieve social privacy. We describe both teens' practices and the structural conditions in which they are embedded, highlighting the ways in which privacy, as it plays out in everyday life, is related more to agency and the ability to control a social situation than particular properties of information. Finally, we discuss the implications of teens' practices, revealing the importance of social norms as a regulatory force.

Marwick, A. (2011) Conspicuous and Authentic: Fashion Blogs, Style, and Consumption. Presented at the International Communication Association annual conference, Boston, MA. [PDF]

Fashion blogging is an international subculture comprised primarily of young women who post pictures of themselves, swap fashion tips, sell vintage clothes, and review couture collections. As such, these women participate in the global flow of consumption while simultaneously producing fashion media which is read worldwide. Fashion blogging exemplifies a type of "conspicuous consumption" which is less about signaling free time and more about signifying "style" which is presumed authentic and personal. In this paper, I explore how fashion bloggers are complicating theories of conspicuous consumption and information flow. The types of interactions with luxury, mass-market, and secondhand goods that bloggers value are those that simultaneously embrace sped-up fashion cycles and resist "top-down" fashion journalism. Identity presentation online through the use of consumer goods cannot simply be explained by current theories of the conspicuous. I outline three refinements to conspicuous consumption theory that can help explain these dynamics. First, incorporating audience theory; second, emphasizing motivation and using ethnographic methods to uncover this; and third, looking at status as specific and located rather than global.

PUBLICATIONS

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Marwick, A. (2012, in press) The Public Domain: Social Surveillance in Everyday Life. Surveillance and Society. [PDF]

People create profiles on social network sites and Twitter accounts against the background of an audience. This paper argues that surveying content created by others and looking at one's own content through other people's eyes, a common part of social media use, should be framed as social surveillance. While social surveillance is distinguished from traditional surveillance along three axes (power, hierarchy, and reciprocity), its affect and behavior modification is common to traditional surveillance. Drawing on ethnographic studies of United States populations, I look at social surveillance, how it is practiced, and its impact on people who engage in it. I use Foucault's concept of capillaries of power to demonstrate that social surveillance assumes the power differentials evident in everyday interactions rather than the hierarchical power relationships assumed in much of the surveillance literature. Social media involves a collapse of social contexts and social roles, complicating boundary work but facilitating social surveillance. Individuals strategically reveal, disclose and conceal personal information to create connections with others and tend social boundaries. These processes are normal parts of day-to-day life in communities that are highly connected through social media.

Marwick, A. and boyd, d. (2011). "To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter." Convergence 17(2): 139 - 158. [PDF]

Social media technologies let people connect by creating and sharing content. We examine the use of Twitter by famous people to conceptualize celebrity as a practice. On Twitter, celebrity is practiced through the appearance and performance of "backstage" access. Celebrity practitioners reveal what appears to be personal information to create a sense of intimacy between participant and follower, publicly acknowledge fans, and use language and cultural references to create affiliations with followers. Interactions with other celebrity practitioners and personalities give the impression of candid, uncensored looks at the people behind the personas. But the indeterminate "authenticity" of these performances appeals to some audiences, who enjoy the game playing intrinsic to gossip consumption.While celebrity practice is theoretically open to all, it is not an equalizer or democratizing discourse. Indeed, in order to successfully practice celebrity, fans must recognize the power differentials intrinsic to the relationship.

Marwick, A. (2010). "There's a Beautiful Girl Under All of This: Performing Hegemonic Femininity in Reality Television." Critical Studies in Media Communication 27(3): 251-266. [PDF]

Marwick, A. and boyd, d. (2010). "I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience." New Media and Society. Published online before print, July 7, 2010. [PDF]

Social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation. This article investigates how content producers navigate "imagined audiences" on Twitter. We talked with participants who have different types of followings to understand their techniques, including targeting different audiences, concealing subjects, and maintaining authenticity. Some techniques of audience management resemble the practices of "micro-celebrity’" and personal branding, both strategic self-commodification. Our model of the networked audience assumes a manyto- many communication through which individuals conceptualize an imagined audience evoked through their tweets.

boyd, d. and Marwick, A. (2009). "The Conundrum of Visibility: Youth Safety and the Internet." Journal of Children and Media 3(4): 410-419. [PDF]

Marwick, A. (2008). "To Catch a Predator? The MySpace Moral Panic." First Monday 13(6). [HTML]

This paper examines moral panics over contemporary technology, or "technopanics." I use the cyberporn panic of 1996 and the contemporary panic over online predators and MySpace to demonstrate links between media coverage and content legislation. In both cases, Internet content legislation is directly linked to media–fueled moral panics that concern uses of technology deemed harmful to children. This is of particular interest currently as a new Internet content bill, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), is being debated in the U.S. Congress. The technopanic over "online predators" is remarkably similar to the cyberporn panic; both are fueled by media coverage, both rely on the idea of harm to children as the justification for Internet content restriction, and both have resulted in carefully crafted legislation to circumvent First Amendment concerns. Research demonstrates that legislation proposed-- or passed-- to curb these problems is an extraordinary response; it is misguided and in many cases masks the underlying problem.

Dissertation

Marwick, A. (2010). Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Self-Branding in Web 2.0. PhD dissertation, New York University, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. [PDF] [Scribd]

When social media technologies, or "Web 2.0," emerged, scholars and technologists hailed them as a new era of participatory, egalitarian culture. This dissertation examines three status-seeking techniques enabled by social media-micro-celebrity, self-branding, and life-streaming-to provide an alternate view. I argue that Web 2.0 originated in the Northern California technology community, influenced both by counter-cultural movements which positioned new media as a solution to structural deficits of government, business, and mass culture, and the Silicon Valley tradition of entrepreneurial capitalism used as a model for neoliberal development world-wide. These status-seeking techniques constitute technologies of subjectivity which encourage people to apply free-market principles to the organization of social life. Drawing from discourses of celebrity, branding, and public relations, I describe three self-presentation strategies people adopt within social media applications to gain status, attention and visibility.

Based on fieldwork in the San Francisco technology scene from 2006-2009, I identify and describe these status-seeking techniques, how they are experienced, and their implications. Micro-celebrity involves creating a persona, performing intimate connections to create the illusion of closeness, acknowledging an audience and viewing them as fans, and using strategic reveal of information to maintain interest. Lifestreaming is the process of tracking and digitizing personal information and broadcasting it to a networked audience, creating a digital portrait of one's actions and thoughts. In a group of lifestreamers, the digital instantiation of personal information through social media creates a rich backdrop of social information to be scrutinized. Self-branding is the strategic creation of identity to be promoted and sold for enterprise purposes, promoted by self-help gurus and career strategists. These self-presentation strategies involve the creation of an edited self that can be safely viewed by a networked audience consisting of friends, family members, and co-workers. This self requires constant self-surveillance and monitoring and has real emotional affects, which constitute immaterial emotional labor.

Social media is thus undergirded by the neoliberal values of the Northern San Francisco tech scene. I argue that the prevalent myths of entrepreneurship and meritocracy are deeply gendered and contribute to a systematic devaluation of women's experiences, further undermining claims of egalitarianism and democracy.

MA Thesis

This project examines identity within the context of the modern-day, commodified internet. Drawing from both theories of identity and discussions of the granular workings of contemporary internet structures, I argue that previous scholarship on "online identity" is no longer applicable considering the major shifts that have taken place online in the last two decades. Instead, we must look at the political economy of the internet if we are to examine identity. I use two case studies to demonstrate how commodification has directly affected the way that users experience identity and self-presentation online. First, profile-based social networking sites such as Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook assume that a single user profile is necessary in order to maintain the utility of the services as networking tools, but this fixity becomes problematic when the inherently flexible nature of offline identity is considered. Second, I examine Microsoft's Xbox Live system to demonstrate that market forces require Live users to adopt a singular model of identity. Even in the most playful of internet realms, multiplicity is, for the most part, de-emphasized in favor of unitary, presumed authentic identity. I conclude with several guidelines that can assist in formulating future answers to the question "Given the changes in the internet over the last two decades, how can we accurately conceptualize identity?" First, I talk about the ways in which authenticity operates within the context of the commodified internet. Second, if we do reconceptualize identity, I outline what must be taken into account. Third, I note how we must be careful not to fall into false dichotomies when analyzing corporate sites. Finally, given the current engineering developments in federated identity management, I stress the importance of contextualizing cyberculture studies within the political economy.

Book Chapters

Marwick, A. (In press) "Gender, Sexuality and Social Media." In Senft, T. & Hunsinger, J. (eds), Routledge Handbook of Social Media. New York: Routledge.

Marwick, A. (In press) "Identity." In Hartley, J., Burgess, J. & Bruns, A. (eds), Companion to New Media Dynamics. Blackwell Companions to Cultural Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Silver, D. & Marwick, A. (2006) "Internet Studies in Times of Terror." In Silver, D. & Massanari, A. (eds), Critical Cyberculture Studies: Current Terrains, Future Directions. New York: NYU Press, pp. 47-54.

Thurlow, C. & Marwick, A. (2005). Apprehension versus awareness: Toward a more appropriate conceptualization of young people's communication. In Williams, A. & Thurlow, C. (eds), Talking Adolescence: Perspectives On Communication In The Teenage Years. New York: Peter Lang. [PDF]

Book Reviews

Marwick, A. (in press). Reading YouTube by Anandam Kavoori. New Media and Society.

Marwick, A. (2009). Human Rights in the Global Information Society by Rikke Frank Jorgensen. Information, Communication & Society 12(6): 958-959.

Whitepapers and Reports

Marwick, A. and Gonzales-Rivero, J. (2011). Learning to Work with Large-Scale Twitter Data Sets: Using Off-The-Shelf Tools to Quickly and Easily See Tweet Patterns. Microsoft Research Social Media Collective Report, MSR-SMC-11-01, Cambridge, MA. [PDF]

Marwick, Alice E, Murgia-Diaz, Diego and Palfrey, John G., Youth, Privacy and Reputation (Literature Review) (March 29, 2010). Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2010-5. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1588163

Marwick, A. (2009). "The Value of Positive User Experience: Return on Investment of User Experience." Momentum Design Lab Whitepaper.

Marwick, A. (2008). "LiveJournal Users: Passionate, Prolific, and Private." LiveJournal, Inc. Research Report. [PDF]

Marwick, A. (2008). "Current and Developing Practice in the Use of Web 2.0 in Higher Education in the United States of America." In A Review of Current and Developing International Practice in the Use of Social Networking (Web 2.0) in Higher Education, J.A. Armstrong & T. Franklin, Eds. For Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience, U.K. [HTML]

Editorials

Boyd, d. & Marwick, A. (2011). "Bullying as True Drama: Why Cyberbullying Rhetoric Misses the Mark." The New York Times, September 22.

Marwick, A. & boyd, d. (2011). "Tweeting Teens Can Handle Public Life." The Guardian, February 15.

Marwick, A. (2010). "Do You Like Your E-Reader? Six Takes from Academics." The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13.

Marwick, A. (2009). "There's No Hiding on Facebook." The Guardian, October 5.

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS

Bolded are papers, non-bold are panels

2011

"The Drama! Teens, Gossip and Celebrity." Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX. 2011.

"Status and Networked Publics." Networked Public Life, Digital Media and Learning Conference, Long Beach, CA, 2011.

"The Closet in Context." Designing Agency, Digital Media and Learning Conference, Long Beach, CA, 2011.

2010

"The Edited Self: Web 2.0 and Self-Branding in Technology Culture." Brand Me Online: Sustaining Personal Identity through Strategies of the Corporate (panel). Association of Internet Researchers, Gothenburg, Sweden. 2010.

Internet Identity: Women in a Virtual World. With Gesel Mason and Michelle Rowley. Creative Dialogue series, University of Maryland, March 1, 2010.

"Celebrity, Microcelebrity, and the Future of Internet Fame." The Future15, South by Southwest Interactive, Austin, TX. 2010.

"Why Kids Do Care About Privacy." Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, New York, NY, 2010.

2009

"The Playboys of Tech: Gendered Entrepreneurial Narratives in Social Media Creation." Society for the Social Studies of Science, Washington, DC. 2009.

"Hating on the Twitter Snobs: Status and Microcelebrity on Twitter." Tweeting it Out: Critical Examinations of Twitter across Disciplines (panel organizer). Association of Internet Researchers, Milwaukee, WI. 2009.

P2P 2.0 and the Future of Digital Media. South by Southwest Interactive, Austin, TX. 2009. With Adam Fisk, Ian Clarke, Wendy Seltzer and Aaron Ray.

Is Privacy Dead Or Just Really Confused? South by Southwest Interactive, Austin, TX. 2009. With danah boyd, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Judith Donath.

2008

"Becoming Elite: Status in Social Media." Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program. Oxford, England, August 2008.

"The Fabulous Life of Microcelebrities: The Cultural Logic of Internet Fame." ROFLCON Keynote. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, April 25-26 2008.

"I'm Internet Famous: Status in Social Media." South By Southwest Interactive, Austin, TX, March 9-11 2008.

