On Brand: Dehumanization and the Internet

Jack M. Moore

A Thesis Process Book, for ArtCenter College of Design’s MFA in Graphic Design Program, Spring 2021.

B On Brand: A Survey of the Coalescence of Brand Identity and Self Identity Online.

By Jack M. Moore This is a process book to accompany a graduate Thesis Completed in ArtCenter College of Design's Graduate Graphic Design Program.

The research and design process of this thesis was conducted in the Fall of 2020 and Spring of 2021.

Any materials not written by myself or of my own making are not mine and the copyright of others. This book is not intended for sale, all materials that are not mine are used as reference and supporting materials, and are attributed as such. All original writings and design are mine.

ArtCenter College of Design | MGx

On Brand A Survey of the Coalescence of Brand Identity and Self Identity Online

by

Jack Moore

®

Contents ™

PAGE 8

Introduction PAGE 28

Agora; Design Solution PAGE 114

Process PAGE 164

Literature Review PAGE 178

On Branding PAGE 204

The Online Self PAGE 262

The Self as Brand PAGE 298

Woman Man Brand Tweet PAGE 328

Strategy Development PAGE 422

Conclusion PAGE 434

References & Colophon

Chapter

01 Intro-

duction

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Synopsis™ ↳ Inspiration for this thesis, ranging from Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain to Kendall Jenner's Instagram's #ad.

Several years ago, between my friends and I, it was posited the question of which was more important: using social media for leisure or building one’s brand? I was shocked that the majority responded that they chose their brand. They reasoned that doing so would build up equity - professionally and socially. Enjoying social media for leisure was a luxury, and they considered it to be lazy, when it could be used to increase one’s professional prospects.

Before this conversation I viewed people who used social media to make money as desperate, sweaty, or solely seeking fame. They were “influencers,” a word I would inflect with a rhetorical eye roll in my head as I said it. Now, this concept of self-monetization on the internet was not just in my backyard, but was presented to me as the proactive and responsible action to take. For me I assumed it was broadly understood that social media was used to connect with friends, engage in conversation, discover new culture and media, ostensibly what it was designed for. As it turns out, these social networks have been designed for users to become reliant on them as channels of self-commodification.

The embedding of social networks into the fabric of our society and economic models has immensely changed how both brands and individuals connect to others, whether those be friends, colleagues, customers, or all of those at once. The possibilities for users of these social networks to commodify On Brand™

their actions and personas has appealed obviously to brands, but individuals as well, largely party of the economic trend of the gig economy where individuals are not only encouraged but almost expected to commodify their free time. For the individual this has been manifested in the “personal brand,” a term coined in the Nineties to help professionals market and distinguish their professional skills better. This has morphed as the Web’s technology and profit models have evolved to represent a larger trend of individuals branding themselves as a means of commodification, using the rhetoric of corporate branding in how they represent themselves on the Internet.

The state of branding Online is not inherently problematic, at its core it seeks to empower individuals to take control of their identities and seek out new economic opportunities, and allows brands to better connect and listen to the demand of their customers. But this practice of brands as people and people as brands as it exists now, and should it continue on its same trajectory, is both unethical and unsustainable.

It is unethical in how it cheapens the self, and dehumanizes users of these networks. Brands humanizing themselves to an uncanny degree confuses the idea of selfhood, modeling normative human behavior on the internet as self-commodifying. Branding works as an interface to communicate a story of a company to consumers. Users on the Internet have taken aspects of this stye of corporate branding to represent their “authentic” selves by saying that they are actually representing themselves authentically, a rhetorical paradox that suggests that it is normative to be inauthentic online. In it’s current iteration, the trend of self branding online models corporate business ethics as the way that individuals should conduct and represent themselves to others online.

This practice is unsustainable in how this economic trend is dependent on the design of these networks which, rather than being designed organically by the actions and wants of society writ large, are at the discretion of private companies’ notions of how these platforms should be designed to increase profits from themselves first and foremost. The commodification of Online spaces has led to the dehumanization of users by confusing the delineation between the individual and the brand.

The term “brand” has joined the larger cultural lexicon in a way it never had before. The contemporary practice of branding has gone through many iterations since it’s inception during the Industrial Revolution, and it’s much wider adoption and implementation after the Second World War. Every iteration adapting to changing societal, economic, and technological trends. The Internet, and more specifically the migration of human interaction onto the Internet has led to one of the biggest changes to the practice of branding, where brands take on the attributes of people and people take on the attributes of branding.

In the context of commodified Internet, branding has taken on the attributes of a buzzword, oft-overused and even more frequently misunderstood. Branding in the context of the Individual has become a catchall for one’s commodified identity. Prior to the post-modern Internet’s coopting of this branding, it was a term almost exclusively relegated to the offices of advertising agencies and the conference rooms of corporate offices.

Marketing management specialists Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller define branding as “a strategy designed by organizations to help people to quickly identify and experience their brand, and give them a reason to choose their products over the compe-

tition’s, by clarifying what this particular brand is and is not” (Kotler & Keller, 2015). What’s key in this definition is how a brand is largely defined by the other brands in which its existence is relational to, and how this can be transposed to one of the most often critiqued sides of social media. The critique being that it has individuals compare themselves to other users, and creates a coalesced homogenization of identity.

Before social media the early internet was a space driven by discovery and anonymity. It was not considered an appropriate activity to spend one’s time on the internet, as it was mainly a distraction or a way to communicate with strangers. The reason why it was considered so niche is because it was more effortful to have a platform on the Internet back then, as opposed to now where social media platforms provide templates for selfhood. Entire websites needed to be constructed and were all the design of the user, not the hidden design of the platform.

As the internet’s popularity grew it became less the Wild West and more and more commercialized. Which leads to the current state of how social networks encourage people to connect and consume more information.

Currently users only have a handful of choices when it comes to choosing a social media platform, and many social media companies are subsidies of parent companies. This means that these companies hold a monopoly on how people connect, discover information, read about current events, make money, and so much more. What is troubling about this is how these companies design their networks to make users reliant on them, creating a consistent need and routine surrounding their platforms. These companies monetize these actions through the sale of ad space and personal data, using now famous algorithms to create a feed of content specific to a persona’s interests, or by creating tools to help user’s monetize their personal brands.

Where corporations relied on statistics, marketing and marketing analytic firms to audit the efficacy of their brands, a social network can provide this service to an individual’s brand, telling them who their target demographic is, the time of day their content is most engaged with, etc. This is then used to encourage the user to buy ad space to promote the business of themselves.

Instagram even removed the “Like” count on posts to drive people to pay for premium analytics, whether they intended on brandifying themselves or not.

My argument is not that personal brands are bad, or inherently dehumanizing. Thy can be an effective and empowering tool when wielded effectively and with the right intentions. Personal Branding arose in the late 1990s when corporate communication and employment worlds both observed the chaotic nature of the other’s environment. Personal branding connected these two worlds of corporate communication and employment systems. It allowed practitioners to position themselves as communicators and prospective employees. This is distinct from corporate branding practice. Corporate communication uses branding to make direct, clear, and persistent bonds between symbols and products or services.Branding and its association its correlation between products and a readily identifiable name enjoyed its heyday from 1920s to 1970s.

This changed in the 1980s as competition arose through the broadening of marketing channels and globalized revenue streams. The 1980s saw the rise of the brand as lifestyle, and beginning of niche marketing. Globalization created major worldwide brands, leading to an overall decline in mid-size brands,

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now there is room only for mega-brands, and niche brands.

Personal branding as we know it now arose in the 1990s in response to the lifestyle brand boom of the 1980s. The popularization of personal branding is generally attributed to Tom Peters’ 1997 article in Fast Company, entitled “The Brand Called You.” Peters makes the argument that as consumers, wearing branded products and apparel such as Nike and Champion, we have already commodified ourselves.

So the next logical step is to commodify our identities. His argument is blythely American individualist in how it espouses our identities as CEO of ourselves, regardless of age, race, class, social standing.

Peters argues that the best chance for success in the dawning digital age of business is: “…becoming a free agent in an economy of free agents, looking to have the best season you can imagine in your field, looking to do your best work and chalk up a remarkable track record, and looking to establish your own micro equivalent of the Nike swoosh” (Peters).

To do this is the responsibly opportunist position to have a leg up in the “next wave of the free-agency market.” To do otherwise is laziness because everything that can be gained from personal branding is just within “lap-top's reach.” This comment, based in the 90s, predicts the gig economy of the future. The gig economy is the result of the further consolidation of corporate brands, where there is now only room for mega brands and the small entrepreneur.

Peters argues that personal branding is a way to create social standing. He puts this in the hypothetical example of who's emails to respond to first, arguing the person with the stronger brand equity is the person you shall respond to first on email. What this amounts to is a neo-capitalist restructuring of class, and a reframing of it in the advent of American entrepreneurialism. American identity is rooted in the notion that one can work their way to the top of the class ladder, as opposed to true class structures where one's position is immobile.

What is transparent in Peter's argument is that he posits personal branding as a neo-capitalist self-help methodology for how to achieve the American dream when the internet has been established as the dominant medium of commerce.

It echoes the sentiment of the pioneers of the 1800s in America, rushing to stake out their claim of the American frontier. While the majority of these arguments seems rooted in an American-centric point of view, the American economic model has developed as the dominant one of the internet. This being that wealth and social mobility are available to those who work hard and “hustle” for any opportunity to make money.

This last point, about personal branding and its relationship to the Internet, is an important point to consider about the broader implications of the design of social media networks. The most widely used social media networks, with the exception of the Chinese-owned TikTok, are American-owned and designed companies. To specifies even further they were largely developed and designed in the same region of the the same region of the United State, the Silicon Valley of Northern California, and were born out of the same schools by the same sort of people, with the same pedigree (i.e. straight, cisgender, wealthy, white men).

It is troubling in how it leads to a flattening of the internet culture and identity, a form of digital neo-colonialism. If the practice of personal branding is largely

based on Western economic standards, and the most popular platforms for it to be practiced on are also designed by a singular demographic, it forces users to adapt their online personas to fit into the American model of what merits “profitable.” This becomes less clear to the users because of the warped nature of online existence. We as users so often forget the vast difference between what is represented digitally, and the our own physical experience of the analog world, that we mistake our digital personas for true selves.

In her essay “The I in the Internet,” writer Jia Tolentino investigates this confusion that social media, and the nature of the Internet, causes in self identity. She credits it to five main factors, asking the reader to consider: “how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity. How it encourages us to overvalue our opinions.

How it maximizes our sense of opposition. How it cheapens our understanding of solidarity. How it destroys our sense of scale” (Tolentino).

Basically she credits this phenomenon of identity loss and crisis to the physical detachment that communication via the internet fosters, where all context, organic community, and sense of scale, space, and time are lost. Preceding these considerations, she nostalgically reminisces on her early experiences on the Internet when she was a young teenager using an Angelfire website. She claims that these experiences felt more authentic, not because these platforms tried to mimic our experiences outside offline, but because they revealed the void between the two existences. Tolentino credits, as the center of this, action and discovery.

Contemporary Internet life is centered on the passivity of receiving information and connections. Algorithms do the chore of discovery, leading to them constructing our online identities as opposed to the other way around. Action itself must always be performed, consider Tolentino’s point about the troubling lack of context on the Internet. The context in this case is the body. With the lack of a body, all actions must be calculated and performed. In the wake of tragedy, one’s sympathies or condolences are nonexistent if they are not logged in a post or commemoration of some kind, this act is called virtue signalling. Consider the summer of 2020, following George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police officers, social media was flooded with virtue signaled posts that rang empty about how to support Black communities and defund the police. The criticism was the emptiness in the words, and the lack of action behind them.

All of these factors point to the problematic and dehumanizing nature of social media networks that exist on the Internet. A probable question at this point is to suggest we abandon social media, and boycott it completely, though this is incredibly unrealistic and ignores the great benefits that social media networks and self branding provide. Social media as a tool is incredibly powerful and necessary for marginalized groups and activist circles to find community and spread their messaging. It allows people to find new interests, and new people to share these interests with, as well as stay in touch with friends that are far away. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic it was essential to have a means of communication and connection that was not solely reliant on physical presence. The issue that I find with the state of social media, is the lack of choice users have in what platforms they choose to utilize, often compromising their own morals to do so.

A solution to the coalescence of brand and self, and the ensuing dehumanization of Internet users is to provide non-commodified, analog spaces that offer

On Brand™

the same services as the most prevalent commodified spaces.

With considerations to my research and the arguments I have posited thus far I created a social networking platform spanning physical spaces, and print media, eschewing the need for the internet and digital platforms entirely. I called this brand Agora, a reference to ancient Athenian meeting places where people would gather in their cities and talk. Goals that I set for myself in creating this brand were that I would: help users discover new content, preserve their identities by making them consider the difference between their represented persona and actual self, make it entirely donation-funded, and create an environment built on action and intention not empty words.

The unique positioning statement I crafted for Agora is “a social network for people, not brands” communicating to users immediately how this was not a service that would seek to commodify their actions and identities on the platform. I decided that in order to achieve this, Agora would be entirely donation-funded similar to the model of Wikimedia, which periodically has donation drives to help encourage users to support the service.

Considering further about how to embolden interaction, and preserve humanity on the Agora platform I considered how interaction would be encouraged and mitigated. I arrived at the two main touchpoints: the Agora space, and the profile book.

A major early hurdle that I encountered was how to make people aware of the brand. To figure this out I created a customer journey map, figuring out every point that a user interacts with the brand. Charting their interactions from mere awareness of the brand, to complete loyalty. Firstly the user becomes aware of Agora from posters and print advertisement

throughout the city. It is primarily located near libraries, museums, universities, and other public gathering spaces. They consider going to visit the Agora itself from hearing testimonials from friends who are members and have positive experiences with it. The user goes to the local Agora where they engage in conversation and meet new people and their friends.

They are given the opportunity to sign up for their own Profile Book. The Profile Book is a way of discovering personalized content, and topics from people around the world. The user gets their first and builds it out with all of their interests. It’s very easy and intuitive. But they still dont know how fulfilling it will be since they mail their book off the next day. Then the next week they get a new persons book, filled with articles and correspondence from other people with similar interests. They read it and add to the conversation, and send it out in a week.

The user finally becomes loyal after using the brand every week for a month and going to the Space. They have not been on social media digital social media in a long time. They feel fulfilled being able to connect to new people and stay in touch with friends, and still be able to learn. The brand has become a part of their weekly routine. It was important for me to define this user journey, as a way of vetting the viability and visibility of a company that would not engage at all in digital advertising of any kind.

I envisioned the center of the brand to be its spatial components called The Agora. The Agora is the primary touchpoint of Agora. It is where users can go to hang out and engage in conversation. They can only go and talk or not talk. No computers or phones are allowed. Ideally Agoras would start off in major cities, located near libraries, cultural institutions, and

Background

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universities where word of mouth and the chance of simply walking into the space would be enough for discovery. Amenities and features would include an amphitheater for talks and seminars organized by any user, a place to register membership to the brand, areas to sit and talk with other members, as well as a library and archive of Profile Books by other users. Agora spaces would be able to range in scope and size, being able to expand just beyond major cities and reach smaller towns. Ideally every small town and large city would have their own Agora that suits their needs and environment.

The Profile Book is a transitory object where people communicate through writing. That is how they get to know each other, learn, and discover. An individual would receive their book and mailing list of their first network once visiting the Agora Space.

Then they create their book by filling out the profile section with their name and basic information. Rather than introducing themselves with photos they draw self-portraits of how they perceive themselves and how they believe other perceive them. The rest of the book contains sections to add dialogues, pose questions, include ephemera and photo albums, and provide recommendations of anything from films to hiking trails. It then gets sent to people in the network and then to others with interests similar to them. While one’s book is being sent to the network, they are receiving other people’s books and responding to them.

The book provides an opportunity for mess and mistakes, things which often go unnoticed or do not happen on digital social media. When beta-testing the Profile Book every person that I sent it to responded in different ways in how they interpreted the instructions set forth by the person whose book it was. This led to interesting variations in materiality, annotations, and completely different ownership over the book as a physical product of travel and networking.

It was important for me to rely on the extreme of only utilizing analog products and services, rather than digital for this project, in order to explore how interaction design could be facilitated via print and spatial mediums.

Ideally every small town and large city would have their own Agora that suits their needs and environment. Agora spaces would be able to range in scope and size, being able to expand beyond major cities and reach smaller towns. Thus allowing everyone the choice of whether they wanted to engage with digital social media or not.

What was important for me in creating Agora, and exploring this project in general, goes back to that conversation I had at the park with my friends all those years ago. I realized how trapped we all felt by the fastness and urgency of social media. What once felt like leisurely activity, now felt like my duty of self-commodification. In exploring this project my relationship to social media and self branding remained in flux, landing at any point between positive and negative perception. Ultimately I realized that for all of the horrible and dehumanizing aspects of what it means to be a person on the internet, there are wonderful and empowering spaces in it as well. What it all came down to is the choice, not the feeling of being compelled to engage in these spaces and to feel like one has control over their own identity.

On Brand™

Background

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The School of Athens (Italian: Scuola di Atene) is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael. It was painted between 1509 and 1511 as a part of Raphael's commission to decorate the rooms now known as the Stanze di Raffaello, in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.

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Abstract™ The contemporary practice of branding has gone through many iterations since it’s inception during the Industrial Revolution, and it’s much wider adoption and implementation after the Second World War. Every iteration adapting to changing societal, economic, and technological trends. The Internet, and more specifically the migration of human interaction onto the Internet has led to one of the biggest changes to the practice of branding, where brands take on the attributes of people and people take on the attributes of branding. Even the term “brand” has joined the larger cultural lexicon in a way it never had before. Historically its been a term limited to those involved in marketing and corporate design, but with the rise of social media the term has come to mean a myriad of ways in which an individual, company, or entity represent and translate themselves into a digital space. This is the crux of where the confusion between brand and person occurs.

The embedding of social networks into the fabric of our society and economic models has immensely changed how both brands and individuals connect to others, whether those be friends, colleagues, customers, or all of those at once. The possibilities for users of these social networks to commodify their actions and personas has appealed obviously to brands, but individuals as well, largely party of the economic trend of the gig economy where individuals are not only encouraged but almost expected to commodify their free time. For the individual this has been manifested in the “personal brand,” a term coined in the Nineties to help professionals market and On Brand™

distinguish their professional skills better. This has morphed as the Web’s technology and profit models have evolved to represent a larger trend of individuals branding themselves as a means of commodification, using the rhetoric of corporate branding in how they represent themselves on the Internet.

The state of branding Online is not inherently problematic, at its core it seeks to empower individuals to take control of their identities and seek out new economic opportunities, and allows brands to better connect and listen to the demand of their customers. But this practice of brands as people and people as brands as it exists now, and should it continue on its same trajectory, is both unethical and unsustainable.

It is unethical in how it cheapens the self, and dehumanizes users of these networks. Brands humanizing themselves to an uncanny degree confuses the idea of selfhood, modeling normative human behavior on the internet as self-commodifying. Branding works as an interface to communicate a story of a company to consumers. Users on the Internet have taken aspects of this stye of corporate branding to represent their “authentic” selves by saying that they are actually representing themselves authentically, a rhetorical paradox that suggests that it is normative to be inauthentic online. In it’s current iteration, the trend of self branding online models corporate business ethics as the way that individuals should conduct and represent themselves to others online.

This practice is unsustainable in how this economic trend is dependent on the design of these networks which, rather than being designed organically by the actions and wants of society writ large, are at the discretion of private companies’ notions of how these platforms should be designed to increase profits from themselves first and foremost.

Background

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Thesis Statement™

On Brand™

The commodification of Online spaces has led to the dehumanization of users by confusing the delineation between the individual and the brand.

There must be a paradigm shift in how the Internet is designed in order to prevent this confusion further.

Background

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Celebrities are among the most notable personal brands who in turn become corporations, trademarking their name. Above shows the trademark application submitted by the American model and influencer Kendall Jenner (b.1995).

Here she is submitting a trademark request for her own name.

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Miquela Sousa, or Lil Miquela, is a character which was created

by Trevor McFedries and Sara DeCou. The project began in 2016 as an Instagram profile. She is notable for being engaing with users and promoting products as if she were a real human.

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Chapter

02 Agora

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A Social Network for

r People, Not Brands

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Agora™ The contemporary practice of branding has gone through many iterations since it’s inception during the Industrial Revolution, and it’s much wider adoption and implementation after the Second World War. Every iteration adapting to changing societal, economic, and technological trends. The Internet, and more specifically the migration of human interaction onto the Internet has led to one of the biggest changes to the practice of branding, where brands take on the attributes of people and people take on the attributes of branding. Even the term “brand” has joined the larger cultural lexicon in a way it never had before. Historically its been a term limited to those involved in marketing and corporate design, but with the rise of social media the term has come to mean a myriad of ways in which an individual, company, or entity represent and translate themselves into a digital space. This is the crux of where the confusion between brand and person occurs.

The embedding of social networks into the fabric of our society and economic models has immensely changed how both brands and individuals connect to others, whether those be friends, colleagues, customers, or all of those at once. The possibilities for users of these social networks to commodify their actions and personas has appealed obviously to brands, but individuals as well, largely party of the economic trend of the gig economy where individuals are not only encouraged but almost expected to commodify their free time. For the individual this has been manifested in the “personal brand,” a term coined in the Nineties to help professionals market and On Brand™

Background

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Quaker meetings were another reference, these are meetings where all attendants must remain silent. They are only allowed to speak when they feel the spirit compels them. I was attracted to this as a concept for social media as a way to cut down on meaningless talk meant to fill silences.

On Brand™

distinguish their professional skills better. This has morphed as the Web’s technology and profit models have evolved to represent a larger trend of individuals branding themselves as a means of commodification, using the rhetoric of corporate branding in how they represent themselves on the Internet.

The state of branding Online is not inherently problematic, at its core it seeks to empower individuals to take control of their identities and seek out new economic opportunities, and allows brands to better connect and listen to the demand of their customers. But this practice of brands as people and people as brands as it exists now, and should it continue on its same trajectory, is both unethical and unsustainable.

It is unethical in how it cheapens the self, and dehumanizes users of these networks. Brands humanizing themselves to an uncanny degree confuses the idea of selfhood, modeling normative human behavior on the internet as self-commodifying. Branding works as an interface to communicate a story of a company to consumers. Users on the Internet have taken aspects of this stye of corporate branding to represent their “authentic” selves by saying that they are actually representing themselves authentically, a rhetorical paradox that suggests that it is normative to be inauthentic online. In it’s current iteration, the trend of self branding online models corporate business ethics as the way that individuals should conduct and represent themselves to others online.

This practice is unsustainable in how this economic trend is dependent on the design of these networks which, rather than being designed organically by the actions and wants of society writ large, are at the discretion of private companies’ notions of how these platforms should be designed to increase profits from themselves first and foremost.

Background

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Strategy

On Brand™

Process

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Value Attributes

Open-M

Compassionate

Knowledge

Story-

Minded

-Driven

Humanistic

Intellectual

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Brand Purpose

The purporse of this brand is to fill the void that is left by other social media platforms.

It is clear that there is a lot of fatigue from users about the combination of the commodification of these platforms and the omnipresent use of brands on them as well.

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Unique Positioning Statement

A social media designed for the humans, not brands.

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Finance Model

The brand would be a non-profit foundation that is funded primarily via donations and sales of official brand merchandise to support the operations of the the social media platform.

Similar to the finance model of Wikimedia.

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User Journey

1. Awareness The user hears about the brand from posters and print advertisement throughout the city.

It is primarily located near libraries, museums, universities, and other public gathering spaces.

2. Consideration

3. Conv

The user hears from friends about the brand. They express how much they enjoy being offline but still are able to connect with both new and known people.

The user goe of the brand tial areas spreading t everywhere. engage in co and meet new and their fr

TESTIMONIALS

They are giv portunity to for the Book The Book is discovering alized conte topics from around the

version

es to one d’s spawhich are to cities There they onversation w people riends.

ven the opo sign up k. a way of personent, and people world.

4. Customer Service

5. Loyalty

The user gets their first and builds it out with all of their interests. Its very easy and intuitive.

But they still dont know how fulfilling it will be since they mail their book off the next day.

The user has been using the brand every week for a month and going to the Space.

They have not been on social media digital social media in a long time.

Then the next week they get a new persons book, filled with articles and correspondence from other people with similar interests.

They read it and add to the conversation, and send it out in a week.

They feel fulfilled being able to connect to new people and stay in touch with friends, and still be able to learn. The brand has become a part of their weekly routine

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Visual Language

The Visual Language for the Agora's brand ranging from Typefaces, color and more.

On Brand™

Process

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Typography Headline

Editorial New FOXES RUN, they go wildly.

Gamely Weaving Betwixt the weeping willows and bouncing with a jovial nature amongst the sophisticated toadstools and burrows.

ABCDEFGHI JKLMNOPQR STUVWXYZ abcdefghi jklmnopqr stuvwxyz 1234567890 !?@#$%&*)(.

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Typography Secondary

Suisse Neue FOXES RUN, they go wildly.

Gamely Weaving Betwixt the weeping willows and bouncing with a jovial nature amongst the sophisticated toadstools and burrows.

t

ABCDEFGHIJ KLMNOPQRS TUVWXYZ abcdefghi jklmnopqr stuvwxyz 1234567890 !?@#$%&*)(.

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Typography Body

Lyon Display FOXES RUN,

they go wildly.

Gamely Weaving Betwixt the weeping willows and bouncing with a jovial nature amongst the sophisticated toadstools and burrows.

ABCDEFGHIJK LMNOPQRSTU VWXYZ abcdefghi jklmnopqr stuvwxyz 1234567890 !?@#$%&*)(.

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Typography

Accent & Type as Image

Ogg (Italic)

FOXES RUN,

they go wildly.

Gamely Weaving Betwixt the weeping willows and bouncing with a jovial nature amongst the sophisticated toadstools and burrows.

,

ABCDEFGH IJKLMNOPQ RSTUVWXYZ abcdefghi jklmnopqr stuvwxyz 1234567890 !?@#$%&*)(.

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Color

C 69 M 69 Y 0 K 0 R 105 G 105 B 234 Hex# 6969ea

C 23 M 11 Y 74 K 0 R 203 G 204 B 105 Hex# cbcb69

C 1 M 71 Y 60 K 0 R 239 G 110 B 96 Hex# ef6e60

C 67 M 40 Y 50 K 12 R 91 G 121 B 117 Hex# 5b7975

C 48 M 49 Y 0 K 0 R 150 G 135 B 255 Hex# 9687ff

C 24 M 0 Y 75 K 0 R 203 G 227 B 103 Hex# cbe367

C 11 M 14 Y 0 K 0 R 220 G 215 B 255 Hex# dcd7ff

C 53 M 23 Y 44 K 1 R 127 G 164 B 149 Hex# 7fa495

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Logo

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Logo

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Agora Space

On Brand™

The spatial area is the main touchpoint of the Brand. It is where users can go to hang out and engage in conversation. They can only go and talk or not talk. No computers or phones allowed. (Forums, Speaches, Book/Film Clubs) Process

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Agoras are located near universities and libraries, where they can be accessed and discovered easily. Knowledge about it is pread by word of mouth.

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As members enter the Agora the days events are advertised at the entrance. It's part of the visual identity system where user's utilize handwriting to write their messaging.

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The Amphitheater is a holdover from the ancient Athenean Agoras. It is where events are held and where members can organize their talks and clubs.

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The Library is where members can go to look at resources and can archive their profile books so that other members can communicate with each other.

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The Community Events wall is where members can post their events, club meetings, film screenings, and other such things.

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WHY POSTERS? Agora is completely reliant on print and analog solutions to typical digital strategies of communication for social media brands. While posters are typically a rote means of communication, these posters are meant to be plastered around Agora spaces, as well as user generated posters (see next page).

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Members then go to the registration desk where they can sign up to become a member, receive a profile book, and discover new users.

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Profile Book

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The book is a transitory object where people communicate through writing. That is how they get to know each other, learn, and discover.

A person creates their book and it gets sent to people in the network and others with interests similar to them.

Process

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Members receive their Profile Book along with other materials as part of the onboarding process.

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The Agora Code of Conduct is an important part of the Profile Book.

It steaks out the importance of respectful engagement and interactions. There is zero tolerance for any kind of abuse.

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The Intro section is where users fill out their profile. Rather than introducing themselves with pictures. they draw self-portraits, emphasizing the difference between the authentic self and the represented self.

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The planets, astrology, and mysticism play a significant role in The Holy Mountain. A central sequence of the film in which the signs of the astrological spectrum are personified into corporations. This plays off of the tenets of semiotics where symbols of astrology are turned into brands, mixing identity, capitalism, and spirituality.

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The planets, astrology, and mysticism play a significant role in The Holy Mountain. A central sequence of the film in which the signs of the astrological spectrum are personified into corporations. This plays off of the tenets of semiotics where symbols of astrology are turned into brands, mixing identity, capitalism, and spirituality.

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03 Process Sketchbook - Notes - Sketches - Scribblings - Ramblings Ideation - Early ideas Notes App

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Notes App

Ramblings, notes, quotes and musings that I collected in the Notes App on my iPhone. Note started in September, 2020.

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Notebook

Notes, sketches, and ideas that I have jotted down in my Moleskine notebook.

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04 Literature Review

The establishing research and literature that was the foundation of this thesis.

This includes an Annotated Bibliography of all foundational works and references.

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Annotated Bibliography™

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de Swaan Arons, Marc. “How Brands Were Born: A Brief History of Modern Marketing.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 3 Oct. 2011 The contemporary concept of branding was born out of the standardization of products that became widely available across the country.

“In the 1950s, consumer packaged goods companies like Procter and Gamble, General Foods and Unilever developed the discipline of brand management, or marketing as we know it today, when they noticed the quality levels of products being offered by competitors around them improve. A brand manager would be responsible for giving a product an identity that distinguished it from nearly indistinguishable competitors.”

The late 1980s and 1990s saw branding become less product oriented and more lifestyle oriented.

This is seen in retailers focusing on branding more, and the broadening of branding from just corporations to all sizes of businesses.

“Now, a decade into the 21st century, the market looks very different to just 20 years ago. The explosion of branded offerings is overwhelming and confusing consumers and causing an ever-increasing headache for the leaders of 'traditional' brands. The average western consumer is exposed to some 3,000 brand messages a day.”

With the standardization of products, there were many that looked almost identical to each other, so marketing and brand strategies were implemented to give these products a story. Building these stories required understanding the customer demographics.

Kurtuldu, M. (n.d.). Brand new: The history of branding.

Design Today.

Modern branding was born in England in the 1800s where Pitchmen were granted patents to sell medicines and sanitary products, which were the most profitable market sectors then. The 1890s saw consumer demand rising with Industrialization and so mail order catalogue arose with the expansion of the postal service. The population was empowered to buy status, which was amplified in the 1920s when the west evolved from a culture of want to a culture of need (due to the returns of colonialism mixed with industrialization).

1940s saw the rise of brand identity after the rise of large numbers of standardized products. This was the birth of the Unique Selling Proposition as terminology (USP).

“The goal of any brand is to reach the zeitgeist of the age. Once it enters that spirit and establishes itself as unique, it transcends from being just a brand to something much more. One clue to see if a brand has achieved this is parodies and association. The fact that Apple were and still are essentially advertising IBM in their own USP as a means to tell the world they are a tech company but not like IBM is quite ironic.”

1960s saw the rise of semiotics and word play in branding and advertising. Companies were not just named anymore after the founders.

It also saw the rising importance of brand mission statements and storytelling. This led to the origination of brands fabricating or embellishing their brand stories to fit the zeitgeist consumer needs.

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Case Study: Danish dairy was considered the best in the world which is how Haagen Daaz developed its name despite being from Brooklyn originally.

“Selling the myth of the culture with a brand had become fundamental.”

1980s which celebrated opulence and decadence, with diminishing returns on those brand promises led to the distrust of brands with too high promises. This gave way to Adbusters.

Today. Brands live and die by the consumers will in an instant. Many brands try and hop on the back of trends that have been pioneered by other brands, such as mimicking Apple’s brand language, but the issue with why they are not as resonant is that their language does not come organically from the brand story.

Redding, Dan. The history of logos and logo design — Smashing magazine. (2010, July 6). Smashing Magazine.

Logos have their origin in ancient marks and symbols.

From ancient cultural symbols and images to printer’s marks.

“For most Western viewers, the image of an apple summons our associations with nature, food, the ‘forbidden fruit’ in the Garden of Eden, Snow White, Apple computers, et cetera. To design a logo with symbolic resonance is to participate in the lineage of social dialogue.”

Contemporary logo design comes from the 20th Century but has roots in the industrial revolution. It was in the 20th Century that brand identity expanded and the logo was not the sole identifier of a company. It became one element in a broader visual language system.

“In order to be successful multinational corporations, you need to produce brands, not products.”

-Naomi Klein “Now that the whole world has been branded, the Twentieth Century approach to branding is old school. I’ll call our present day in age the Brand Era. The logo has evolved from a mark of quality on a product to a visual distillation of a cultural ideal — one that’s capable of accruing or asserting brand equity in a variety of marketing environments and inspiring great allegiance among consumers.”

“In this twenty-first century brand space, Nike is no longer a shoe company — it is a concept that represents transcendence through sports.”

Background

Corporations now want to capture the same branding ethos that companies like Nike that designers throw around words like brand worlds and brand landscapes.

These worlds are helpful in some contexts because they recognize that branding can be reactive, and a successful branding strategy requires constant adaptation.

Redding poses the question if there will be a Post-Brand era. Naomi Klein asserts that that many brands “have transcended beyond the realm of things” meaning that the brand identity has for some come to hold more value than the production of physical products. Technology will increase this trend as brands become more ubiquitous in our lives.

Redding points to the MTV logo as revolutionary in how it was a system that constantly allowed the logo to change. Branding will continue to expand into new territories, they won’t go anywhere. They just need to learn how to be adaptive to new forms and expectations from consumers.

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Almeida, Fernando. (2017). Concept and Dimensions of Web 4.0. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMPUTERS & TECHNOLOGY. 16. 7040-7046.

Web 4.0 is a new evolution of the Web paradigm based "pervasive computing" and "ubiquitous computing" are on multiple models, technologies and social relation- the most widely used in the literature. On the other side, ships. The concept of Web 4.0 is not totally clear and terms such as "Web 4.0", "symbiotic Web" and "Web sounanimous in literature, because it is composed by cial computing" are not often used several dimensions. In this sense, this study uses a systematic review approach to clarify the concept of Web 4.0 and explore its various dimensions, analyzing if they have elements in common. The findings indicate that the number of studies published from 2009 to 2017 on this field significantly increased, having reached a peak in 2014. Furthermore, we identified five dimensions associated with the Web 4.0 paradigm, in which the terms

Basar, Shumon, Douglas Coupland, Hans U. Obrist, and Wayne Daly. The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present. , 2015. Print.

“50 years after Marshall McLuhan's ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture in The Medium is the Massage, Basar, Coupland and Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that’s redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the 'extreme present'.

THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors offer five characteristics of the Extreme Present (see below); invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and ‘mindsource’ images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly’s striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It’s like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read.

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Welcome to THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn’t just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it’s also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket.”

McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. The Medium Is the Massage. New York: Bantam Books.

“Marshall McLuhan was a visionary, far ahead of his time. The Canadian was a philosopher and professor but could perhaps be best described as a communications theorist. The book is actually called “The Medium is the Massage” due to a mistake from the typesetters, but when McLuhan saw the error, he loved it and kept it as it was. Perhaps this was because McLuhan thought media “massage” the brain to behave in particular ways.

So, the medium is the message — what does it mean? Quite simply, it means that the way that we send and receive information is more important than the information itself. Where we were once consumers, consuming information by watching television or listening to the radio, in the 21st century we have now also become producers, creating our own information as well. For example, after watching the latest episode of a television series, we can now instantly connect with anyone, anywhere in the world who also watched the programme and communicate with them."

The mediums have changed the way we behave. Studies have shown that our memory spans have reduced due to digital technology. News stories have been replaced with 140 character tweets. Conversations have been replaced with emojis.

olent civil disobedience which resulted in the eventual overthrow of the government.

McLuhan prophesied that “Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know.” Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing revelations in 2013 exposed the 24/7 global surveillance intelligence agencies and governments undertake on their citizens. The public opinion of Snowden ranges from hero to traitor and underlines the dilemma that affects our society.

In McLuhan’s world, he refers to “One big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption”. We can see present day examples of this where tweets and comments posted online have resulted in job dismissals, arrests and online abuse. The deleting of these tweets or comments has minimal effect — anything posted on the internet potentially could last forever.

“Real, total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric informational media — under cold conditions, and constantly.”

Anecdotally, I’ve heard of young children trying to turn the noise of their parents arguing down with a remote control. When reading a book I’ve had to stop myself moving my hand to press on a word to get the dictionary definition, after becoming familiar with the kindle’s user interface.

This quote from McLuhan in his book has been proven true multiple times in the past, most recently with the 2016 United States presidential election. The battle for the White House was multi-faceted and complex, but information and propaganda was key, with both sides working hard to broadcast their views. The two protagonists, Trump and Clinton tried to influence the public, with information from WikiLeaks and alleged actions from Russia taking centre stage.

For McLuhan watching television changed the way we looked at the world. He said “It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media.”

This has developed in the modern world with social media playing an important part in various civil and cultural events. The Egyptian revolution of 2011 was a successful uprising in part due to the extensive use of Facebook and other social media. Online activism helped to organize and publicize demonstrations and acts of non-vi-

Marshall McLuhan was seen as an odd character by many. He claimed to only read the right hand page of serious books as he found books have huge redundancy. By reading only the right-hand pages he stays wide awake, filling in the other page with his own thoughts.

The most incredible aspect of McLuhan’s claims was that they were made nearly 40 years ago, in 1967, before social media, the world-wide web or the internet even existed. His prediction of an international, interconnected, interactive global village is now an actuality.”

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Alter, Adam. “Why It’s Dangerous to Label People.”

Psychology Today.

Linguistic Relativity was proposed by Benjamin Whorf.

According to his hypothesis, the words we use to describe what we see aren't just idle placeholders; they determine what we see.

or the black category. For half the students, the face was described as belonging to a white man, and for the other half, it was described as belonging to a black man.”

“Labels shape more than our perception of color; they also change how we perceive more complex targets, like people. Jennifer Eberhardt, a social psychologist at Stanford, and her colleagues showed white college students pictures of a man who was racially ambiguous; he could have plausibly fallen into the white category

Labels and categorization are informed by our personal / societal /economic and racial histories. Brands open up a new potential for categorization. They are merely an extension of existing categorization of persons, privileging those with the resources to brand themselves.

Lair, Daniel J., et al. “Marketization and the Recasting of the Professional Self: The Rhetoric and Ethics of Personal Branding.” Management Communication Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 3, Feb. 2005, pp. 307–343.

Abstract: Within the personal branding movement, people and their careers are marketed as brands complete with promises of performance, specialized designs, and tag lines for success. Because personal branding offers such a startlingly overt invitation to self-commodification, the phenomenon invites a careful and searching analysis. This essay begins by examining parallel developments in contemporary communication and employment climates and exploring how personal branding arises as (perhaps) an extreme form of a market-appropriate response. The contours of the personal branding movement are then traced, emphasizing the rhetorical tactics with which it responds to increasingly complex communication and employment environments. Next, personal branding is examined with a critical eye to both its effects on individuals and the power relations it instantiates on the basis of social categories such as gender, age, race, and class. Finally, the article concludes by reflecting on the broader ethical implications of personal branding as a communication strategy.

The authors setup a dichotomy of definitions between branding and personal branding. “we define branding as a programmatic approach to the selling of a product, service, organization, cause, or person that is fashioned as a proactive response to the emerging desires of a target audience or market (see Cheney &Christensen, 2001).” “personal branding, the concepts of product development and promotion are used to market persons for entry into or transition within the labor market.”

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“Although the use of such strategies for self-promotion in the business world is certainly nothing new, personal branding as a movement broadens their impact by turning branding from a simple business tactic into an ideological understanding of the corporate world capable of an embracing influence over workers’ very sense of self.”

This is in response to the existential questions of personal branding. What is unique about you and distinguishable? What is remarkable and notable about you?

What is genuinely real and authentic about you?

POSITIONING PERSONAL BRANDING Personal Branding arose in the late 1990s when corporate communication and employment worlds both observed the chaotic nature of the other’s environment. Personal branding connected these two worlds of corporate communication and employment systems. Allowed practitioners to position themselves as communicators and prospective employees.

Corporate communication uses branding to make “direct, clear, and persistent bonds between symbols and products or services.” Branding and its association its correlation between products and a readily identifiable name enjoyed its heyday from 1920s to 1970s.

This changed in the 1980s as competition arose through the broadening of marketing channels and globalized channels (1980s saw the rise of the brand as lifestyle, and beginning of niche marketing). Globalization created major worldwide brands, leading to an overall decline in mid-size brands. (now there is just room for mega-brands, and small brands).

By 2000 the branding field diversified. Iterations included: “consumer branding, types of branding include

retail brands, product brands, corporate brands (Olins, 2000), and,we would add, personal brand.”

than an attempt to authentically/earnestly market oneself.

Personal branding is the logical extension of these previous iterations of branding. Celebrities had long been doing it. In the late 1990s, David Bowie’s initial public offering in “Bowie Bonds” raised $55 million, and James Brown sold $30 million worth of stock in his future earnings (Peters, 1999).

EMERGENCE OF PERSONAL BRANDING The popularization of personal branding is generally attributed to Peters’s (1997) article in Fast Company, entitled “The Brand Called You” (cf. Diekmeyer, 1999)

“How to Win Friends and Influence People” Carnegie (1936/1982) is an early example of personal branding movement. Promised to give individuals control over their own economic destiny. * This can be made as a parallel to the gig economy. Individuals who seek to have control over their financial future. The carrot being held in front of individuals to be freed from salaried futures devoid of agency. * Personal Branding can be attributed to a quest for agency as the consolodation of corporate branding, and capitol is condensed into limited holdings.

Now the corporate reliance on symbols to sell products has imploded because the market has become too saturated with symbols that they have begun to lose significance. The use of person-first branding is a response to this, influencers are much more likely to influence consumers and resonate over a symbol.

“Branding itself may be seen within this broader communicative and cultural context. The progress from consumer branding to company branding to the branding of a person and a career is hardly surprising when we consider the push for consolidating the branding movement via an ideology of individual efficacy, identity, and control.

In a way, this development represents the ultimate marriage of marketing culture with the mythos of the American individual: In a world of change and opportunity, you can create and recreate yourself so as to be the master of your own destiny." * The rise of the personal brand can be linked to the globalization of American culture over the internet.

The internet’s alignment of individual self interest with that of American culture.

"In addition, personal branding carries the elevation of image over substance one step further: The world of appearance is not only articulated and accepted, it is valorized and held up as the only reasonable way to negotiate the contemporary world of work and professions. In short, the personal branding movement positions workers as irrational when they attempt to preserve and promote what they experience as their true or authentic selves.

Personal branding, then, promotes a hyper-individuality based on a lack of deeper identity and self-awareness. *The key difference between self-promotion (in the classical sense) and branding is the heightening of identity and self-awareness of experience, rather

Background

At least 15 books on personal digital branding were published between 1997 – 2005.

Personal branding strategies typically make appeals to commodify the self by suggesting they promote themselves as a product.

I AM MY PROJECTS. (p. 41) Everybody is a package. (“He’s a ball of fire.” “She’s a pistol.” “He’s the biggest bore I’ve ever met.”) The trick for Brand You is making sure you control your package and the message it sends. (p. 46) A personal brand is a synecdoche of a person.

Personal branding was popular in the early 2000s and late 90s because of the perceived economic freedom and agency it potentially allowed practitioners. Critics then mainly focused critiques on the earnestness of these practices.

The model of power exhibited in personal branding discourse’s call to self-commodification is a different brand of power than the overt commodification-as-domination thesis offered by Marx (1867/1967). “discourses such as personal branding invite individuals to consent to their own self-packaging all the while celebrating their sense of personal efficacy.”

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Peters, Tom. (1997). The Brand Called You. Fast Company, 10, 83. Retrieved November 11, 2003, from www.fastcompany.com/magazine/10/brandyou.html *originator of bringing personal branding as a term and practice into mainstream discourse.

Tagline: Big companies understand the importance of brands. Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand. Here’s what it takes to be the CEO of Me Inc. Peters makes the argument that as consumers, wearing branded products and apparel such as Nike and Champion, we have already commodified ourselves. So the next logical step is to commodify our identities. His argument is blythely American individualist in how it espouses our identities as CEO of ourselves, regardless of age, race, class, social standing.

“The real action is at the other end: the main chance is becoming a free agent in an economy of free agents, looking to have the best season you can imagine in your field, looking to do your best work and chalk up a remarkable track record, and looking to establish your own micro equivalent of the Nike swoosh.”

To do this is the responsibly opportunist position to have a leg up in the “next wave of the free-agency market.” To do otherwise is laziness because everything that can be gained from personal branding is just within “lap-top’s reach.” This comment, based in the 90s, predicts the gig economy of the future. The gig economy is the result of the further consolidation of corporate brands, where there is now only room for mega brands and the small entrepreneur.

Peters argues that personal branding is a way to create social standing. He puts this in the hypothetical example of who’s emails to respond to first, arguing the

person with the stronger brand equity is the person you shall respond to first on email. What this amounts to is a neo-capitalist restructuring of class, and a reframing of it in the advent of American entrepreneurialism. American identity is rooted in the notion that one can work their way to the top of the class ladder, as opposed to true class structures where one’s position is immobile.

What is transparent in Peter’s argument is that he posits personal branding as a neo-capitalist self-help methodology for how to achieve the American dream when the internet has been established as the dominant medium of commerce. It echoes the sentiment of the pioneers of the 1800s in America, rushing to stake out their claim of the American frontier.

While the majority of these arguments seems rooted in an American-centric point of view, the American economic model has developed as the dominant one of the internet. This being that wealth and social mobility are available to those who work hard and “hustle” for any opportunity to make money.

“You’re every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop.”

“You’re not an 'employee' of General Motors, you’re not a “staffer” at General Mills, you’re not a 'worker' at General Electric or a 'human resource' at General Dynamics (ooops, it’s gone!). Forget the Generals! You don’t 'belong to' any company for life, and your chief affiliation isn’t to any particular 'function.'

You’re not defined by your job title and you’re not confined by your job description.”

This reads as a self-help mantra of self actualization by way of self-commodification.

Peters, Tom (1999). The Brand You 50. New York: Knopf.

I am as good as my last-next gig. (p. 5) Survivors will “be” a product . . . and exhibit clear cut distinction at . . . something. (p. 9)

Everybody is a package. (“He’s a ball of fire.” “She’s a pistol.” “He’s the biggest bore I’ve ever met.”) The trick for Brand You is making sure you control your package and the message it sends. (p. 46)

I AM MY PROJECTS. (p. 41)

Phillipson, I. (2002). Married to the job: Why we live to work and what we can do about it. New York: Free Press.

“Peters’ latest book [Brand You 50] is a blatant call to transform the self into an instrumental object that is constituted and directed by the market. It fundamentally eschews a self that longs for true recognition and acceptance. Instead, it places a

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premium on those of us who can shift our needs and personae to accommodate the twists and turns of today’s economy. (p. 99)” (Phillipson, 2002)

“10 Reasons to Resist the Personal Branding Rage.”

BachelorsDegreeOnline.com, 23 Aug. 2019.

1. It’s dehumanizing

between brands and people. We require validation and commercial rewards, brands dont typically need that.

2. its ego-stroking/narcissistic distraction 3. personal branding is just marketing yourself, nothing new. It’s just a buzzword/trend.

4. It will be replaced with a trendy term later (valid, but its replacement will be positioned as more valid some and more sinister to others) 5. It shoves people into boxes. Playing to a Meyers Briggs or astrological need to define ourselves and categorize our identities.

6. It limits thinking. Runs the risk of stereotyping oneself.

Playing into what a branded (insert race) (insert gender) etc. can look like. What identity is considered more marketable over others?

7. Personal branders cant take the criticism. Not valid, its an arbitrary argument. But a valid take could be that we cant criticize individuals in the same way that we criticize/judge companies.

8. Requires too much validation from other people.

Non-argument, but i guess it points to the difference

Background

9. Shifts focus from sincerity. Encourages individuals to engage in dishonest branding practices.

10. Relies too much on social media. THIS IS THE BEST POINT FROM THIS ARTICLE!!!!!! So smart because unlike other brands personal brands really do not have the ability to disseminate their brand across as many touchpoints as brands. *Are personal brands really brands or are they just a veneer of self promotion and a way of categorizing how we interact and construct ourselves on the internet?

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Business of Fashion Team, et al. “The Evolution of the Influencer Economy.” Business of Fashion. Web. May 8, 2018.

“Now when I’m working with brands, it’s not to sell products… It’s to change their way of approaching a customer or product.” Nicolette Mason, Social Media Influencer Brands partner with influencers because they will become brands themselves one day. They also provide an interface with niche markets that they would otherwise have a hard time capturing. Influencers are an intermediary, who can translate one brand’s messaging through their own to act as B2B marketing.

Influencers also provide a credibility to brands who might otherwise lack diversity/inclusivity in their marketing/branding practices. It is akin to having a micro rebrand for minimal cost that is outsourced to a different distributor.

“In other words, influencers are no longer just peddling products directly from brands to their follow-

ers. They’re creating campaigns around a brand for a company and even building their own brands, as Mason did.”

The most important thing is the credibility of the relationship between the influencer and they brand they are working with. How integrated the product/service is into their routine makes a difference. It is all about a genuine connection.

To brands, especially trend-focused brands like those in the fashion industry, influencers act as a form of retail channels/outlets that are hyper specialized. *How genuine can a connection be when there is a monetary incentive behind it?

Lorusso, Silvio. Everyone is an Entrepreneur. Nobody is Safe (2018). Krisis Publishing.

Abstract: “In this pocket-sized paperback volume, Italian writer and conceptual artist Silvio Lorusso guides us through this era of the “entreprecariat,” or the relationship between entrepreneurship and precarity.

The precariat class consists of those whose working lives are comprised of disjointed bits, lacking financial or professional stability. In our entreprecarious society, everyone is an entrepreneur and nobody is stable.

Through analyses of memes, photographs and advertisements, Lorusso explores tensions surrounding labor, productivity, autonomy and failure while dissecting the media objects that encourage a precarious lifestyle. Precarious economic conditions demand an entrepreneurial attitude, while entrepreneurialism breeds instability and change; thus, entreprecarity is characterized by a cognitive dissonance. Lorusso wea-

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ponizes irony and sarcasm in order to shift our collective understanding of work ethic, labor, leisure, production and competition” ENTREPRECARIAT: The state of being an entrepreneur defined by existing in precarity.

SOCIAL MEDIA BUSINESS MODELS

Falch, Morten & Henten, Anders & Tadayoni, Reza & Windekilde, Iwona. (2009). Business Models in Social Networking.

Facebook was launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. They are thus very new service platforms but they already have millions of users and their valuation is counted in billions of US$. This is an extraordinary development, which one will not find in any other line of business, and it illustrate the power of network effects, where the utility of the individual users depends on the presence and usage of the network by other users. The cases described in the present paper

are clearly examples of web 2.0 services, where the services provided by the networks are dependent upon content created by the users.

Kokavcova, Dagmar. The Social Media Business Model.

(2017). Matej University.

Written in 2017, this paper looks holistically at the monetization of activity on social media platforms. Looks at how to build an ITC and introduce entrepreneurial model for aspiring entrepreneurs. It looks at social media, especially blogs, as a major current trend in the online business world.

Direct Monetization: when a blogger is earning money through blog directly. Blogs give independence but must rely on social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al) to drive traffic to content.

Advertising: Requires strong readership for one’s blog or social media page.

Publishing books/merchandise: is a common way to increase profits. It exists outside of relying on third parties advertisers as middle men for profits.

Indirect Monetization: Speaking opportunities, employment opportunities, brand ambassador roles.

“Some consider blogging as an outlet and consider it purely as a hobby. Moreover, in the blogosphere are bloggers who despise the idea of earning money from it… Other might want to take blogging into the next level which means make it their part/fulltime job transforming hobby into a business career.

Factors that influence social media business models are availability, low entry costs, the number of innovative revenue models, the popularity of social media. The success of a blog depends on consistency, quality of content, trustworthiness, and engagement with the audience."

Johnston, Matthew. “How Facebook Makes Money.”

Investopedia, Investopedia, 7 Oct. 2020.

Facebook Inc. (FB) primarily makes money by selling advertising space on its various social media platforms.

Facebook sells ads on social media websites and mobile applications.

Ad sales are the primary source of Facebook's revenue.

Facebook's business has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and faces heightened uncertainty in its business outlook.

More than 1,000 groups and companies staged an advertising boycott of Facebook in July. Facebook is facing an antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.

“Facebook posted $18.3 billion in advertising revenue in Q2 2020, comprising 98% of the company's total revenue. Ad revenue grew by 10.2% in Q2

Background

compared to the same three-month period a year ago.”

“Facebook was once gain forced to defend its reputation this summer as more than 1,000 groups and companies took part in an advertising boycott of Facebook during the month of July. The goal of the boycott was to pressure the social networking giant to do a better job of stopping the spread of hate speech and misinformation on its platforms.”

“Facebook is also still under investigation by the FTC for possible anticompetitive practices. A big focus of the FTC's antitrust investigation is whether Facebook has engaged in a strategy of buying up potential rivals in order to limit potential future competitive threats to its business.”

Chapter

05 On

Branding Sketchbook - Notes - Sketches - Scribblings - Ramblings Ideation - Early ideas Notes App

Wha Brand

at is dng?

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Collected Branding Definitions ↳“Branding is the process where a business makes itself known to the public and differentiates itself from competitors. Branding typically includes a phrase, design or idea that makes it easily identifiable to the public.”

Indeed.com Branding Definition ↳“Branding is endowing products and services with the power of a brand” Kotler & Keller, 2015 ↳“Branding is the process of giving a meaning to specific organization, company, products or services by creating and shaping a brand in consumers’ minds. It is a strategy designed by organizations to help people to quickly identify and experience their brand, and give them a reason to choose their products over the competition’s, by clarifying what this particular brand is and is not.” ↳“A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers” American Marketing Association ↳“A brand is a reason to choose."

Cheryl Burgess – Blue Focus Marketing ↳“You can consider a brand as the idea or image people have in mind when thinking about specific products, services and activities of a company, both in a practical (e.g. “the shoe is light-weight”) and emotional way (e.g. “the shoe makes me feel powerful”). It is therefore not just the physical features that create a brand but also the feelings that consumers develop towards the company or its product. This combination of physical and emotional cues is triggered when exposed to the name, the logo, the visual identity, or even the message communicated." ↳“A product can be easily copied by other players in a market, but a brand will always be unique. For example, Pepsi and Coca-Cola taste very similar, however for some reason, some people feel more connected to Coca-Cola, others to Pepsi. ¶ Brand is a known identity of a company in terms of On Brand™

what products and services they offer but also the essence of what the company stands for in terms of service and other emotional, non tangible consumer concerns. To brand something is when a company or person makes descriptive and evocative communications, subtle and overt statements that describe what the company stands for. For example, is the brand the most economical, does it stands for superior service, is it an environmental responsible provider of x,y,z service or product. Each communication is deliberate in evoking emotion in the receiver to leave him/her with an essence of what the company or person stands for.”

Donna Antonucci ↳“Branding is the art of aligning what you want people to think about your company with what people actually do think about your company. And vice-versa. " Jay Baer – Convince & Convert. Author with Amber Naslund of The Now Revolution ↳“A brand is the essence of one’s own unique story. This is as true for personal branding as it is for business branding. The key, though, is reaching down and pulling out the authentic, unique “you”. Otherwise, your brand will just be a facade. The power of a strong logo in brand identity is that a simple visual can instantaneously communicate a brand and what it is about. Some large brands are able to do this by symbol only, without words, that is the Holy Grail that brands dream about. This seems to represent the very essence of communication at its most primitive roots. Few can pull it off. Logos are vitally important, but are just one component of what creates a strong brand. Logos should support the broader brand strategy that supports an even bigger brand story."

Paul Biedermann – re:DESIGN ↳“A brand symbol as “anything that leaves a mental picture of the brand’s identity."

Leo Burnett ↳“Branding is more than a name and symbol. A brand is created and influenced by people, visuals, culture, style, perception, words, messages, PR, opinions, news media and especially social media. Like when a child is born and given a name, a brand needs nurturing, support, development and continuous care in order to thrive and grow. Some brands have a life cycle and grow old like people. Some brands are timeless and never die, are “born again” or reinvented, while some brands live a short but powerful life and have an iconic legacy. " Lisa Buyer – The Buyer Group ↳“Branding is the encapsulation of a company’s mission statement, objectives, and corporate soul as expressed through the corporate voice and aesthetic."

Margie Clayman ↳“Brands are shorthand marketing messages that create emotional bonds with consumers. Brands are composed of intangible elements related Branding History

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to its specific promise, personality, and positioning and tangible components having identifiable representation including logos, graphics, colors and sounds. A brand creates perceived value for consumers through its personality in a way that makes it stand out from other similar products.

Its story is intricately intertwined with the public’s perception and consistently provides consumers with a secure sense that they know what they’re paying for. In a world where every individual is also a media entity, your consumers own your brand (as it always was)."

Heidi Cohen – Riverside Marketing Strategies ↳“Branding, to me, is the identity of a product or service. It’s the name, the logo, the design, or a combination of those that people use to identify, and differentiate, what they’re about to buy. A good brand should deliver a clear message, provide credibility, connect with customers emotionally, motivate the buyer, and create user loyalty."

Gini Dietrich – Spin Sucks ↳“Branding is the sub-total of all the “experiences” your customers have with your business. For successful branding you need to understand the principles of Ivan Pavlov as my brother Jeffrey and I discussed in our Waiting For Your Cat to Bark. For branding to work you must have: Consistency. Pavlov never offered food without ringing the bell and never rang the bell without offering food. Frequency. The bell rang several times a day, day after day. Anchoring. Pavlov tied the experiment to something about which the dog was emotional. Frequency and consistency create branding only when the message is associated with an emotional anchor.

This is the most difficult and essential element to get correct. However, keep in mind Pavlov had an easier time because he chose dogs which are much better at following a leader, today’s customers are more cat like and not as easily persuaded or motivated."

Bryan Eisenberg – Author of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark ↳“In today’s social, customer-controlled world, marketers may be spending their money to build a brand. But they don’t own it. In their influential book, Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff state “your brand is whatever your customers say it is…” As a marketer, this means that, while a brand is the emotional relationship between the consumer and the product, you must engage with consumers and build positive brand associations. The deeper the relationship, the more brand equity exists."

