The era of Vlogging

In Alice Marwick’s book Status Update she talks about lifestreaming in the chapter “Lifestreaming: We Live in Public”. Lifestreaming is sharing information constantly to an audience and this creates a digital network about one’s thoughts and actions. Lifestreaming may seem fun and easy but it is far from that. Lifestreaming requires lots of thought and labour. Lifestreamers constantly have to think about what their viewers want to see that also matches and fits with the persona that they have created online. The audience is a main part of lifestreaming as they are able to interact with the lifestreamer as well by posting comments or liking the video/picture.

An example of lifestreamers that I follow were Jesse Wellens and Jeana Smith. They are youtubers for the channels BFvsGF and PrankvsPrank. PrankvsPrank is a channel about them pulling pranks on each other and BFvsGF is a channel where they do daily vlogs. Vlogs are blogs which are displayed in videos. They have been dating for 10 years and just recently split up. They posted one last video together where they talked about the reasons on why they broke up and one of them was because of vlogging. They said that vlogging put a lot of pressure and stress on them because they had to find creative and fun things to post about every day and they became consumed about their public image and did not have time to focus on each other.

Here is a video where they announce their breakup:

My question is “do you think vlogging is ruining lives and why?”

What's your pitch?

An important strategy for Web 2.0 is self-branding. Alice Marwick’s chapter “Self-Branding: The (Safe for Work) Self” in her book Status Update discusses the “promotional culture” that we live in. Self-branding is using marketing technique on one’s self. This is to promote our self to future employers and other people. To do this, we need to take part in emotional labour and self-surveillance. However, self-branding is contradictory as because we appear to be authentic and true but we are not actually our true self as we have to monitor everything that we do. We sell ourselves as commodities to potential managers.

Networking is also part of self-branding. During our everyday interactions with other people, we think about the possibilities of what something can lead to. Networking requires each person to pitch an idea or topic to the other person and this in turn leads to discussions (Marwick, 189). Having a good pitch is what will get you noticed and establish your own brand.

My question is “what do you consider to be a good pitch?” and "do you have a pitch?"

Apps and Drive

          Jodi Dean in her article discusses the roles that apps play in customizing and enhancing our experience when using the mobile technologies and devices that these apps are stored in. She points out that there are 4 ways that apps create drive through people’s interactions with these technologies. The 4 ways that apps try to create drive are through processes of the individualization of their apps to their users in order to allow them to feel more connected to what they do with these apps. Apps try to create a sense of Isolation in the users experience with the app where the person is taken from one reality and immersed in another one. Apps also try to create personalization and responsibilization by allowing certain options or operations available for a more customized experience as well as affirming individual fantasy of omniscience and autonomy, where a person is able to do things for themselves without the need for assistance. They also find ways to identify with their users where they closely monitor and then identify the usage habits of their users in order to provide them with more features and services that will support their interests.

          

          Apps are what make these mobile devices like IPhones, IPads, tablets, that we identify with so successful in the world that we live in. They are able to create feelings of joy and pleasure in us when we are using or experiencing them, these feelings have the ability to fasten us to our devices and create interdependent relationships between user and device where individuals cannot live without their mobile technology. Without the many services apps present and the tasks that they help us carry out and complete, we will not see the same amount of craze and interest that forms when newer versions come out of the mobile technologies we hold so close to us. Do you think you would have an IPhone if it didn’t have the apps that we use so much today like banking, social media, health apps or game apps?

The Fabulous Lives of Micro-Celebrities

Alice Marwick’s chapter "The Fabulous Lives of Micro-Celebrities," in her book Status Update talks about micro-celebrities and she describes the two ways that one can be a micro-celebrity. The first being arranging yourself to be recognized and the second being ascribed fame because of your own success. Authenticity is needed for both ways. Many people have started building careers using their online fame.

Companies will give you a coupon code with your name that you share with your followers and they will get 15% off if they use the code RENA for example. It is also easy to share information through various different platforms, you can link your youtube account to your instagram so it's always easy to access all the content. As well as having post notifications on, you're constantly being updated whenever someone posts a new video or picture. A guy that went to my highschool created a very successful bodybuilding instagram account and now he is making a lot of money for posting videos and pictures of him working out and tip and tricks. In addition he has partnered with companies that give him coupon codes for supplements and protein powder. He also created a youtube channel and will post Instagram stories telling you go check out his new video and he linked it so that you can just swipe up and it’ll take you directly to youtube.

My question is “What micro-celebrities do you follow and why?”

Marwick & Self Branding

Alice Marwick in Status Update: discusses how labor is both in-material and emotional. From the standpoint of Self-branding, the in-material labor that Markwick refers to is the process that users go through online to produce content that can interpreted by other users, ``revealing vulnerable information in a performance of authenticity, and complete identification with the enterprise subject.`` (Marwick, 58), which encourages audiences viewing our content to interact with us more frequently. The other concept that Marwick talks about is the emotional aspect of labor, which ultimately describes that the content that we post online, or how we brand ourselves, in which we do what Marwick quotes as ``induce or suppress feelings in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others`` (Marwick, 351), suggesting we are different online than in real life.  One of the labouring processes of identity that comes to mind with these concepts are social media websites Facebook and Instagram. More specifically, how we upload pictures and videos of us doing things that we want to show people we are connected with online. My question is with regards to branding, have you ever attempted to create your own self brand online? What methods do you think have worked? Do you think there are users of social media who do in fact hinder the perceptions of other users in order to get what they want? 

Jodi Dean - Apps and Drive

Jodi Dean's article Apps and Drive examines how applications on smartphones increase communicative capitalism, individualist and individualizing fantasies. Dean focuses on how apps cause us to feel a need to own a smartphone, provides the consumer with a way to stay connected and a way for one to interact. She also says that the fascination with apps derives from "the affective attachment point tethering complex chains of production in which the app is less a product than itself another means of production". Essentially she is saying how the app is not really a product but another way of production fulfilling capitalistic goals.

The focus of the article can be broken down into four components of individualization that fulfil individualist desires as Dean says, the four are: isolation, personalization, responsibilization and identification. I think the most intriguing aspect is identification due to how prominent this concept has been throughout fourth year communications seminars. Specifically the focus on what can be seen as one's personal data such as, location and browsing history I find to be important. This is because this is what allows companies to target consumers based on their preferences, it allows for a greater chance of purchases if you're targeting the consumers preferred tastes.

Do you think that you are more inclined to purchase within app to further yourself along in the app? or do you think you are more likely to purchase items seen on the side bar? For instance some online shopping you have inquired about that is now subject to your screen due to identification.

Sharma and the use of time with Taxi`s

 In Sarah Sharma`s Temporal Labour and The TaxiCab: Maintaining The Time of Others, she discusses the concept of affective labour, which is the idea of an subject establishing a link within space, essentially having that subject make time for other subjects. In relation to Taxis, Sharma believes they are constrained by giving the potential customer their services by driving them to their destinations. Are there any other instances where a subject`s time is being used in order to ensure the success of another subject? For instance, the recent taxi app Uber has drivers that voluntarily use their own free time to drive people in order to make a profit.