Okay, Facebook me: Exploring Behavior, Motivations and Uses in Social Network Sites. With Frederick Stutzman, danah boyd, and Clifford Lampe. iConference, Los Angeles, CA. 2008.

2007

"L33t Phreaks and Power Sellers: Locating Status in Social Media" Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies Workshop, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. November 2007. This is a basic presentation about my thoughts on social status in social media, concentrating on USENET, MUDs, and IRC.

• Powerpoint deck [PDF]
• Notes [PDF]

"The People's Republic of YouTube? Interrogating Rhetorics of Internet Democracy." Association of Internet Researchers 8.0. Vancouver, Canada. October 2007. Winner, Student Paper award [SSRN]

The mass media often frames YouTube as intrinsically democratic, allowing ordinary citizens to act as journalists or media watchdogs, participate directly in mainstream media, and become celebrities themselves. While characterizing the internet as "democratic" is nothing new, what are the implications when the site of democracy is not national, but commercial? This paper explores the interplay between community-based or democratic interests and YouTube's profit-driven nature. I maintain YouTube is subject not only to the same social forces that limit discursive egalitarianism in the "real world," but to economic forces that act upon users in more complicated ways. It is therefore problematic to look to YouTube, or any other internet site, to compensate for shortcomings in the democratic process.

"I Can Make You a (net) Celebrity Overnight: Fan Production and Participatory Culture in Online Reality Shows." Media in Transition, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. May 2007. [SSRN]

Online versions of reality shows pit users against each other, following the conventions of television franchises like American Idol and Project Runway. An outgrowth of the popularity of both reality television and internet fandom, online reality contests are fan-driven and made possible by free publishing tools such as Google Video, YouTube, Flickr and DeviantArt. These contests, like Google Idol and LiveJournal's Next Top Model (LNTM), comprise a new, hybrid genre of fan production that mimics the rules and structure of reality television programs, while encouraging participant creativity. While these competitions draw from conventions of specific programs, their participants are no longer "audiences" or even "fans" in a strict sense; rather, they are micro-media producers themselves. I argue that online reality competitions, together with other hybrid forms such as machinima, anime music videos and filk music, not only contribute to our understanding of participatory culture, but should fundamentally alter media studies concepts of the audience.

Mystery Science Web 3000: Combinatorial Media. With Sean Kelly, Rick Webb, and Lilli Cheng. South by Southwest Interactive, Austin, TX. 2007

2006

"Feminist Blogging: An Academic Perspective" (Web)Sites of Resistance, Barnard College, New York. November 2006.[Notes: Word doc] Also see this crib [PDF]

I Can Make You a (net) Celebrity Overnight: Fan Production and Participatory Culture in Online Reality Shows. Department of Culture and Communication Graduate Conference, New York Hall of Science, Queens, New York. November 2006. (See later, more polished version of this on [SSRN])

• PowerPoint
• Notes: Word doc

"Selling Your Self: Examining Values in Identity 2.0." Identity and Identification in a Networked World. New York University, New York. September 2006

• PowerPoint [.ppt]
• Talk outline [.doc]

Selling Your Self: Examining Online Identity. Media Change and Social Theory, St. Hugh's College, Oxford, September 2006.

The Myth of User Control in Identity 2.0. Ethical Design of Surveillance Infrastructures Workshop, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, June 2006.

Women, Action & the Media: Making, Noise, Making Change. Boston, 2006. Panelist, "(Web) Sites of Resistance."

2005

Marwick, A. (2005). "I'm More Than Just a Friendster Profile: Identity, Authenticity, and Power in Social Networking Services." Association for Internet Researchers, Chicago, IL. [SSRN]

The rise in popularity of social networking services (SNS) in the last few years is not unproblematic. The structure and underlying philosophy of social networking services presents two problems regarding user self-presentation of identity. First, the fixity of profiles creates conflict in user self-presentation strategies. SNS privilege a single identity presentation as both "authentic" and "real", which diminishes user agency. I present a typology of user presentation strategies on Friendster, Orkut, and MySpace that discusses how users navigate this fixity in a variety of ways, and how successful the application architecture is in encouraging a particular type of presentation. Second, I draw from social networking theory to discuss how the presentation of social networks is decontextualized both in terms of relational ties and larger social structures. The social and cultural power inherently embedded in networks is made invisible, replaced with both structural regulation and power (by the application) and political and cultural assumptions in how identity is presented. Additionally, the structure of both application and profiles encourages framing oneself as a consumer and commodifying complicated relationships as social capital.