Neil Feinstein – True North ↳“Branding can be divided into old and new.

Old Branding. Advertisers shouting carefully pedicured messages at consumers who don’t want to hear it.

New Branding. Advertisers humbly listening to what consumers tell others the brand is and back up with real action (like repeat purchases) and incorporating appropriate innovations so their products continue to earn consumers’ loyalty and word of mouth."

Dr. Augustine Fou – Marketing Science Consulting Group, Inc.

On Brand™

↳“Branding is an ongoing process of looking at your company’s past and present…and then creating a cohesive personality for the company and its products going forward. We do SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis and go through all the benefits (real and emotional) that the product or service fulfills for its customers. We review the key factors that spurred growth, pricing, corporate culture, key players, and we figure out “who you are”, by key players, the president, customer service. Then we create the brand voice first. It’s a wonderful process."

Lois Geller – Lois Geller Marketing Group ↳“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer."

Seth Godin – Author of Linchpin ↳“Brand is the image people have of your company or product. It’s who people think you are. Or quoting Ze Frank, it’s the “emotional aftertaste” that comes after an experience (even a second-hand one) with a product, service or company. (Also, it’s the mark left after a red-hot iron is applied to a steer’s hindquarters.)"

Ann Handley – MarketingProfs, Author with C.C. Chapman of Content Rules ↳“Attention is a scarce resource. Branding is the experience marketers create to win that attention."

Jeffrey Harmon – Orabrush ↳“Branding is the representation of your organization as a personality.

Branding is who you are that differentiates you."

Dave Kerpen – Likeable Media, Author of Likeable Social Media ↳“A brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or design or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of the competitor."

Phillip Kotler – Author of Marketing Management ↳“That old “a brand is a promise” saw holds true, but only partially true."

Rebecca Lieb, author of The Truth About Search Engine Optimization ↳“Don Zahorsky is an old cattle breeder in my neighborhood. He’s been in the business of registered Angus cattle for decades, even back when my dad was a kid. Ride around in the pasture with Don, and he can tell you the parentage of every animal. “What’s that tag number? 0282? That’s another Dominator son. His mother is a real good cow. Her father was the grand champion … ” He has invested his life in breeding the best registered Angus cattle he possibly can. He’s bought bulls back from people, because he didn’t like the way they performed. He’s never thought once Branding History

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about business brands, about emotional experiences, about logos. But he does care a lot about his reputation and the service he provides his buyers. He brands his bulls with a DZ on the right hip. Everyone around here knows that brand. They know Don. They know that brand means a good bull. Here’s the lesson: It’s not the brand that makes the bull valuable. It’s Don’s reputation that makes the bull valuable. The brand is just a way of showing it."

Becky McCray – Small Business Survival ↳“A brand is a singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of a prospect.”

Al Ries – Author of Positioning: the Battle for Your Mind ↳“A brand is the meaningful perception of a product, a service or even yourself –either good, bad or indifferent — that marketers want people to believe based on what they think they hear, see, smell, taste and generally sense from others around them.

Josh Moritz ↳“A brand is “The intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised.”

David Ogilvy, Author of On Advertising ↳“Branding is the defined personality of a product, service, company, organization or individual. Many folks confuse “having a logo” for an ongoing branding process, but in fact a good logo is an extension of a defined identity for a venture in the same way that a flag or national anthem may represent a country. A well designed brand personality can be seen in everything from customer service to the actual products a company may offer. Another misconception about brands is that they should reflect a quality; and that may be true in a brand that’s about quality (think of a Chanel logo which communicates the idea of luxury) but on the other hand if a local dollar store even has a designed logo that may in fact work against the goals of their brand as they may seem overpriced. Like an artist finding his or her voice the goal of a branding process should be to always frame in a concise way what makes your endeavor unique; and then apply that message to each medium."

Michael Pinto– Very Memorable Design ↳“Brand is the sum total of how someone perceives a particular organization. Branding is about shaping that perception of someone."

Ashley Friedlein – Econsultancy ↳“Branding” is what lazy and ineffective marketing people do to occupy their time and look busy."

David Meerman Scott – Author of Real-Time Marketing and PR ↳“Successful branding is what you do, not what you say or show. Successful branding requires your delivering consistently positive experiences for your constituents. It comes from keeping your promises to them, from earning their trust that your brand will do its best at every point of contact On Brand™

to deliver on what they want and expect from you. This trust leads to their choosing your brand again. Successful brands never take their constituents for granted. They never forget that most important to constituents are what’s in it for them, that constituents are distracted, and you must earn their attention. (Constituents include, depending on your product or service: customers, consumers, suppliers, employees, partners, allies, investors, funders, donors, analysts, critics, unions, regulators, the media, voters, etc.) The logo and theme line are not the brand. The logo symbolizes the brand. The theme line, if it’s any good, uniquely and memorably expresses the brand promise. (Most theme lines fail to do that.)"

Jim Siegel – HealthCare Chaplaincy ↳“General advertising is Cyrano. He comes under your window and sings; people get used to it and ignore it. But if Roxane responds, there’s a relationship. We move the brand relationship up a notch. Advertising becomes a dialogue that becomes an invitation to a relationship.”

Lester Wunderman, Author of Being Direct ↳“A brand is essentially a container for a customer’s complete experience with the product or company.”

Sergio Zyman

Branding History

This word cloud is generated from the collected definitions of branding. The two largest words are “people” and “company” followed by “product,” “services,” and “emotional.” Illustrating the close relationship between branding, business, and human attributes.

Histo Bran

ory of ndng

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History of Modern 1940

1950

1970

1980

2000

2010

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Branding Timeline 1960

1990

2020

Branding History

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1940s The evolution of branding starts in the 1940s. The radio was a popular form of reaching the public as well as catalogs and some print magazines.

Developing a brand image may not have been quite as challenging as it is today because there was far less competition. People couldn’t start a website in their college dorm room and turn it into a multi-billion dollar empire.

guishing these similar products from each other. It was the introduction of storytelling into commerce.

It was a different time in our country and people were supporting the war effort as much as possible. There were some iconic brands founded in this decade, such as Best Western, McDonald’s and Paper Mate.

The market brought about a boom of similar products from different companies. Branding was a way of distin-

1950s he postwar economy was booming by the 1950s. The evolution of branding began to really take off as more Americans began buying homes, cars and products. Television entered homes and TV advertising took off, allowing brands to reach consumers in their homes daily. By the end of the decade, TV commercials reached 90% of homes in the country.

offensive through today’s lens such as the little woman serving the man, but were more acceptable at the time or at least overlooked. Advertisers began to use demographics to target their ads.

Understand the time period as you look at the sample ads below. Women usually didn’t work but cared for the home and children. Some things seem

1960s The 1960s were seen as the era of the ad man. Shows such as “Mad Men” highlight the creativity of the era.

Things were still ticking along pretty nicely with the American economy.

Though society was shifting a little at a time, things were simple and happy. It wouldn’t be until later in the 60s that protests began to erupt and new trends enter the market. Television advertising became prevalent and midcentury modern art grew in popularity.

Some major shifts in the country started in the 1960s. In 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president. Not only was he the youngest president in history, but he was the first Catholic president. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. Many of the baby boomers who were born in the 50s were now in their teens and they were ready for things to change. Advertising had to change with it. The 1960s brought radical changes to the evolution of branding.

On Brand™

1970s

The 1970s saw the effects of the Cultural Revolution of the late 60s.

Music changed, fashion changed and advertising changed. A recession started but by the end of the decade, advertising would take off and become a $28 billion industry. Ads became commonplace and in color as televisions now were.

Brands were reaching out to the youth at this point, as well as the changing society that changed how brands reached out to women and people of color who now became new broader mar-

1980s Through the 1980s, smaller advertising agencies got gobbled up by the big players. Technology created big changes in the evolution of branding in the 1980s with things such as MTV and CNN launched. Cable TV became available in the early 80s, expanding the reach of television advertising and of choices consumers had of what to watch.

This led away from the brands being solely product oriented and more geared towards lifestyle, and selling products associated with it.

1990s Generation X walked into adulthood and they were very different than any generation before them. Sandwiched between the Baby Boomers and Millennials, they had a lot of doubt about advertising and weren’t as inclined to believe whatever they were told.

Honesty and integrity became more and more important in creating a positive brand image.

ket niches, rather than housewives and afterthoughts. Ads of the 70s took on sexual undertones. Subliminal messaging became the status quo.

Something new advertisers began was subliminal messaging but the public didn’t like it and it may have harmed the image of brands more than helping these brands. This became the beginnings of declining trust in brands.

The VCR allowed people to fast-forward through commercials. But, some commercials were so entertaining, they’ve become iconic, such as Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” commercials.

People longed for a return to simpler times, but they also liked their modern conveniences, something advertisers struggled to balance. Advertisers began to present unique value propositions (UVPs), showing how their products were different.

campaign. Featuring supermodels like Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, and teen actors of the day.

Teenagers had more spending power than ever. and they demanded greater personalization. Niche marketing became more and more important and saw a huge rise especially in the early days of the Internet.

Celebrity endorsements became firmly entrenched in the branding practices of the 1990s. This is best illustrated in the Got Milk? milk mustache

Branding History

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2000s The 2000s arrived without nearly as much fanfare as expected. People who thought computers might melt down as a century shifted found that technology easily kept up. Things such as early digital advertising arrived on the scene and marketers had to figure out how to reach people on an entirely new medium that seemed to adapt and change almost daily.

son why people wouldn’t care if most brands disappeared. The public begins disconnecting with companies.

Celebrity endorsements are still important, but pop stars and Hollywood elite trend in ads such as this one.

The idea is that if the buyer likes the celebrity they will want to try the product.

By 2006, digital ads become more targeted and social media giants such as Facebook start collecting all kinds of information on users’ buying habits. Spam becomes an issue and it impacts how legitimate companies need to community with their audiences.

The first spam ad is sent out in the 2000s and thus begins a greater divide between brands and consumers.

This may harken back to the rea-

2010s The 2010s at first glance haven’t brought many changes to advertising, but nothing could be further. In the last several years alone, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) have changed how online brands interact with their customers. Ads are much more highly targeted than ever before, because we have tons of data and information about how people interact with brands, search for information online and can even track their spending habits. Personalization is the name of the game in today’s evolution of branding.

at items on their website but then didn’t make a purchase, giving them a second chance at making a sell.

The rise of social media led to the creation of the contemporary influencer economy. Brands would partner with individuals who have followings across social media and internet publishing platforms.

Chipotle decided to reward their customers for having knowledge about the industry instead of for visits. They created a commercial in 2011 and show it in about 5,700 movie theaters in the United States. The commercial is animated and shows a farmer’s process and ends with the tagline “cultivate a better world.”

Sephora used Facebook’s mobile ads feature to deliver customized ads to the appropriate audiences. The brand chose to show ads to those who looked

On Brand™

2020s How might the evolution of branding shift even more moving into the new century’s Roaring 20s? Expect technology to grow at an even faster pace than in any decade before. As the Internet of Things (IoT) takes over more and more daily tasks, branding may become more automated. Companies will reach out to customers automatically, leaving only the creative side of campaigns for marketers to deal with.

People are more socially conscious than at any other point in history and they all have an opinion. Expect people to reward the brands who are known for doing good things and helping others while steering away from controversial topics and politics.

Tomorrow’s marketers will have to be easily adaptable in an ever-changing world.

“People want to buy from brands that are like themselves and therefore will support them,” says Lisa Wood, head of marketing at first direct.

For large companies, a change in culture towards having a more human and friendly outlook might not be as easy as it is for smaller ones, due to the set up of the company internally. “Sometimes you need to do things that are difficult otherwise everybody does them, which is why it is such a strategic advantage if you can do it,” says Glynn.

Brands are becoming more human by illustrating their morals to us.

The 2020s also have seen the beginning of the Human Era Brand. At the core of the Human Era is the realization that the search for trust extends to organizations and brands as well as to people.

Future We live in a world where consumers are increasingly skeptical about the breakdown between what organizations say and what they do—and they’re not shy in expressing their dissatisfaction (in words and dollars!) with just a few clicks on their preferred device. In this environment, a significant opportunity is afforded to brands that lead with authenticity, that is, align their promises and their actions. Basic stuff, like promising only what they can deliver—or not saying or doing anything that the CEOs wouldn’t be ashamed to tell their respective grandmothers. Authenticity, pure and simple, has moved from business hygiene to an opportunity for real differentiation for those willing to embrace it. And the reward is enhanced brand equity, customer loyalty, and marketplace differentiation.

Tried-and-tested brands such as Ben

and Jerrys, Newman’s Own and Burt’s Bees remind us of this every day. In our unpredictable and unstable world, bravery is no longer the purview of caped crusaders.

I believe bravery is an essential though rarely explored capability–one that all brand leaders will need to develop in 2020. Prioritizing bravery challenges leaders to seek out unproven solutions to familiar problems; be the lone voice, advocating what is right for the brand, its customers and the planet; or exemplify humanity by committing to inclusive marketing.

A conscious focus on bravery is what our brands and our society need most right now.

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How Brands Were Born Marc de Swaan Arons There was a time, going back at least 70 years, when all it took to be successful in business was to make a product of good quality. If you offered good coffee, whiskey or beer, people would come to your shop and buy it.

And as long as you made sure that your product quality was superior to the competition, you were pretty much set. Well into the 1970s, a savvy consumer could distinguish between high-quality and shabby products quite easily.

And yet, as much as we like to complain about what we buy, it remains a fact that we live in a golden age for quality products. Today, it is much more rare to find cars that consistently break down or kiddie pools that leak. I challenge you to walk into any supermarket and find a product that is not of almost equal quality to the category leader in terms of functional performance. Nevertheless, the companies that were category leader in the early days often still are today. Some represent the "foundational brands," the companies that in the 1950s and 1960s epitomized the kind of smart marketing that is now ubiquitous. A handful of these marketing leaders are listed in the gallery below. And the reason they have survived the test of time comes down to the discipline of marketing and branding.

The shift from simple products to brands has not been sudden or inevitable.

You could argue that it grew out of the standardization of quality products for consumers in the middle of the 20th century, which required companies to find a new way to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

In the 1950s, consumer packaged goods companies like Procter and Gamble, General Foods and Unilever developed the discipline of brand management, or marketing as we know it today, when they noticed the quality levels of products being offered by competitors around them improve. A brand manager would be responsible for giving a product an identity that distinguished it from nearly indistinguishable competitors.

On Brand™

Branding History

200 This required an understanding of the target consumer and what

we call a "branded proposition" that offered not only functional / but also emotional value. Over time, the emotional value would 201 create a buffer against functional parity. As long as the brand was perceived to offer superior value to its competitors, the company offering the brand could charge a little more for its products.

If this brand "bonus" was bigger than the cost of building a brand (the additional staff and often advertising costs), the company came out ahead.

In the 1950s and 1960s, brands like Tide, Kraft and Lipton excelled in marketing activities (see above gallery), setting the benchmarks for all brands today.

This marked the start of almost 50 years of marketing where "winning" was determined by understanding the consumer better than your competitors and the getting the total "brand mix" right. The brand mix is more than the logo, or the price of a product. It's also the packaging, the promotions, and the advertising, all of which is guided by precisely worded positioning statements.

As my friend Simon Clift, former Chief Marketing Officer of Unilever likes to say, a brand is the contract between a company and consumers. A bundle of contracts, in fact. And the consumer is the judge and the jury. If he or she believes a company is in breach of that contract either by underperforming or misbehaving, the consumer will simply choose to enter a contract with another brand.

I say "misbehaving" because in fact the strongest brands have always exuded a clear sense of their core value. Dan Wieden, legendary ad-man and founder of advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy, puts it another way: Brands are verbs. Nike exhorts. IBM solves.

Sony dreams.

But few brands are so articulate. Even the inventors of brand management continue to find it a challenge. Jim Stengel, formerly of Procter & Gamble, candidly acknowledged to me in an interview that "while many of P&G's products were very highly regarded for their functional qualities, some of our competitors had a stronger emotional bond with consumers' hearts. There was a lot of trust in our products, but there wasn't a lot of love."

For decades, it was the case that big companies marketed brands, while everyone else sold products. When I graduated from university in the late 1980s, someone with the ambition to learn marketing knew to start at companies like Colgate, Procter, Unilever, Coke, Pepsi, and General Mills to learn the ropes. Companies like Sara Lee, Mars, Cadburys, and Danone, also very much dependent on successful branding, tended to hire "graduates" from these companies after they had been trained for five years in the basics. From there marketers fanned out across industry. A quick LinkedIn search today among chief marketing officers and senior vice presidents of marketing confirms that how important these companies have been in shaping the face of marketing today.

Just 20 years ago, most retailers did not even have a proper marketing department. If they did the department was responsible for little more than coordinating store-opening launch parties.

But in the early 1990s, things started to change. The previous commoditization of product quality was followed by an almost equal push for build real brands.

One by one the big retailers started to realize that they had an opportunity to also play the branding game and that by selling more, higher quality, but particularly better-branded products, they could not only dramatically improve their margin mix, but that they could raise the profile and reputation of their own

brand as a whole.

Without a doubt, the UK has led the pack worldwide. The retail landscape there is now really different to elsewhere as a result. Retailers like Tesco, Waitrose and Sainsbury started hiring marketers from their suppliers like Unilever and P&G just over a decade ago. Of course it took some time, but today these companies and their portfolio of brands enjoy equal and sometime better brand loyalty than any of the manufacturer brands they carry. And the results have followed. Private or "own" label as its sometimes called market share in the UK is over 50% in some key core food and household product categories. And profit has followed; The profit margins of these UK supermarkets chains is over double that of the rest of the world's supermarkets.

Continental Europe has followed closely, with private label shares in many supermarket categories averaging between 20 and 30 across the store. The US still lags significantly, but Wal-Mart's recent complete rebranding and introduction of many private label product lines is undoubtedly a sign of what's to come.

And this development has not been limited to retailer brands or the fast moving consumer goods markets. The rapid rise of a mobile phone brand like HTC from a private (OEM) label supplier just three years ago to a major player today, as well as the very strong ascension of brands like Haier in household products and LG in the TV market show that a little bit of marketing knowledge can go a long way to building strong brands.

Now, a decade into the 21st century, the market looks very different to just 20 years ago. The explosion of branded offerings is overwhelming and confusing consumers and causing an ever-increasing headache for the leaders of 'traditional' brands. The average western consumer is exposed to some 3,000 brand messages a day. How can consumers cut through the clutter? How should traditional market leaders regain leadership? The new marketers of the 21st century will be the subject of my next column.

On Brand™

A tin of Lyle's Golden Syrup, first sold in London in 1885.

Recognised by Guinness World Records as having the world's oldest branding and packaging.

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Chapter

06 The Online Self

Writing and research on the history of the Self on the Internet.

- Jia Tolentino - Jenny Odell - Slavoj Zizek

Who on Inter

am I the rnet ?

Google knows me as Jack Moore, knows that I identify as Male, and believes that I was born April 15, 1992 – even though I was born April 15, 1995. This is the first gap between my Online Self and my Analog Self.

Saturday November 14, 2020 Followers: 369 Following: 500 Posts: 445

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The I in the Internet

By Jia Tolentino In the beginning the internet seemed good. “I was in love with the internet the first time I used it at my dad’s office and thought it was the ULTIMATE COOL,” I wrote, when I was ten, on an Angelfire subpage titled “The Story of How Jia Got Her Web Addiction.” In a text box superimposed on a hideous violet background, I continued: But that was in third grade and all I was doing was going to Beanie Baby sites. Having an old, icky bicky computer at home, we didn’t have the Internet. Even AOL seemed like a far-off dream. Then we got a new top-o’-the-line computer in spring break ’99, and of course it came with all that demo stuff. So I finally had AOL and I was completely amazed at the marvel of having a profile and chatting and IMS!! Then, I wrote, I discovered personal webpages. (“I was astonished!”) I learned HTML and “little Javascript trickies.” I built my own site on the beginner-hosting site Expage, choosing pastel colors and then switching to a “starry night theme.” Then I ran out of space, so I “decided to move to Angelfire. Wow.” I learned how to make my own graphics. “This was all in the course of four months,” I wrote, marveling at how quickly my ten-year-old internet citizenry was evolving. I had recently revisited the sites that had once inspired me, and realized “how much of an idiot I was to be wowed by that.”

