Alison Hearn

Insecure: Narratives and economies of the branded self in transformation television

What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? (Butler 2004, 33) In a world marked by deepening political, economic, cultural and environmental insecurity, it is little wonder tha...

Cultural studies of data mining: Introduction:

Over the past 2 years, the total amount of data about everything from the humidity of shipping crates, toilet flushes in shopping malls or tweets about Justin Beiber exceeded the total amount yet recorded in human history – equivalent to a zettabyte of data or sextillion bytes and growing (Shaw, 2014). Given this, it is now axiomatic to claim that we are in the ‘age of big data’ and are witnessing a quantitative (and perhaps qualitative) ‘revolution’ (Lohr, 2012) in human knowledge, driven by accompanying forms of data mining and analytics. New analytical methods and businesses seeking to monetize this explosion of data emerge daily. Often offered in black-boxed proprietary form, these companies and their analytic methods promise to help us gain insight into public opinion, mood, networks, behaviour patterns and relationships. Data analytics and machine learning are also ostensibly paving the way for a more intelligent Web 3.0, promising a more ‘productive and intuitive’ user/consumer experience. Data analytics involve far more than targeted advertising, however; they envision new strategies for forecasting, targeting and decision-making in a growing range of social realms, such as marketing, employment, education, health care, policing, urban planning and epidemiology. They also have the potential to usher in new, unaccountable and opaque forms of discrimination and social sorting based not on human-scale narratives but on incomprehensibly large, and continually growing, networks of interconnections.

Confessions of a Radical Eclectic: Reality Television, Self-Branding, Social Media, and Autonomist Marxism

This paper explores the contributions of autonomist Marxist theory to my understanding of reality television, self-branding and social media. Autonomist Marxist ideas help to bridge the classic media studies divide between critical political economy and cultural studies, illuminating the very material connections between television’s mode of production, its texts, and its broader cultural context and impact. Concepts such as the social factory, immaterial labour, the socialized worker, and virtuosity, contributed by thinkers such as Mauricio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, have enabled me to argue that reality television is a privileged site of production in the post-Fordist era; it not only produces texts or ideologies about work and life, but also models the monetization of “being” and produces “branded selves”. While autonomist ideas are extremely useful, the field of thinking is complex and not without its internal debates. This paper also explores contributions by George Caffentzis, Massimo de Angelis and David Harvie, specifically the concept of the war over measure, arguing that this concept helps to frame some of the ways in which the public expression of opinion and feeling online and in social media are being captured, measured and put to work for capital.

Student Rights in an Age of Austerity? ‘Security’, Freedom of Expression and the Neoliberal University

In this profile, we examine a worrying trend taking place in institutions of higher education around the world: a notable increase in their managerial corporatization and neoliberalization, combined with greater repression of freedom of expression on campuses under the aegis of ‘securitization’. We focus attention specifically on how these twinned trends have impacted student activism in a post-2008 austerity-driven economic environment. Drawing on examples from Canada and elsewhere, we highlight attempts to depoliticize and institutionalize student engagement, as well as evidence of students working to break free of myriad constraints to foment change in their respective communities.

Trump’s “Reality” Hustle

This brief editorial links Trump’s popularity to reality television’s messages of promotionalism and the spread of overt forms of self-branding and reputation-seeking across the population at large thanks to social media. Against the backdrop of growing economic insecurity, most people must now assiduously self-promote and hustle in order to find or protect their jobs. Trump supporters are not ‘dupes’ buying the hype then; they recognize that Trump’s brand is his skill set, admire it, and see it as all the qualification he needs to become president. While Trump’s ‘brand’ is figured as the result of his own personal style and power, it is actually the product of the underpaid, highly exploited labour of thousands of workers. Trump the Brand and reality television’s gauzy promise of mini-celebrity are symptoms of, and alibis for a flawed and failing political economic system. It will take the concerted, collective power of people in the streets, demanding something better, to stop him.

Verified: Self-presentation, identity management, and selfhood in the age of big data

ABSTRACT What new styles of selfhood and self-presentation, forms of social status, and arbiters of “authenticity” are being authorized and propagated in the wake of big data and affective capitalism? How are they functioning, for whom, and to what end? This article takes up these questions via an examination of a sought-after user identity badge, the Twitter verification checkmark, figuring it as both an affective lure that incentivizes specific styles of self-presentation and a disciplinary means through which capitalist logics work to condition and subsume the significance of the millions of forms of self-presentation generated daily. Beneath the promise of democratized access to social status and fame, the business practices of the social platforms in and through which we self-present draw us into privatized strategies of social sorting, identity management, and control. To conclude, the article will posit a new “ideal type” of selfhood for the big data age.

Witches and bitches: Reality television, housewifization and the new hidden abode of production

The governance of affect by capital has seen its ideological legitimation and emblematic site of production in the mainstream television industry, specifically reality television programs, as they provide templates for affective self-presentation to the public at large. As even a cursory glance at most reality television production demonstrates, it is most often women’s bodies and self-concepts that bear the burden of signifying and legitimating the message of this new economic formation: ‘conform to our template, be seen, and build a reputation!’ This article will focus on the Real Housewives franchise, which along with its network Bravo is credited with saving the fortunes of NBC, as the paradigmatic example of these new narrative trends and business models. It will interrogate the historical resonances and discontinuities between the economy of affective visibility now apparent on reality television and its modes of production and the origins of the ‘real’ housewife in early capitalism. At this time, women’s skills, bodies and reproductive capacities were violently restructured; forbidden from earning a wage or having money, women’s work inside and outside the home was simultaneously appropriated and concealed. As reality television inaugurates new kinds of labor and value creation in the 21st century, it does so in ways that are deeply gendered or ‘housewifized’; reality television’s forms of hidden, precarious, and unregulated labour recall the appropriation and denigration of the value of women’s work by systems of capitalist expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries.