barbara fister reviewed Status update by Alice E. Marwick
Review of 'Status update' on 'LibraryThing'
Marwick studied the culture of Silicon Valley workers over a period of years and finds certain cultural traits and fundamental beliefs about social status and how it works have embedded themselves in the social media platforms we use every day.Young tech workers who Marwick studied preferred entrepreneurship over working for someone else, believed that creativity and oneâs âauthenticâ public identity are expressed through oneâs work, and that such work can lead to a meaningful life (and can also bring great wealth - how very handy!) Itâs a version of the American Dream, one that believes self-starters who work hard and have tech skills will succeed, and that anyone who doesnât simply isnât smart enough or hasnât worked hard enough. She unpacks the conflation of work with personal value that is developed and groomed in public and how all of these assumptions play out in terms of gender and class. And …
Marwick studied the culture of Silicon Valley workers over a period of years and finds certain cultural traits and fundamental beliefs about social status and how it works have embedded themselves in the social media platforms we use every day.Young tech workers who Marwick studied preferred entrepreneurship over working for someone else, believed that creativity and oneâs âauthenticâ public identity are expressed through oneâs work, and that such work can lead to a meaningful life (and can also bring great wealth - how very handy!) Itâs a version of the American Dream, one that believes self-starters who work hard and have tech skills will succeed, and that anyone who doesnât simply isnât smart enough or hasnât worked hard enough. She unpacks the conflation of work with personal value that is developed and groomed in public and how all of these assumptions play out in terms of gender and class. And does it ever - because itâs a very white, male world in Silicon Valley that rarely recognizes its own privilege.returnreturnThe social media platforms these smart young professionals have developed are designed to encourage entrepreneurial thinking, branding of the self, and the public performance of an identity, an edited self that dissolves the boundaries between work and not-work. As she puts it in her concluding chapter:returnreturn"In fact, the values promoted by users of social media are those of the enterprise business culture. Although the top-down, hierarchical management style of the 1950s and 1960s was replaced in the dot-com era with one that emphasized the leveling of hierarchies in the workplace, creative self-expression through labor, and independent workers, this has not significantly improved the lot of the individual worker. If anything, the free-agent culture of enterprise labor justifies neoliberal policies, which dismantle socioeconomic protections like pension plans and employee-sponsored health insurance, and so both provide less protection to workers and normalize instability."returnreturnI thought this was a very good contribution to our understanding of how a certain insrumentalization of status-seeking has influenced our daily technological infrastructure in ways that reflect a very specific world view, informal, freedom-loving if not downright libertarian, and naively devoted to the myth of meritoracy in a plutocratic and increasingly unequal society.