I have no memory of inadvertently starting this essay two decades ago, or of making this Angelfire subpage, which I found while hunting for early traces of myself on the internet. It’s now eroded to its skeleton: its landing page, titled “THE VERY BEST,” features a sepia-toned photo of Andie from Dawson’s Creek and a dead link to a new site called “THE FROSTED FIELD,” which is “BETTER!” There’s a page dedicated to a blinking mouse GIF named Susie, and a “Cool Lyrics Page” with a scrolling banner and the lyrics to Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and the TLC diss track “No Pigeons,” by Sporty Thievz. On an On Brand™

Star,” Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and the TLC diss track “No Pigeons,” by Sporty Thievz. On an FAQ page— there was an FAQ page—I write that I had to close down my customizable cartoon-doll section, as “the response has been enormous.” It appears that I built and used this Angelfire site over just a few months in 1999, immediately after my parents got a computer. My insane FAQ page specifies that the site was started in June, and a page titled “Journal”—which proclaims, “I am going to be completely honest about my life, although I won’t go too deeply into personal thoughts, though”—features entries only from October. One entry begins: “It’s so HOT outside and I can’t count the times acorns have fallen on my head, maybe from exhaustion.” Later on, I write, rather prophetically: “I’m going insane! I literally am addicted to the web!”

In 1999, it felt different to spend all day on the internet. This was true for everyone, not just for ten-yearolds: this was the You’ve Got Mail era, when it seemed that the very worst thing that could happen online was that you might fall in love with your business rival. Throughout the eighties and nineties, people had been gathering on the internet in open forums, drawn, like butterflies, to the puddles and blossoms of other people’s curiosity and expertise. Self-regulated newsgroups like Usenet cultivated lively and relatively civil discussion about space exploration, meteorology, recipes, rare albums. Users gave advice, answered questions, made friendships, and wondered what this new internet would become.

Because there were so few search engines and no centralized social platforms, discovery on the early internet took place mainly in private, and pleasure existed as its own solitary reward. A 1995 book called You Can Surf the Net! listed sites where you could read movie reviews or learn about martial arts. It urged

readers to follow basic etiquette (don’t use all caps; don’t waste other people’s expensive bandwidth with overly long posts) and encouraged them to feel comfortable in this new world (“Don’t worry,” the author advised. “You have to really mess up to get flamed.”). Around this time, GeoCities began offering personal website hosting for dads who wanted to put up their own golfing sites or kids who built glittery, blinking shrines to Tolkien or Ricky Martin or unicorns, most capped off with a primitive guest book and a green-and-black visitor counter. GeoCities, like the internet itself, was clumsy, ugly, only half functional, and organized into neighborhoods: /area51/ was for sci-fi, / westhollywood / for LGBTQ life, /enchantedforest/ for children, /petsburgh/ for pets. If you left GeoCities, you could walk around other streets in this ever-expanding village of curiosities. You could stroll through Expage or Angelfire, as I did, and pause on the thoroughfare where the tiny cartoon hamsters danced. There was an emergent aesthetic—blinking text, crude animation. If you found something you liked, if you wanted to spend more time in any of these neighborhoods, you could build your own house from HTML frames and start decorating.

This period of the internet has been labeled Web 1.0—a name that works backward from the term Web 2.0, which was coined by the writer and user-experience designer Darcy DiNucci in an article called “Fragmented Future,” published in 1999. “The Web we know now,” she wrote, “which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear….The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of texts and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.” On Web 2.0, the structures would be dynamic, she predicted: instead of

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houses, websites would be portals, through which an ever- changing stream of activity—status updates, photos—could be displayed. What you did on the internet would become intertwined with what everyone else did, and the things other people liked would become the things that you would see. Web 2.0 platforms like Blogger and Myspace made it possible for people who had merely been taking in the sights to start generating their own personalized and constantly changing scenery. As more people began to register their existence digitally, a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist.

In a New Yorker piece from November 2000, Rebecca Mead profiled Meg Hourihan, an early blogger who went by Megnut. In just the prior eighteen months, Mead observed, the number of “weblogs” had gone from fifty to several thousand, and blogs like Megnut were drawing thousands of visitors per day. This new internet was social (“a blog consists primarily of links to other Web sites and commentary about those links”) in a way that centered on individual identity (Megnut’s readers knew that she wished there were better fish tacos in San Francisco, and that she was a feminist, and that she was close with her mom). The blogosphere was also full of mutual transactions, which tended to echo and escalate. The “main audience for blogs is other bloggers,” Mead wrote. Etiquette required that, “if someone blogs your blog, you blog his blog back.”

Through the emergence of blogging, personal lives were becoming public domain, and social incentives—to be liked, to be seen—were becoming economic ones. The mechanisms of internet exposure began to seem like a viable foundation for a career.

Hourihan cofounded Blogger with Evan Williams, who later cofounded Twitter. JenniCam, founded in 1996 when the college student Jennifer Ringley started broadcasting webcam photos from her dorm room, attracted at one point up to four million daily visitors, some of whom paid a subscription fee for quicker-loading images. The internet, in promising a potentially unlimited audience, began to seem like the natural home of self- expression. In one blog post, Megnut’s boyfriend, the blogger Jason Kottke, asked himself why he didn’t just write his thoughts down in private. “Somehow, that seems strange to me though,” he wrote. “The Web is the place for you to express your thoughts and feelings and such. To put those things elsewhere seems absurd.”

Every day, more people agreed with him. The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed, social connections bristling like neurons in every direction. At ten, I was clicking around a web ring to check out other Angelfire sites full of animal GIFs and Smash Mouth trivia. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a public LiveJournal. At fifteen, I was uploading photos of myself in a miniskirt on Myspace. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post. Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection—this feverish, electric, unlivable hell.

As with the transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, the curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of

happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and bitched about articles that had been commissioned to make people bitch. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse.

Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer. As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct—like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them.

This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-traveled on Instagram; this is why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; this is why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself.

This practice is often called “virtue signaling,” a term most often used by conservatives criticizing the left.

But virtue signaling is a bipartisan, even apolitical action. Twitter is overrun with dramatic pledges of allegiance to the Second Amendment that function as intra-right virtue signaling, and it can be something like virtue signaling when people post the suicide hotline after a celebrity death. Few of us are totally immune to the practice, as it intersects with a real desire for political integrity. Posting photos from a protest against border family separation, as I did while writing this, is a microscopically meaningful action, an expression of genuine principle, and also, inescapably, some sort of attempt to signal that I am good.

Taken to its extreme, virtue signaling has driven people on the left to some truly unhinged behavior. A legendary case occurred in June 2016, after a two-year-old was killed at a Disney resort— dragged off by an alligator while playing in a no- swimming-allowed lagoon. A woman, who had accumulated ten thousand Twitter followers with her posts about social justice, saw an opportunity and tweeted, magnificently, “I’m so finished with white men’s entitlement lately that I’m really not sad about a 2yo being eaten by a gator because his daddy ignored signs.” (She was then pilloried by people who chose to demonstrate their own moral superiority through mockery—as I am doing here, too.)

A similar tweet made the rounds in early 2018 after a sweet story went viral: a large white seabird named Nigel had died next to the concrete decoy bird to whom he had devoted himself for years. An outraged writer tweeted, “Even concrete birds do not owe you affection, Nigel,” and wrote a long Facebook post arguing that Nigel’s courtship of the fake bird exemplified…rape culture. “I’m available to write the feminist perspective on Nigel the gannet’s non-tragic death should anyone wish to pay me,” she added, underneath the original tweet, which received more than a thousand likes. These deranged takes, and their unnerving proximity to online monetization,

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are case studies in the way that our world—digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism—makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard. You don’t end up using a news story about a dead toddler as a peg for white entitlement without a society in which the discourse of righteousness occupies far more public attention than the conditions that necessitate righteousness in the first place.

On the right, the online performance of political identity has been even wilder. In 2017, the social- media-savvy youth conservative group Turning Point USA staged a protest at Kent State University featuring a student who put on a diaper to demonstrate that “safe spaces were for babies.” (It went viral, as intended, but not in the way TPUSA wanted—the protest was uniformly roasted, with one Twitter user slapping the logo of the porn site Brazzers on a photo of the diaper boy, and the Kent State TPUSA campus coordinator resigned.)

It has also been infinitely more consequential, beginning in 2014, with a campaign that became a template for right-wing internet-political action, when a large group of young misogynists came together in the event now known as Gamergate.

The issue at hand was, ostensibly, a female game designer perceived to be sleeping with a journalist for favorable coverage. She, along with a set of feminist game critics and writers, received an onslaught of rape threats, death threats, and other forms of harassment, all concealed under the banner of free speech and “ethics in games journalism.” The Gamergaters—estimated by Deadspin to number around ten thousand people— would mostly deny this harassment, either parroting in bad faith or fooling themselves into believing the argument that Gamergate was actually about noble ideals. Gawker Media, Deadspin’s

parent company, itself became a target, in part because of its own aggressive disdain toward the Gamergaters: the company lost seven figures in revenue after its advertisers were brought into the maelstrom.

In 2016, a similar fiasco made national news in Pizzagate, after a few rabid internet denizens decided they’d found coded messages about child sex slavery in the advertising of a pizza shop associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This theory was disseminated all over the far-right internet, leading to an extended attack on DC’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria and everyone associated with the restaurant—all in the name of combating pedophilia—that culminated in a man walking into Comet Ping Pong and firing a gun.

(Later on, the same faction would jump to the defense of Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for the Senate who was accused of sexually assaulting teenagers.) The over-woke left could only dream of this ability to weaponize a sense of righteousness. Even the militant antifascist movement, known as antifa, is routinely disowned by liberal centrists, despite the fact that the antifa movement is rooted in a long European tradition of Nazi resistance rather than a nascent constellation of radically paranoid message boards and YouTube channels. The worldview of the Gamergaters and Pizzagaters was actualized and to a large extent vindicated in the 2016 election—an event that strongly suggested that the worst things about the internet were now determining, rather than reflecting, the worst things about offline life.

Mass media always determines the shape of politics and culture. The Bush era is inextricable from the failures of cable news; the executive overreaches of the Obama years were obscured by the internet’s magnification of personality and performance; Trump’s

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rise to power is inseparable from the existence of social networks that must continually aggravate their / users in order to continue making money. But lately I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately 221 terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along. How did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our disappearing free time in an openly torturous environment? How did the internet get so bad, so confining, so inescapably personal, so politically determinative—and why are all those questions asking the same thing?

I’ll admit that I’m not sure that this inquiry is even productive. The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving. And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life.

It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages— you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near- impossible to regulate or control.

The internet is also in large part inextricable from life’s pleasures: our friends, our families, our communities, our pursuits of happiness, and— sometimes, if we’re lucky—our work. In part out of a desire to preserve what’s worthwhile from the decay that surrounds it, I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.

In 1959, the sociologist Erving Goffman laid out a theory of identity that revolved around playacting. In every human interaction, he wrote in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a person must put on a sort of performance, create an impression for an audience. The performance might be calculated, as with the man at a job interview who’s practiced every answer; it might be unconscious, as with the man who’s gone on so many interviews that he naturally performs as expected; it might be automatic, as with the man who creates the correct impression primarily because he is an upper-middle-class white man with an MBA. A performer might be fully taken in by his own performance—he might actually believe that his biggest flaw is “perfectionism”—or he might know that his act is a sham. But no matter what, he’s performing. Even if he stops trying to perform, he still has an audience, his actions still create an effect. “All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify,” Goffman wrote.

To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion. A performer, in order to be convincing, must conceal “the discreditable facts that he has had to learn about the performance; in everyday terms, there will be things he knows, or has known, that he will not be able to tell himself.” The interviewee, for example, avoids thinking about the fact that his biggest flaw actually involves drinking at the office. A friend sitting across from you at dinner, called to play therapist for your trivial romantic hang-ups, has to pretend to herself that she wouldn’t rather just go home and

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get in bed to read Barbara Pym. No audience has to be physically present for a performer to engage in this sort of selective concealment: a woman, home alone for the weekend, might scrub the baseboards and watch nature documentaries even though she’d rather trash the place, buy an eight ball, and have a Craigslist orgy. People often make faces, in private, in front of bathroom mirrors, to convince themselves of their own attractiveness. The “lively belief that an unseen audience is present,” Goffman writes, can have a significant effect.

Offline, there are forms of relief built into this process. Audiences change over—the performance you stage at a job interview is different from the one you stage at a restaurant later for a friend’s birthday, which is different from the one you stage for a partner at home. At home, you might feel as if you could stop performing altogether; within Goffman’s dramaturgical framework, you might feel as if you had made it backstage. Goffman observed that we need both an audience to witness our performances as well as a backstage area where we can relax, often in the company of “teammates” who had been performing alongside us. Think of coworkers at the bar after they’ve delivered a big sales pitch, or a bride and groom in their hotel room after the wedding reception: everyone may still be performing, but they feel at ease, unguarded, alone. Ideally, the outside audience has believed the prior performance. The wedding guests think they’ve actually just seen a pair of flawless, blissful newlyweds, and the potential backers think they’ve met a group of geniuses who are going to make everyone very rich. “But this imputation—this self—is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it,” Goffman writes. The self is not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance. This effect can be believed or disbelieved at will.

Online—assuming you buy this framework—the system metastasizes into a wreck. The presentation of self in everyday internet still corresponds to Goffman’s playacting metaphor: there are stages, there is an audience. But the internet adds a host of other, nightmarish metaphorical structures: the mirror, the echo, the panopticon. As we move about the internet, our personal data is tracked, recorded, and resold by a series of corporations—a regime of involuntary technological surveillance, which subconsciously decreases our resistance to the practice of voluntary self-surveillance on social media. If we think about buying something, it follows us around everywhere.

We can, and probably do, limit our online activity to websites that further reinforce our own sense of identity, each of us reading things written for people just like us. On social media platforms, everything we see corresponds to our conscious choices and algorithmically guided preferences, and all news and culture and interpersonal interaction are filtered through the home base of the profile. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.

This system persists because it is profitable. As Tim Wu writes in The Attention Merchants, commerce has been slowly permeating human existence—entering our city streets in the nineteenth century through billboards and posters, then our homes in the twentieth century through radio and TV. Now, in the twenty-first

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Angelfire was one of the earliest and most popular platforms that predated social media. It was an early example of people self-branded. What makes it notable is how it existed in Web 1.0 before the web was monetized.

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Myspace was a transitional era for online interaction and self branding. It was similar to Angelfire in its customization, but created a social network where people were connected to each other. Brandifying the self began on here as people and celebrities began interacting. It was the advent of the shared platform and the blank profile.

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Facebook, originally The Facebook, was started in 2004.

Initially it was intended to compare female Harvard students to farm animals. Now it has become one of the largest social media platforms in the world. Building a framework for social media branding.

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merce has filtered into our identities and relationships. We have generated billions of dollars for social media platforms through our desire—and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural requirement—to replicate for the internet who we know, who we think we are, who we want to be.

Selfhood buckles under the weight of this commercial importance. In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.

(You can essentially be on a job interview in perpetuity.) In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action—you get invited over for dinner, or you lose the friendship, or you get the job. Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name. Worst of all, there’s essentially no backstage on the internet; where the offline audience necessarily empties out and changes over, the online audience never has to leave. The version of you that posts memes and selfies for your pre-cal classmates might end up sparring with the Trump administration after a school shooting, as happened to the Parkland kids—some of whom became so famous that they will never be allowed to drop the veneer of performance again. The self that traded jokes with white supremacists on Twitter is the self that might get hired, and then fired, by The New York Times, as happened to Quinn Norton in 2018. (Or, in the case of Sarah Jeong, the self that made jokes about white people might get Gamergated after being hired at the Times a few months thereafter.) People who maintain a public internet profile are building a self that can be viewed simultaneously by their mom, their boss, their potential future bosses, their eleven-year-old nephew, their past and future sex partners, their relatives who loathe their politics, as well as anyone who cares to look for any possible reason. Identity, according to Goffman, is a series of claims and promises. On the internet, a highly functional person is one who can promise everything to an indefinitely increasing audience at all times.

Incidents like Gamergate are partly a response to these conditions of hyper-visibility. The rise of trolling, and its ethos of disrespect and anonymity, has been so forceful in part because the internet’s insistence on consistent, approval- worthy identity is so strong. In particular, the misogyny embedded in trolling reflects the way women—who, as John Berger wrote, have always been required to maintain an external awareness of their own identity—often navigate these online conditions so profitably.

It’s the self-calibration that I learned as a girl, as a woman, that has helped me capitalize on “having” to be online. My only experience of the world has been one in which personal appeal is paramount and self- exposure is encouraged; this legitimately unfortunate paradigm, inhabited first by women and now generalized to the entire internet, is what trolls loathe and actively repudiate. They destabilize an internet built on transparency and likability. They pull us back toward the chaotic and the unknown.

Of course, there are many better ways of making the argument against hyper-visibility than trolling. As Werner Herzog told GQ, in 2011, speaking about psychoanalysis: “We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you

illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore.”

The first time I was ever paid to publish anything, it was 2013, the end of the blog era. Trying to make a living as a writer with the internet as a standing precondition of my livelihood has given me some professional motivation to stay active on social media, making my work and personality and face and political leanings and dog photos into a continually updated record that anyone can see. In doing this, I have sometimes felt the same sort of unease that washed over me when I was a cheerleader and learned how to convincingly fake happiness at football games—the feeling of acting as if conditions are fun and normal and worthwhile in the hopes that they will just magically become so. To try to write online, more specifically, is to operate on a set of assumptions that are already dubious when limited to writers and even more questionable when turned into a categorical imperative for everyone on the internet: the assumption that speech has an impact, that it’s something like action; the assumption that it’s fine or helpful or even ideal to be constantly writing down what you think.

I have benefited, I mean, from the internet’s unhealthy focus on opinion. This focus is rooted in the way the internet generally minimizes the need for physical action: you don’t have to do much of anything but sit behind a screen to live an acceptable, possibly valorized, twenty-first-century life. The internet can feel like an astonishingly direct line to reality—click if you want something and it’ll show up at your door two hours later; a series of tweets goes viral after a tragedy and soon there’s a nationwide high school walkout—but it can also feel like a shunt diverting our energy away from action, leaving the real- world sphere to the people who already control it, keeping us busy figuring out the precisely correct way of explaining our lives. In the run-up to the 2016 election and increasingly so afterward, I started to feel that there was almost nothing I could do about ninety-five percent of the things I cared about other than form an opinion—and that the conditions that allowed me to live in mild everyday hysterics about an unlimited supply of terrible information were related to the conditions that were, at the same time, consolidating power, sucking wealth upward, far outside my grasp.

I don’t mean to be naïvely fatalistic, to act like nothing can be done about anything. People are making the world better through concrete footwork every day. (Not me—I’m too busy sitting in front of the internet!) But their time and labor, too, has been devalued and stolen by the voracious form of capitalism that drives the internet, and which the internet drives in turn. There is less time these days for anything other than economic survival. The internet has moved seamlessly into the interstices of this situation, redistributing our minimum of free time into unsatisfying micro-installments, spread throughout the day. In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts seeming like an end in itself.

I started thinking about this when I was working as an editor at Jezebel, in 2014. I spent a lot of the day reading headlines on women’s websites, most of which had by then adopted a feminist slant. In this realm, speech was constantly framed as a sort of intensely satisfying action: you’d get headlines like “Miley Cyrus Spoke Out About Gender Fluidity on Snapchat

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and It Was Everything” or “Amy Schumer’s Speech About Body Confidence at the Women’s Magazine / Awards Ceremony Will Have You in Tears.” Forming 231 an opinion was also framed as a sort of action: blog posts offered people guidance on how to feel about online controversies or particular scenes on TV. Even identity itself seemed to take on these valences.

Merely to exist as a feminist was to be doing some important work. These ideas have intensified and gotten more complicated in the Trump era, in which, on the one hand, people like me are busy expressing anguish online and mostly affecting nothing, and on the other, more actual and rapid change has come from the internet than ever before. In the turbulence that followed the Harvey Weinstein revelations, women’s speech swayed public opinion and led directly to change. People with power were forced to reckon with their ethics; harassers and abusers were pushed out of their jobs. But even in this narrative, the importance of action was subtly elided. People wrote about women “speaking out” with prayerful reverence, as if speech itself could bring women freedom—as if better policies and economic redistribution and true investment from men weren’t necessary, too.

Goffman observes the difference between doing something and expressing the doing of something, between feeling something and conveying a feeling. “The representation of an activity will vary in some degree from the activity itself and therefore inevitably misrepresent it,” Goffman writes. (Take the experience of enjoying a sunset versus the experience of communicating to an audience that you’re enjoying a sunset, for example.) The internet is engineered for this sort of misrepresentation; it’s designed to encourage us to create certain impressions rather than allowing these impressions to arise “as an incidental by-product of [our] activity.” This is why, with the internet, it’s so easy to stop trying to be decent, or reasonable, or politically engaged —and start trying merely to seem so.

As the value of speech inflates even further in the online attention economy, this problem only gets worse. I don’t know what to do with the fact that I myself continue to benefit from all this: that my career is possible in large part because of the way the internet collapses identity, opinion, and action—and that I, as a writer whose work is mostly critical and often written in first person, have some inherent stake in justifying the dubious practice of spending all day trying to figure out what you think. As a reader, of course, I’m grateful for people who help me understand things, and I’m glad that they—and I—can be paid to do so.

I am glad, too, for the way the internet has given an audience to writers who previously might have been shut out of the industry, or kept on its sidelines: I’m one of them. But you will never catch me arguing that professional opinion- havers in the age of the internet are, on the whole, a force for good.

In April 2017, the Times brought a millennial writer named Bari Weiss onto its opinion section as both a writer and an editor.

Weiss had graduated from Columbia, and had worked as an editor at Tablet and then at The Wall Street Journal. She leaned conservative, with a Zionist streak. At Columbia, she had cofounded a group called Columbians for Academic Freedom, hoping to pressure the university into punishing a pro- Palestinian professor who had made her feel “intimidated,” she told NPR in 2005.

At the Times, Weiss immediately began launching columns from a rhetorical and political standpoint of high-strung defensiveness, disguised with a veneer of levelheaded nonchalance. “Victimhood, in the in-

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tersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane,” she wrote—a bit of elegant phrasing in a piece that warned the public of the rampant anti-Semitism evinced, apparently, by a minor activist clusterfuck, in which the organizers of the Chicago Dyke March banned Star of David flags. She wrote a column slamming the organizers of the Women’s March over a few social media posts expressing support for Assata Shakur and Louis Farrakhan.

This, she argued, was troubling evidence that progressives, just like conservatives, were unable to police their internal hate.

(Both-sides arguments like this are always appealing to people who wish to seem both contrarian and intellectually superior; this particular one required ignoring the fact that liberals remained obsessed with “civility” while the Republican president was actively endorsing violence at every turn.

Later on, when Tablet published an investigation into the Women’s March organizers who maintained disconcerting ties to the Nation of Islam, these organizers were criticized by liberals, who truly do not lack the self-policing instinct; in large part because the left does take hate seriously, the Women’s March effectively splintered into two groups.) Often, Weiss’s columns featured aggrieved predictions of how her bold, independent thinking would make her opponents go crazy and attack her. “I will inevitably get called a racist,” she proclaimed in one column, titled “Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation.” “I’ll be accused of siding with the alt-right or tarred as Islamophobic,” she wrote in another column. Well, sure.

Though Weiss often argued that people should get more comfortable with those who offended or disagreed with them, she seemed mostly unable to take her own advice. During the Winter Olympics in 2018, she watched the figure skater Mirai Nagasu land a triple axel—the first American woman to do so in Olympic competition—and tweeted, in a very funny attempt at a compliment, “Immigrants: they get the job done.” Because Nagasu was actually born in California, Weiss was immediately shouted down. This is what happens online when you do something offensive: when I worked at Jezebel, people shouted me down on Twitter about five times a year over things I had written or edited, and sometimes outlets published pieces about our mistakes.

This was often overwhelming and unpleasant, but it was always useful. Weiss, for her part, tweeted that the people calling her racist tweet racist were a “sign of civilization’s end.” A couple of weeks later, she wrote a column called “We’re All Fascists Now,” arguing that angry liberals were creating a “moral flattening of the earth.” At times it seems that Weiss’s main strategy is to make an argument that’s bad enough to attract criticism, and then to cherry- pick the worst of that criticism into the foundation for another bad argument. Her worldview requires the specter of a vast, angry, inferior mob.

It’s of course true that there are vast, angry mobs on the internet. Jon Ronson wrote the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed about this in 2015. “We became keenly watchful for transgressions,” he writes, describing the state of Twitter around 2012. “After a while it wasn’t just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. It was misspeakings. Fury at the terribleness of other people had started to consume us a lot….In fact, it felt weird and empty when there wasn’t anyone to be furious about. The days between shamings felt like days picking at fingernails, treading water.” Web 2.0 had curdled; its organizing principle was shifting. The early internet had been constructed around lines of affinity, and whatever good spaces

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and It Was Everything” or “Amy Schumer’s Speech About Body Confidence at the Women’s Magazine Awards Ceremony Will Have You in Tears.” Forming an opinion was also framed as a sort of action: blog posts offered people guidance on how to feel about online controversies or particular scenes on TV. Even identity itself seemed to take on these valences.

Merely to exist as a feminist was to be doing some important work. These ideas have intensified and gotten more complicated in the Trump era, in which, on the one hand, people like me are busy expressing anguish online and mostly affecting nothing, and on the other, more actual and rapid change has come from the internet than ever before. In the turbulence that followed the Harvey Weinstein revelations, women’s speech swayed public opinion and led directly to change. People with power were forced to reckon with their ethics; harassers and abusers were pushed out of their jobs. But even in this narrative, the importance of action was subtly elided. People wrote about women “speaking out” with prayerful reverence, as if speech itself could bring women freedom—as if better policies and economic redistribution and true investment from men weren’t necessary, too.

Goffman observes the difference between doing something and expressing the doing of something, between feeling something and conveying a feeling. “The representation of an activity will vary in some degree from the activity itself and therefore inevitably misrepresent it,” Goffman writes. (Take the experience of enjoying a sunset versus the experience of communicating to an audience that you’re enjoying a sunset, for example.) The internet is engineered for this sort of misrepresentation; it’s designed to encourage us to create certain impressions rather than allowing these impressions to arise “as an incidental by-product of [our] activity.” This is why, with the internet, it’s so easy to stop trying to be decent, or reasonable, or politically engaged —and start trying merely to seem so.

As the value of speech inflates even further in the online attention economy, this problem only gets worse. I don’t know what to do with the fact that I myself continue to benefit from all this: that my career is possible in large part because of the way the internet collapses identity, opinion, and action—and that I, as a writer whose work is mostly critical and often written in first person, have some inherent stake in justifying the dubious practice of spending all day trying to figure out what you think. As a reader, of course, I’m grateful for people who help me understand things, and I’m glad that they—and I—can be paid to do so.

I am glad, too, for the way the internet has given an audience to writers who previously might have been shut out of the industry, or kept on its sidelines: I’m one of them. But you will never catch me arguing that professional opinion- havers in the age of the internet are, on the whole, a force for good.

In April 2017, the Times brought a millennial writer named Bari Weiss onto its opinion section as both a writer and an editor.

Weiss had graduated from Columbia, and had worked as an editor at Tablet and then at The Wall Street Journal. She leaned conservative, with a Zionist streak. At Columbia, she had cofounded a group called Columbians for Academic Freedom, hoping to pressure the university into punishing a pro- Palestinian professor who had made her feel “intimidated,” she told NPR in 2005.

At the Times, Weiss immediately began launching columns from a rhetorical and political standpoint of high-strung defensiveness, disguised with a veneer of levelheaded nonchalance. “Victimhood, in the in-

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(Above) “Bliss“ (1998) by Charles “Chuck” O’Rear is believed to be the most viewed photograph in history.

Estimated to have been viewed by well over a billion people. It was used by Windows as the default wallpaper for the Windows XP OS. (Below) The hill from “Bliss” in 2018, which is located at a winery in Sonoma, California.

EVEN AS WE

increasingly BECAME SAD

and ugly on the INTERNET, THE

mirage of the

BETTER ONLINE

self continued TO GLIMMER.

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tersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane,” she wrote—a bit of elegant phrasing in a piece that warned the public of the rampant anti-Semitism evinced, apparently, by a minor activist clusterfuck, in which the organizers of the Chicago Dyke March banned Star of David flags. She wrote a column slamming the organizers of the Women’s March over a few social media posts expressing support for Assata Shakur and Louis Farrakhan. This, she argued, was troubling evidence that progressives, just like conservatives, were unable to police their internal hate. (Both-sides arguments like this are always appealing to people who wish to seem both contrarian and intellectually superior; this particular one required ignoring the fact that liberals remained obsessed with “civility” while the Republican president was actively endorsing violence at every turn. Later on, when Tablet published an investigation into the Women’s March organizers who maintained disconcerting ties to the Nation of Islam, these organizers were criticized by liberals, who truly do not lack the self-policing instinct; in large part because the left does take hate seriously, the Women’s March effectively splintered into two groups.) Often, Weiss’s columns featured aggrieved predictions of how her bold, independent thinking would make her opponents go crazy and attack her. “I will inevitably get called a racist,” she proclaimed in one column, titled “Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation.” “I’ll be accused of siding with the alt-right or tarred as Islamophobic,” she wrote in another column. Well, sure.

Though Weiss often argued that people should get more comfortable with those who offended or disagreed with them, she seemed mostly unable to take her own advice. During the Winter Olympics in 2018, she watched the figure skater Mirai Nagasu land a triple axel—the first American woman to do so in Olympic competition—and tweeted, in a very funny attempt at a compliment, “Immigrants: they get the job done.” Because Nagasu was actually born in California, Weiss was immediately shouted down. This is what happens online when you do something offensive: when I worked at Jezebel, people shouted me down on Twitter about five times a year over things I had written or edited, and sometimes outlets published pieces about our mistakes.

This was often overwhelming and unpleasant, but it was always useful. Weiss, for her part, tweeted that the people calling her racist tweet racist were a “sign of civilization’s end.” A couple of weeks later, she wrote a column called “We’re All Fascists Now,” arguing that angry liberals were creating a “moral flattening of the earth.” At times it seems that Weiss’s main strategy is to make an argument that’s bad enough to attract criticism, and then to cherry- pick the worst of that criticism into the foundation for another bad argument. Her worldview requires the specter of a vast, angry, inferior mob.

It’s of course true that there are vast, angry mobs on the internet. Jon Ronson wrote the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed about this in 2015. “We became keenly watchful for transgressions,” he writes, describing the state of Twitter around 2012. “After a while it wasn’t just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. It was misspeakings. Fury at the terribleness of other people had started to consume us a lot….In fact, it felt weird and empty when there wasn’t anyone to be furious about. The days between shamings felt like days picking at fingernails, treading water.” Web 2.0 had curdled; its organizing principle was shifting. The early internet had been constructed around lines of affinity, and whatever good spaces

remain on the internet are still the product of affinity and openness. But when the internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition, much of what had formerly been surprising and rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious, and grim.

This shift partly reflects basic social physics. Having a mutual enemy is a quick way to make a friend—we learn this as early as elementary school—and politically, it’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look. Gawker Media thrived on antagonism: its flagship site made enemies of everyone; Deadspin targeted ESPN, Jezebel the world of women’s magazines. There was a brief wave of sunny, saccharine, profitable internet content—the OMG era of BuzzFeed, the rise of sites like Upworthy—but it ended in 2014 or so. Today, on Facebook, the most-viewed political pages succeed because of a commitment to constant, aggressive, often unhinged opposition. Beloved, oddly warmhearted websites like The Awl, The Toast, and Grantland have all been shuttered; each closing has been a reminder that an open-ended, affinity-based, generative online identity is hard to keep alive.

That opposition looms so large on the internet can be good and useful and even revolutionary. Because of the internet’s tilt toward decontextualization and frictionlessness, a person on social media can seem to matter as much as whatever he’s set himself against.

Opponents can meet on suddenly (if temporarily) even ground. Gawker covered the accusations against Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby years before the mainstream media would take sexual misconduct seriously. The Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline challenged and overturned long-standing hierarchies through the strategic deployment of social media.

The Parkland teenagers were able to position themselves as opponents of the entire GOP. But the appearance of a more level playing field is not the fact of it, and everything that happens on the internet bounces and refracts. At the same time that ideologies that lead toward equality and freedom have gained power through the internet’s open discourse, existing power structures have solidified through a vicious (and very online) opposition to this encroachment. In her 2017 book, Kill All Normies—a project of accounting for the “online battles that may otherwise be forgotten but have nevertheless shaped culture and ideas in a profound way”—the writer Angela Nagle argues that the alt-right coalesced in response to increasing cultural power on the left. Gamergate, she writes, brought together a “strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-posting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist pranksters, nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls” to form a united front against the “earnestness and moral self-flattery of what felt like a tired liberal intellectual conformity.” The obvious hole in the argument is the fact that what Nagle identifies as the center of this liberal conformity—college activist movements, obscure Tumblr accounts about mental health and arcane sexualities—are frequently derided by liberals, and have never been nearly as powerful as those who detest them would like to think. The Gamergaters’ worldview was not actually endangered; they just had to believe it was—or to pretend it was, and wait for a purportedly leftist writer to affirm them—in order to lash out and remind everyone what they could do.

Many Gamergaters cut their expressive teeth on 4chan, a message board that adopted as one of its mottos the phrase “There are no girls on the internet.”

“This rule does not mean what you think it means,” wrote one 4chan poster, who went, as most of them did, by the username Anonymous. “In real life, people

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like you for being a girl. They want to fuck you, so they pay attention to you and they pretend what you have to say is interesting, or that you are smart or clever.

On the Internet, we don’t have the chance to fuck you.

This means the advantage of being a ‘girl’ does not exist. You don’t get a bonus to conversation just because I’d like to put my cock in you.” He explained that women could get their unfair social advantage back by posting photos of their tits on the message board: “This is, and should be, degrading for you.”

Here was the opposition principle in action. Through identifying the effects of women’s systemic objectification as some sort of vagina- supremacist witchcraft, the men that congregated on 4chan gained an identity, and a useful common enemy. Many of these men had, likely, experienced consequences related to the “liberal intellectual conformity” that is popular feminism: as the sexual marketplace began to equalize, they suddenly found themselves unable to obtain sex by default. Rather than work toward other forms of self-actualization—or attempt to make themselves genuinely desirable, in the same way that women have been socialized to do at great expense and with great sincerity for all time—they established a group identity that centered on anti- woman virulence, on telling women who happened to stumble across 4chan that “the only interesting thing about you is your naked body. tl;dr: tits or GET THE FUCK OUT.” In the same way that it behooved these trolls to credit women with a maximum of power that they did not actually possess, it sometimes behooved women, on the internet, to do the same when they spoke about trolls. At some points while I worked at Jezebel, it would have been easy to enter into one of these situations myself. Let’s say a bunch of trolls sent me threatening emails—an experience that wasn’t exactly common, as I have been “lucky,” but wasn’t rare enough to surprise me. The economy of online attention would suggest that I write a column about those trolls, quote their emails, talk about how the experience of being threatened constitutes a definitive situation of being a woman in the world. (It would be acceptable for me to do this even though I have never been hacked or swatted or Gamergated, never had to move out of my house to a secure location, as so many other women have.) My column about trolling would, of course, attract an influx of trolling. Then, having proven my point, maybe I’d go on TV and talk about the situation, and then I would get trolled even more, and then I could go on defining myself in reference to trolls forever, positioning them as inexorable and monstrous, and they would return the favor in the interest of their own ideological advancement, and this whole situation could continue until we all died.

There is a version of this mutual escalation that applies to any belief system, which brings me back to Bari Weiss and all the other writers who have fashioned themselves as brave contrarians, building entire arguments on random protests and harsh tweets, making themselves deeply dependent on the people who hate them, the people they hate. It’s ridiculous, and at the same time, here I am writing this essay, doing the same thing. It is nearly impossible, today, to separate engagement from magnification. (Even declining to engage can turn into magnification: when people targeted in Pizzagate as Satanist pedophiles took their social media accounts private, the Pizzagaters took this as proof that they had been right.) Trolls and bad writers and the president know better than anyone: when you call someone terrible, you just end up promoting their work.

The political philosopher Sally Scholz separates solidarity into three categories. There’s social solidarity,

which is based on common experience; civic solidarity, which is based on moral obligation to a community; and political solidarity, which is based on a shared commitment to a cause. These forms of solidarity overlap, but they’re distinct from one another.

What’s political, in other words, doesn’t also have to be personal, at least not in the sense of firsthand experience. You don’t need to step in shit to understand what stepping in shit feels like. You don’t need to have directly suffered at the hands of some injustice in order to be invested in bringing that injustice to an end.

But the internet brings the “I” into everything. The internet can make it seem that supporting someone means literally sharing in their experience—that solidarity is a matter of identity rather than politics or morality, and that it’s best established at a point of maximum mutual vulnerability in everyday life. Under these terms, instead of expressing morally obvious solidarity with the struggle of black Americans under the police state or the plight of fat women who must roam the earth to purchase stylish and thoughtful clothing, the internet would encourage me to express solidarity through inserting my own identity. Of course I support the black struggle because I, myself, as a woman of Asian heritage, have personally been injured by white supremacy. (In fact, as an Asian woman, part of a minority group often deemed white-adjacent, I have benefited from American anti-blackness on just as many occasions.) Of course I understand the difficulty of shopping as a woman who is overlooked by the fashion industry because I, myself, have also somehow been marginalized by this industry. This framework, which centers the self in an expression of support for others, is not ideal.

The phenomenon in which people take more comfort in a sense of injury than a sense of freedom governs many situations where people are objectively not being victimized on a systematic basis. For example, men’s rights activists have developed a sense of solidarity around the absurd claim that men are second- class citizens. White nationalists have brought white people together through the idea that white people are endangered, specifically white men— this at a time when 91 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are white men, when white people make up 90 percent of elected American officials and an overwhelming majority of top decision-makers in music, publishing, television, movies, and sports.

Conversely, and crucially, the dynamic also applies in situations where claims of vulnerability are legitimate and historically entrenched. The greatest moments of feminist solidarity in recent years have stemmed not from an affirmative vision but from articulating extreme versions of the low common denominator of male slight. These moments have been world-altering: #YesAllWomen, in 2014, was the response to Elliot Rodger’s Isla Vista massacre, in which he killed six people and wounded fourteen in an attempt to exact revenge on women for rejecting him. Women responded to this story with a sense of nauseating recognition: mass violence is nearly always linked to violence toward women, and for women it is something approaching a universal experience to have placated a man out of the real fear that he will hurt you. In turn, some men responded with the entirely unnecessary reminder that “not all men” are like that. (I was once hit with “not all men” right after a stranger yelled something obscene at me; the guy I was with noted my displeasure and helpfully reminded me that not all men are jerks.) Women began posting stories on Twitter and Facebook with #YesAllWomen to make an obvious but important point: not all men have made women fearful, but yes, all women have experienced fear because of men. #MeToo, in 2017, came in the weeks following the Harvey Weinstein revelations, as the floodgates opened and story after story after story

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236 rolled out about the subjugation women had experienced at the

hands of powerful men. Against the normal forms of disbelief / and rejection these stories meet with—it can’t possibly be that 237 bad; something about her telling that story seems suspicious— women anchored one another, establishing the breadth and inescapability of male abuse of power through speaking simultaneously and adding #MeToo. In these cases, multiple types of solidarity seemed to naturally meld together. It was women’s individual experiences of victimization that produced our widespread moral and political opposition to it. And at the same time, there was something about the hashtag itself—its design, and the ways of thinking that it affirms and solidifies—that both erased the variety of women’s experiences and made it seem as if the crux of feminism was this articulation of vulnerability itself. A hashtag is specifically designed to remove a statement from context and to position it as part of an enormous singular thought. A woman participating in one of these hashtags becomes visible at an inherently predictable moment of male aggression: the time her boss jumped her, or the night a stranger followed her home. The rest of her life, which is usually far less predictable, remains unseen. Even as women have attempted to use #YesAllWomen and #MeToo to regain control of a narrative, these hashtags have at least partially reified the thing they’re trying to eradicate: the way that womanhood can feel like a story of loss of control. They have made feminist solidarity and shared vulnerability seem inextricable, as if we were incapable of building solidarity around anything else. What we have in common is obviously essential, but it’s the differences between women’s stories—the factors that allow some to survive, and force others under—that illuminate the vectors that lead to a better world. And, because there is no room or requirement in a tweet to add a disclaimer about individual experience, and because hashtags subtly equate disconnected statements in a way that can’t be controlled by those speaking, it has been even easier for #MeToo critics to claim that women must themselves think that going on a bad date is the same as being violently raped.

What’s amazing is that things like hashtag design—these essentially ad hoc experiments in digital architecture—have shaped so much of our political discourse. Our world would be different if Anonymous hadn’t been the default username on 4chan, or if every social media platform didn’t center on the personal profile, or if YouTube algorithms didn’t show viewers increasingly extreme content to retain their attention, or if hashtags and retweets simply didn’t exist. It’s because of the hashtag, the retweet, and the profile that solidarity on the internet gets inextricably tangled up with visibility, identity, and self-promotion. It’s telling that the most mainstream gestures of solidarity are pure representation, like viral reposts or avatar photos with cause-related filters, and meanwhile the actual mechanisms through which political solidarity is enacted, like strikes and boycotts, still exist on the fringe. The extremes of performative solidarity are all transparently embarrassing: a Christian internet personality urging other conservatives to tell Starbucks baristas that their name is “Merry Christmas,” or Nev Schulman from the TV show Catfish taking a selfie with a hand over his heart in an elevator and captioning it “A real man shows his strength through patience and honor. This elevator is abuse free.” (Schulman punched a girl in college.) The demonstrative celebration of black women on social media— white people tweeting “black women will save America” after elections, or Mark Ruffalo tweeting that he said a prayer and God

answered as a black woman—often hints at a bizarre need on the part of white people to personally participate in an ideology of equality that ostensibly requires them to chill out. At one point in The Presentation of Self, Goffman writes that the audience’s way of shaping a role for the performer can become more elaborate than the performance itself. This is what the online expression of solidarity sometimes feels like—a manner of listening so extreme and performative that it often turns into the show.

The final, and possibly most psychologically destructive, distortion of the social internet is its distortion of scale. This is not an accident but an essential design feature: social media was constructed around the idea that a thing is important insofar as it is important to you. In an early internal memo about the creation of Facebook’s News Feed, Mark Zuckerberg observed, already beyond parody, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” The idea was that social media would give us a fine-tuned sort of control over what we looked at. What resulted was a situation where we—first as individuals, and then inevitably as a collective—are essentially unable to exercise control at all. Facebook’s goal of showing people only what they were interested in seeing resulted, within a decade, in the effective end of shared civic reality. And this choice, combined with the company’s financial incentive to continually trigger heightened emotional responses n its users, ultimately solidified the current norm in news media consumption: today we mostly consume news that corresponds with our ideological alignment, which has been fine-tuned to make us feel self-righteous and also mad.

In The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu observes that technologies designed to increase control over our attention often have the opposite effect. He uses the TV remote control as one example.

It made flipping through channels “practically nonvolitional,” he writes, and put viewers in a “mental state not unlike that of a newborn or a reptile.” On the internet, this dynamic has been automated and generalized in the form of endlessly varied but somehow monotonous social media feeds—these addictive, numbing fire hoses of information that we aim at our brains for much of the day. In front of the timeline, as many critics have noted, we exhibit classic reward-seeking lab- rat behavior, the sort that’s observed when lab rats are put in front of an unpredictable food dispenser. Rats will eventually stop pressing the lever if their device dispenses food regularly or not at all. But if the lever’s rewards are rare and irregular, the rats will never stop pressing it. In other words, it is essential that social media is mostly unsatisfying.

That is what keeps us scrolling, scrolling, pressing our lever over and over in the hopes of getting some fleeting sensation—some momentary rush of recognition, flattery, or rage.

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Background

"I have been thinking about 5 intersecting problems with ourselves and the Internet:

1st how the Internet is built to distend our sense own of identity. 2nd how it encourages us to overvalue our own opinions. 3rd how it maximizes our own sense of opposition.

4th how it cheap-

ens our understanding of solidarity. 5th how it destroys our sense of scale."

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The Case for Nothing

By Jenny Odell In early 2017, not long after Trump’s inauguration, I was asked to give a keynote talk at EYEO, an art and technology conference in Minneapolis. I was still reeling from the election and, like many other artists I knew, found it difficult to continue making anything at all. On top of that, Oakland was in a state of mourning following the 2016 Ghost Ship fire, which took the lives of many artists and community-minded people. Staring at the blank field in which I was supposed to enter my talk title, I thought about what I could possibly say that would be meaningful in a moment like this. Without yet knowing what the talk would actually be, I just typed in “How to Do Nothing.”

After that, I decided to ground the talk in a specific place: the Morcom Amphitheatre of Roses in Oakland, California, otherwise known simply as the Rose Garden. I did that partly because it was in the Rose Garden that I began brainstorming my talk. But I had also realized that the garden encompassed everything I wanted to cover: the practice of doing nothing, the architecture of nothing, the importance of public space, and an ethics of care and maintenance.

I live five minutes away from the Rose Garden, and ever since I’ve lived in Oakland, it’s been my default place to go to get away from my computer, where I do much of my work, art and otherwise. But after the election, I started going to the Rose Garden almost every day. This wasn’t exactly a conscious decision; it was more of an innate movement, like a deer going to a salt lick or a goat going to the top of a hill. What I would do there is nothing. I’d just sit there. And although I felt a bit guilty about how incongruous it seemed—beautiful garden versus terrifying world—it really did feel like a necessary survival tactic. I recognized the feeling in a passage from Gilles Deleuze in Negotiations: We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of On Brand™

solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.

He wrote that in 1985, but I could identify with the sentiment in 2016, almost to a painful degree. The function of nothing here— of saying nothing—is that it’s a precursor to having something to say. “Nothing” is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.

Of course, as a visual artist, I’ve long had an appreciation of doing nothing—or, more properly, making nothing. I had been known to do things like collect hundreds of screenshots of farms or chemical- waste ponds from Google Earth, cutting them out and arranging them in mandala-like compositions. In The Bureau of Suspended Objects, a project I did while in residence at Recology SF, I spent three months photographing, cataloging, and researching the origins of two hundred discarded objects. I presented them as a browsable archive in which people could scan a handmade tag next to each object and learn about its manufacturing, material, and corporate history.

At the opening, a confused and somewhat indignant woman turned to me and said, “Wait…so did you actually make anything? Or did you just put things on shelves?” I often say that my medium is context, so the answer was yes to both.

Part of the reason I work this way is because I find existing things infinitely more interesting than anything I could possibly make.

The Bureau of Suspended Objects was really just an excuse for

me to stare at the amazing things in the dump—a Nintendo Power Glove, a jumble of bicentennial-edition 7UP cans, a bank ledger from 1906— and to give each object the attention it was due.

This near- paralyzing fascination with one’s subject is something I’ve termed the “observational eros.” There’s something like it in the introduction of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, where he describes the patience and care involved in close observation of one’s specimens: When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book—to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.

Given this context, it’s perhaps unsurprising that one of my favorite public art pieces was done by a documentary filmmaker.

In 1973, Eleanor Coppola carried out a public art project called Windows, which materially speaking consisted only of a map with a date and a list of locations in San Francisco. Following Steinbeck’s formula, the windows at each location were the bottle, and whatever happened behind them were the stories that “crawled in.” Coppola’s map reads: Eleanor Coppola has designated a number of windows in all parts of San Francisco as visual landmarks. Her purpose in this project is to bring to the attention of the whole community, art that exists in its own context, where it is found, without being altered or removed to a gallery situation.

I like to consider this piece in contrast with how we normally experience public art, which is some giant steel thing that looks like it landed in a corporate plaza from outer space. Coppola

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instead casts a subtle frame over the whole of the city itself, a light but meaningful touch that recognizes art that exists where it already is.

A more recent project that acts in a similar spirit is Scott Polach’s Applause Encouraged, which happened at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015. On a cliff overlooking the sea, forty-five minutes before the sunset, a greeter checked guests in to an area of foldout seats formally cordoned off with red rope. They were ushered to their seats and reminded not to take photos. They watched the sunset, and when it finished, they applauded. Refreshments were served afterward.

THESE LAST FEW projects have something important in common. In each, the artist creates a structure—whether that’s a map or a cordoned-off area (or even a lowly set of shelves!)— that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction that constantly threaten to close it. This attention- holding architecture is something I frequently think about at the Rose Garden. Far from your typical flat square garden with simple rows of roses, it sits into a hill, with an endlessly branching system of paths and stairways through and around the roses, trellises, and oak trees. I’ve observed that everyone moves very slowly, and yes, people do quite literally stop and smell the roses. There are probably a hundred possible ways to wind your way through the garden, and just as many places to sit. Architecturally, the Rose Garden wants you to stay there for awhile.

You can see this effect at work in the circular labyrinths that are designed for nothing other than contemplative walking. Labyrinths function similarly to how they appear, enabling a sort of dense infolding of attention; through two-dimensional design alone, they make it possible not to walk straight through a space, nor to stand still, but something very well in between. I find myself gravitating toward these kinds of spaces—libraries, small museums, gardens, columbaria—because of the way they unfold secret and multifarious perspectives even within a fairly small area.

But of course, this infolding of attention doesn’t need to be spatialized or visual. For an auditory example, I look to Deep Listening, the legacy of the musician and composer Pauline Oliveros.

Classically trained in composition, Oliveros was teaching experimental music at UC San Diego in the 1970s. She began developing participatory group techniques—such as performances where people listened to and improvised responses to each other and the ambient sound environment—as a way of working with sound that could bring some inner peace amid the violence and unrest of the Vietnam War. Deep Listening was one of those techniques. Oliveros defines the practice as “listening in every possible way to every thing possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds.”4 She distinguished between listening and hearing: “To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.”5 The goal and the reward of Deep Listening was a heightened sense of receptivity and a reversal of our usual cultural training, which teaches us to quickly analyze and judge more than to simply observe.

When I learned about Deep Listening, I realized I had unwittingly been practicing it for a while—only in the context of bird-watching. In fact, I’ve always found it funny that it’s called

bird-watching, because half if not more of bird-watching is actually bird-listening. (I personally think they should just rename it “bird-noticing.”) However you refer to it, what this practice has in common with Deep Listening is that observing birds requires you quite literally to do nothing. Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online. You can’t really look for birds; you can’t make a bird come out and identify itself to you. The most you can do is walk quietly and wait until you hear something, and then stand motionless under a tree, using your animal senses to figure out where and what it is.

What amazed and humbled me about bird-watching was the way it changed the granularity of my perception, which had been pretty “low-res.” At first, I just noticed birdsong more. Of course it had been there all along, but now that I was paying attention to it, I realized that it was almost everywhere, all day, all the time. And then, one by one, I started learning each song and associating it with a bird, so that now when I walk into the Rose Garden, I inadvertently acknowledge them in my head as though they were people: “Hi, raven, robin, song sparrow, chickadee, goldfinch, towhee, hawk, nuthatch…” and so on. The sounds have become so familiar to me that I no longer strain to identify them; they register instead like speech. This might sound familiar to anyone who has ever learned another (human) language as an adult. Indeed, the diversification of what was previously “bird sounds”—into discrete sounds that mean something to me—is something I can only compare to the moment that I realized that my mom spoke three languages, not two.

My mom has only ever spoken English to me, and for a very long time, I assumed that whenever my mom was speaking to another Filipino person, she was speaking Tagalog. I didn’t really have a good reason for thinking this other than that I knew she did speak Tagalog and it sort of all sounded like Tagalog to me. But my mom was only sometimes speaking Tagalog. Other times she was speaking Ilonggo, which is a completely different language that is specific to where she’s from in the Philippines. The languages are not the same, i.e., one is not simply a dialect of the other; in fact, the Philippines is full of language groups that, according to my mom, have so little in common that speakers would not be able to understand each other, Tagalog is only one.

This type of embarrassing discovery, in which something you thought was one thing is actually two things, and each of those two things is actually ten things, seems like a simple function of the duration and quality of one’s attention. With effort, we can become attuned to things, able to pick up and then hopefully differentiate finer and finer frequencies each time.

THERE’S SOMETHING IMPORTANT that the moment of stopping to listen has in common with the labyrinthine quality of attention-holding architecture: in their own ways, each enacts some kind of interruption, a removal from the sphere of familiarity. Every time I see or hear an unusual bird, time stops, and later I wonder where I was, just as wandering some unexpected secret passageway can feel like dropping out of linear time. Even if brief or momentary, these places and moments are retreats, and like longer retreats, they affect the way we see everyday life when we do come back to it.

The location of the Rose Garden—when it was built in the 1930s— was specifically chosen because of the natural bowl shape of the land. The space feels physically and acoustically enclosed, remarkably separate from everything around it. When you sit in the Rose Garden, you truly sit in it. Likewise, lab-

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yrinths of any kind, by virtue of their shape, collect our attention into these small circular spaces. When / Rebecca Solnit, in her book Wanderlust, wrote about 247 walking in the labyrinth inside the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, she found herself barely in the city at all: “The circuit was so absorbing I lost sight of the people nearby and hardly heard the sound of the traffic and the bells for six o’clock.”6 This isn’t a new idea, and it also applies over longer periods of time. Most people have, or have known someone who has, gone through some period of “removal” that fundamentally changed their attitude to the world they returned to. Sometimes that’s occasioned by something terrible, like illness or loss, and sometimes it’s voluntary, but regardless, that pause in time is often the only thing that can precipitate change on a certain scale.

One of our most famous observers, John Muir, had just such an experience. Before becoming the naturalist that we know him as, he worked as a supervisor and sometimes-inventor in a wagon wheel factory. (I suspect that he was a man concerned with productivity, since one of his inventions was a study desk that was also an alarm clock and timer, which would open up books for an allotted amount of time, close them, and then open the next book.) Muir had already developed a love of botany, but it was being temporarily blinded by an eye accident that made him re-evaluate his priorities. The accident confined him to a darkened room for six weeks, during which he was unsure whether he would ever see again.

The 1916 edition of The Writings of John Muir is divided into two parts, one before the accident and one after, each with its own introduction by William Frederic Badè. In the second introduction, Badè writes that this period of reflection convinced Muir that “life was too brief and uncertain, and time too precious, to waste upon belts and saws; that while he was pottering in a wagon factory, God was making a world; and he determined that, if his eyesight was spared, he would devote the remainder of his life to a study of the process.” Muir himself said, “This affliction has driven me to the sweet fields.”

As it turns out, my dad went through his own period of removal when he was my age and working as a technician in the Bay Area. He’d gotten fed up with his job and figured he had enough saved up to quit and live extremely cheaply for a while. That ended up being two years. When I asked him how he spent those years, he said he read a lot, rode his bike, studied math and electronics, went fishing, had long chats with his friend and roommate, and sat in the hills, where he taught himself the flute. After a while, he says, he realized that a lot of his anger about his job and outside circumstances had more to do with him than he realized. As he put it, “It’s just you with yourself and your own crap, so you have to deal with it.” But that time also taught my dad about creativity, and the state of openness, and maybe even the boredom or nothingness, that it requires. I’m reminded of a 1991 lecture by John Cleese (of Monty Python) on creativity, in which two of the five required factors he lists are time: 1) Space, 2) Time, 3) Time, 4) Confidence, 5) A 22 inch waist Humor.

And so at the end of this stretch of open time, my dad looked around for another job and realized that the one he’d had was actually pretty good. Luckily for him, they welcomed him back without hesitation open arms. But also, because he’d discovered what was necessary for his own creativity, things weren’t exactly the same the second time around. With renewed energy and a different perspective on his job, he went from technician

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to engineer, and has filed around twelve patents so far. To this day, he insists that he comes up with all of his best ideas on the top of a hill after a long bike ride.

This got me thinking that perhaps the granularity of attention we achieve outward also extends inward, so that as the perceptual details of our environment unfold in surprising ways, so too do our own intricacies and contradictions. My dad said that leaving the confined context of a job made him understand himself not in relation to that world, but just to the world, and forever after that, things that happened at work only seemed like one small part of something much larger. It reminds me of how John Muir described himself not as a naturalist but as a “poetico-trampo-geologist- botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc.,” or of how Pauline Oliveros described herself in 1974: Pauline Oliveros is a two legged human being, female, lesbian, musician, and composer among other things which contribute to her identity. She is herself and lives with her partner…along with assorted poultry, dogs, cats, rabbits and tropical hermit crabs.

Of course, there’s an obvious critique of all of this, and that’s that it comes from a place of privilege. I can go to the Rose Garden, stare into trees, and sit on hills all the time because I have a teaching job that only requires me to be on campus two days a week, not to mention a whole set of other privileges. Part of the reason my dad could take that time off was that on some level, he had cause to think he could get another job. It’s very possible to understand the practice of doing nothing solely as a self-indulgent luxury, the equivalent of taking a mental health day, if you’re lucky enough to work at a place that has those. But here I come back to Deleuze’s “right to say nothing,” and just because this right is denied to many people doesn’t make it any less of a right or any less important. As far back as 1886, decades before it would finally be guaranteed, workers in the United States pushed for an eight-hour workday: “eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will.” The famous graphic by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions shows this motto corresponding to three sections of the day: a textile worker at her station, a sleeping person’s feet sticking out of a blanket, and a couple sitting in a boat on a lake, reading a union newspaper.

The movement also had its own song: We mean to make things over; we’re tired of toil for naught but bare enough to live on: never an hour for thought. We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers; We’re sure that God has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours. We’re summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill: Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!

Here, I’m struck by the types of things associated with the category “what we will”: rest, thought, flowers, sunshine. These are bodily, human things, and this bodily-ness is something I will come back to.

When Samuel Gompers, who led the labor group that organized this particular iteration of the eight-hour movement, gave an address titled “What Does Labor Want?” the answer he arrived at was, “It wants the earth and the fullness thereof.” And to me it seems significant that it’s not eight hours of, say, “leisure” or “education,” but “eight hours of what we will.” Although leisure might be involved, the most humane way to describe that period is to refuse to define it.

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That campaign was about a demarcation of time. So it’s interesting, and certainly troubling, to understand the decline in labor unions in the last several decades alongside a similar decline in the demarcation of public space. True public spaces, the most obvious examples being parks and libraries, are places for—and thus the spatial underpinnings of—“what we will.” A public, noncommercial space demands nothing from you in order for you to enter, nor for you to stay; the most obvious difference between public space and other spaces is that you don’t have to buy anything, or pretend to want to buy something, to be there.

Consider an actual city park in contrast to a faux public space like Universal CityWalk, which one passes through upon leaving the Universal Studios theme park. Because it interfaces between the theme park and the actual city, CityWalk exists somewhere in between, almost like a movie set, where visitors can consume the supposed diversity of an urban environment while enjoying a feeling of safety that results from its actual homogeneity. In an essay about such spaces, Eric Holding and Sarah Chaplin call CityWalk “a 'scripted space’ par excellence, that is, a space which excludes, directs, supervises, constructs, and orchestrates use.”13 Anyone who has ever tried any funny business in a faux public space knows that such spaces do not just script actions, they police them. In a public space, ideally, you are a citizen with agency; in a faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place.

The Rose Garden is a public space. It is a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project from the 1930s, and like all WPA projects, was built by people put to work by the federal government during the Depression. I’m reminded of its beginnings every time I see its dignified architecture: that this rose garden, an in-

credible public good, came out of a program that itself was also a public good. Still, it wasn’t surprising to me to find out recently that the Rose Garden is in an area that almost got turned into condos in the seventies. I’m appalled, but not surprised. I’m also not surprised that it took a concerted effort by local residents to have the area rezoned to prevent that from happening. That’s because this kind of thing always seems to be happening: those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they “produce” can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified— despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value that the garden provides.

Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos. In After the Future, the Marxist theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi ties the defeat of labor movements in the eighties to rise of the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs. In the past, he notes, economic risk was the business of the capitalist, the investor.

Today, though, “'we are all capitalists’…and therefore, we all have to take risks…The essential idea is that we should all consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.”

The way that Berardi describes labor will sound as familiar to anyone concerned with their personal brand as it will to any Uber driver, content moderator, hard-up freelancer, aspiring YouTube star, or adjunct professor who drives to three campuses in one week: In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine…The workers are deprived of

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every individual consistency. Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist. Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salary. (emphasis mine) The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries—eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will—so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.

In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial. Just as public space gives way to faux public retail spaces or weird corporate privatized parks, so we are sold the idea of compromised leisure, a freemium leisure that is a very far cry from “what we will.”

In 2017, while I was an artist in residence at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, I spent a lot of time going through the ads in old issues of BYTE, a 1980s-era hobbyist computing magazine.

Among unintentionally surreal images—a hard drive plugged into an apple, a man arm wrestling with his desktop computer, or a California gold miner holding up a pan of computer chips and saying, “Eureka!”—I came across a lot of ads about computers whose main point was that they were going to save you time working. My favorite was an ad by NEC, whose motto was “Taking it to the limit.” The ad, titled “Power Lunch,” shows a man at home, typing on a computer whose screen shows a bar graph of increasing values. He drinks a small carton of milk, but his sandwich is untouched. Taking it to the limit indeed.

Part of what’s so painful about this image is that we know how this story ends; yes, it did get easier to work. From anywhere.

All the time! For an extreme example, look no further than Fiverr, a microtasking site where users sell various tasks—basically, units of their time—for five dollars each. Those tasks could be anything: copyediting, filming a video of themselves doing something of your choice, or pretending to be your girlfriend on Facebook. To me, Fiverr is the ultimate expression of Franco Berardi’s “fractals of time and pulsating cells of labor.”

In 2017, Fiverr ran a similar ad to NEC’s “Power Lunch,” but missing the lunch. In this one, a gaunt twenty-something stares dead-eyed into the camera, accompanied by the following text: “You eat a coffee for lunch. You follow through on your follow-through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice.

You might be a doer.” Here, the idea that you would even withhold some of that time to sustain yourself with food is essentially ridiculed. In a New Yorker article aptly titled “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death,” Jia Tolentino concludes after reading a Fiverr press release: “This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation—or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in [Fiverr’s pro-

motional] video.” When every moment is a moment you could be working, power lunch becomes power lifestyle.

Though it finds its baldest expression in things like the Fiverr ads, this phenomenon—of work metastasizing throughout the rest of life—isn’t constrained to the gig economy. I learned this during the few years that I worked in the marketing department of a large clothing brand. The office had instituted something called the Results Only Work Environment, or ROWE, which meant to abolish the eight- hour workday by letting you work whenever from wherever, as long as you got your work done. It sounded noble enough, but there was something in the name that bothered me. After all, what is the E in ROWE? If you could be getting results at the office, in your car, at the store, at home after dinner—aren’t those all then “work environments”? At that time, in 2011, I’d managed not to get a phone with email yet, and with the introduction of this new workday, I put off getting one even longer. I knew exactly what would happen the minute I did: that every minute of every day I would in fact be answerable to someone, even if my leash was a lot longer.

Our required reading, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results-Only Revolution, by the creators of ROWE, seemed well intended, as the authors attempted to describe a merciful slackening of the “be in your chair from nine to five” model. But I was nonetheless troubled by how the work and non-work selves are completely conflated throughout the text.

They write: If you can have your time and work and live and be a person, then the question you’re faced with every day isn’t, Do I really have to go to work today? but, How do I contribute to this thing called life?

What can I do today to benefit my family, my company, myself?

To me, “company” doesn’t belong in that sentence. Even if you love your job! Unless there’s something specifically about you or your job that requires it, there is nothing to be admired about being constantly connected, constantly potentially productive the second you open your eyes in the morning—and in my opinion, no one should accept this, not now, not ever. In the words of Othello: “Leave me but a little to myself.”

This constant connection—and the difficulty of maintaining any kind of silence or interiority—is already a problem, but after the 2016 election it seemed to take on new dimensions. I was seeing that the means by which we give over our hours and days are the same with which we assault ourselves with information and misinformation, at a frankly inhumane rate. Obviously the solution is not to stop reading the news, or even what other people have to say about that news, but we could use a moment to examine the relationship between attention span and the speed of information exchange.

Berardi, contrasting modern-day Italy with the political agitations of the 1970s, says the regime he inhabits “is not founded on the repression of dissent; nor does it rest on the enforcement of silence. On the contrary, it relies on the proliferation of chatter, the irrelevance of opinion and discourse, and on making thought, dissent, and critique banal and ridiculous.” Instances of censorship, he says, “are rather marginal when compared to what is essentially an immense informational overload and an actual siege of attention, combined with the occupation of the sources of information by the head of the company.”

It is this financially incentivized proliferation of chatter, and the utter speed at which waves of hysteria now happen online, that has so deeply horrified me and offended my senses and cognition as a human who dwells in human, bodily time. The connection

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"In the global digital network, l abor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy... Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist.

Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salary." – Jenny Odell

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"At the center of entrepreneurism is that we should all consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.”

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between the completely virtual and the utterly real, as evidenced by something like Pizzagate, or the doxing and swatting of online journalists, is deeply, fundamentally disturbing on a human phenomenological level. I know that in the months after the election, a lot of people found themselves searching for this thing called “truth,” but what I also felt to be missing was just reality, something I could point to after all of this and say, This is really real.

IN THE MIDDLE of this postelection heartbreak and anxiety, I was still looking at birds. Not just any birds, and not even a species, but a few specific individuals. First, it was a couple of black-crowned night herons that reliably perch outside of a KFC in my neighborhood, almost all day and night. If you’ve never seen one, night herons are stocky compared to other herons.

My boyfriend once described them as a cross between a penguin and Paul Giamatti. They have a grumpy stoicism about them, sitting hunched over with their long neck completely hidden away. I sometimes affectionately refer to these birds as “the colonels” (because of their location) or “my precious footballs” (because of their shape).

Without really thinking about it, I modified my path home from the bus to pass by the night herons whenever I could, just to be reassured by their presence.

I remember specifically feeling comforted by the presence of these strange birds, like I could look up from the horrifying maelstrom of that day’s Twitter and they’d probably be there, unmoving with their formidable beaks and their laser-red eyes. (In fact, I even found them sitting in the same place on 2011 Google Street View, and I have no doubt they were there earlier, but Street View doesn’t go back any further.) The KFC is near Lake Merritt, a man-made lake in a completely developed area that, like much of the East Bay and the Peninsula, used to be the type of wetlands that herons and other shorebirds love. Night herons have existed here since before Oakland was a city, holdovers from that marshier time. Knowing this made the KFC night herons begin to seem like ghosts to me, especially at night when the streetlights would make their white bellies glow from below.

One of the reasons the night herons are still here is that, like crows, they don’t mind humans, traffic, or the occasional piece of trash for dinner. And indeed, crows were the other birds I had started paying more attention to. I had just finished reading Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds and had learned that crows are incredibly intelligent (in the way that humans measure intelligence, anyway) and can recognize and remember human faces. They have been documented making and using tools in the wild. They can also teach their children who are the “good” and “bad” humans—good being ones who feed them and bad being ones who try to catch them or otherwise displease them.

They can hold grudges for years. I’d seen crows all my life, but now I became curious about the ones in my neighborhood.

My apartment has a balcony, so I started leaving a few peanuts out on it for the crows. For a long time the peanuts just stayed there and I felt like a crazy person. And then once in a while I’d notice that one was gone, but I couldn’t be sure who took it. Then a couple times I saw a crow come by and swipe one, but it wouldn’t stay. And this went on for a while until finally they began hanging out on a telephone wire nearby. One started coming every day around the time that I eat breakfast, sitting exactly where I could see it from the kitchen table, and it would caw

to make me come out on the balcony with a peanut.

Then one day it brought its kid, which I knew was its kid because the big one would groom the smaller one and because the smaller one had an undeveloped, chicken-like squawk. I named them Crow and Crowson.

I soon discovered that Crow and Crowson preferred it when I threw peanuts off the balcony so they could do fancy dives off the telephone line. They’d do twists, barrel rolls, and loops, which I made slow-motion videos of with the obsessiveness of a proud parent. Sometimes they wouldn’t want any more peanuts and would just sit there and stare at me. One time Crowson followed me halfway down the street. And frankly, I spent a lot of time staring back at them, to the point that I wondered what the neighbors might think. But again, like the night herons, I found their company comforting, somehow extremely so given the circumstances. It was comforting that these essentially wild animals recognized me, that I had some place in their universe, and that even though I had no idea what they did the rest of the day, that they would (and still do) stop by my place every day— that sometimes I can even wave them over from a faraway tree.

Inevitably, I began to wonder what these birds see when they look at me. I assume they just see a human who for some reason pays attention to them.

They don’t know what my work is, they don’t see progress—they just see recurrence, day after day, week after week. And through them, I am able to inhabit that perspective, to see myself as the human animal that I am, and when they fly off, to some extent, I can inhabit that perspective too, noticing the shape of the hill that I live on and where all of the tall trees and good landing spots are. I noticed that some ravens live half in and half out of the Rose Garden, until I realized that there is no “rose garden” to them. These alien animal perspectives on me and our shared world have provided me not only with an escape hatch from contemporary anxiety but also a reminder of my own animality and the animateness of the world I live in.

Their flights enable my own literal flights of fancy, recalling a question that one of my favorite authors, David Abram, asks in Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology: “Do we really believe that the human imagination can sustain itself without being startled by other shapes of sentience?” Strange as it sounds, this explained my need to go to the Rose Garden after the election. What was missing from that surreal and terrifying torrent of information and virtuality was any regard, any place, for the human animal, situated as she is in time and in a physical environment with other human and nonhuman entities. It turns out that groundedness requires actual ground. “Direct sensuous reality,” writes Abram, “in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.”

When I realized this, I grabbed on to it like a life raft, and I haven’t let go. This is real. Your eyes reading this text, your hands, your breath, the time of day, the place where you are reading this— these things are real. I’m real too. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force; I’m lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, see, and smell things in a world where others also hear, see, and smell me. And it takes a break to remember that: a

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break to do nothing, to just listen, to remember in the deepest sense what, when, and where we are.

I WANT TO be clear that I’m not actually encouraging anyone to stop doing things completely. In fact, I think that “doing nothing”—in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping to listen—entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change. I consider “doing nothing” both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully. On this level, the practice of doing nothing has several tools to offer us when it comes to resisting the attention economy.

The first tool has to do with repair. In such times as these, having recourse to periods of and spaces for “doing nothing” is of utmost importance, because without them we have no way to think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves—individually or collectively.

There is a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something. When overstimulation has become a fact of life, I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out, or if that bothers you, #NOSMO, the necessity of sometimes missing out.

That’s a strategic function of nothing, and in that sense, you could file what I’ve said so far under the heading of self-care.

But if you do, make it “self-care” in the activist sense that Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self- indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” This is an important distinction to make these days, when the phrase “self-care” is appropriated for commercial ends and risks becoming a cliché. As Gabrielle Moss, author of Glop: Nontoxic, Expensive Ideas That Will Make You Look Ridiculous and Feel Pretentious (a book parodying goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-priced wellness empire), put it: self-care “is poised to be wrenched away from activists and turned into an excuse to buy an expensive bath oil.”

The second tool that doing nothing offers us is a sharpened ability to listen. I’ve already mentioned Deep Listening, but this time I mean it in the broader sense of understanding one another. To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.” Unfortunately, our constant engagement with the attention economy means that this is something many of us (myself included) may have to relearn. Even with the problem of the filter bubble aside, the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening. Instead they reward shouting and oversimple reaction: of having a “take” after having read a single headline.

I alluded earlier to the problem of speed, but this is also a problem both of listening and of bodies. There is in fact a connection between 1) listening in the Deep Listening, bodily sense, and 2) listening, as in me understanding your perspective. Writing about the circulation of information, Berardi makes a distinction that’s especially helpful here, between what he calls connectivity and sensitivity. Connectivity is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units—an example would be an article racking up a bunch of shares very quickly and unthinkingly by like-minded people on Facebook. With connectivity, you either are or are not compatible. Red or blue: check the box.

In this transmission of information, the units don’t change, nor does the information.

Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently

shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous—and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time. Not only that, due to the effort of sensing, the two entities might come away from the encounter a bit different than they went in. Thinking about sensitivity reminds me of a monthlong artist residency I once attended with two other artists in an extremely remote location in the Sierra Nevada. There wasn’t much to do at night, so one of the artists and I would sometimes sit on the roof and watch the sunset. She was Catholic and from the Midwest; I’m sort of the quintessential California atheist. I have really fond memories of the languid, meandering conversations we had up there about science and religion. And what strikes me is that neither of us ever convinced the other—that wasn’t the point—but we listened to each other, and we did each come away different, with a more nuanced understanding of the other person’s position.

So connectivity is a share or, conversely, a trigger; sensitivity is an in-person conversation, whether pleasant or difficult, or both. Obviously, online platforms favor connectivity, not simply by virtue of being online, but also arguably for profit, since the difference between connectivity and sensitivity is time, and time is money. Again, too expensive.

As the body disappears, so does our ability to empathize. Berardi suggests a link between our senses and our ability to make sense, asking us to “hypothesize the connection between the expansion of the infosphere…and the crumbling of the sensory membrane that allows human beings to understand that which cannot be verbalized, that which cannot be reduced to codified signs.” In the environment of our online platforms, “that which cannot be verbalized” is figured as excess or incompatible, although every in- person encounter teaches us the importance of nonverbal expressions of the body, not to mention the very matter-of-fact presence of the body in front of me.

BUT BEYOND SELF-CARE and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

This is the place to mention a few regulars of the Rose Garden. Besides Rose the wild turkey and Grayson the cat (who will sit on your book if you’re trying to read), you are always likely to see a few of the park’s volunteers doing maintenance. Their presence is a reminder that the Rose Garden is beautiful in part because it is cared for, that effort must be put in, whether that’s saving it from becoming condos or just making sure the roses come back next year. The volunteers do such a good job that I often see park visitors walk up to them and thank them for what they’re doing.

When I see them pulling weeds and arranging hoses, I often think of the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Her well-known pieces include Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside, a performance in which she washed the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum, and Touch Sanitation Performance, in which she spent eleven months shaking hands with and thanking New York City’s 8,500 sanitation men, in addition to interviewing and shadowing them.

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New York City Sanitation Department since 1977.

Ukeles’s interest in maintenance was partly occasioned by her becoming a mother in the 1960s. In an interview, she explained, “Being a mother entails an enormous amount of repetitive tasks. I became a maintenance worker. I felt completely abandoned by my culture because it didn’t have a way to incorporate sustaining work.” In 1969, she wrote the “Manifesto for Maintenance Art”, an exhibition proposal in which she considers her own maintenance work as the art. She says, “I will live in the museum and do what I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition…My working will be the work.” Her manifesto opens with a distinction between what she calls the death force and the life force: IDEAS: The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct: The Death Instinct: separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change.

The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations, equilibrium.

The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like “disrupt.” Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in “progress.”

That brings me to one last surprising aspect of the Rose Garden, which I first noticed on the central promenade. Set into the concrete on either side are a series of numbers in the tens, each signifying a decade, and within each decade are ten plaques with the names of various women. As it turns out, the names are of women who were voted Mother of the Year by Oakland residents. To be Mother of the Year, you must have “contributed to improving the quality of life for the people of Oakland—through home, work, community service, volunteer efforts or combination thereof.” In an old industry film about Oakland, I found footage of a Mother of the Year ceremony from the 1950s. After a series of close-ups on different roses, someone hands a bouquet to an elderly woman and kisses her on the forehead. And for a few days this last May, I noticed an unusual number of volunteers in the garden, sprucing everything up, repainting things. It took me a while to realize they were preparing for Mother of the Year 2017, Malia Luisa Latu Saulala, a local church volunteer.

I’m mentioning this celebration of mothers in the context of work that sustains and maintains—but I don’t think that one needs to be a mother to experience a maternal impulse. At the end of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the stunning 2018 documentary on Fred Rogers (aka Mister Rogers), we learn that in his commencement speeches, Rogers would ask the audience to sit and think about someone who had helped them, believed in them, and wanted the best for them. The filmmakers then ask the interviewees to do this. For the first time, the voices we’ve been hearing for the past hour or so fall silent; the film cuts between different interviewees, each thinking, looking slightly off camera. Judging from the amount of sniffling in the theater where I saw this film, many in the audience were also thinking of their own mothers, fathers, siblings, friends. Rogers’s point in the commencement speeches was made anew: we are all familiar with the phenomenon of selfless care from at least some part of our lives. This phenomenon is no exception; it is at the core of what defines the human experience.

Thinking about maintenance and care for one’s kin also brings me back to a favorite book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, in which Rebecca Solnit dispenses with the myth that people become desperate and selfish after disasters. From the 1906 San Franscisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina, she gives detailed accounts of the surprising resourcefulness, empathy, and sometimes even humor that arise in dark circumstances. Several of her interviewees report feeling a strange nostalgia for the purposefulness and the connection they felt with their neighbors immediately following a disaster. Solnit suggests that the real disaster is everyday life, which alienates us from each other and from the protective impulse that we harbor.

And as my familiarity with and love for the crows grows over the years, I’m reminded that we don’t even need to limit this sense of kinship to the human realm. In her essay “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Donna J. Haraway reminds us that relatives in British English meant “logical relations” until the seventeenth century, when they became “family members.” Haraway is less interested in individuals and genealogical families than in symbiotic configurations of different kinds of beings maintained through the practice of care—asking us to “make kin, not babies!” Citing Shakespeare’s punning between “kin” and “kind,” she writes, “I think that the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time). Kin is an assembling sort of word.”

Gathering all this together, what I’m suggesting is that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human—including the alliances that sustain and surprise us. I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit. In Becoming Animal, Abram writes that “all our technological utopias and dreams of machine-mediated immortality may fire our minds but they cannot feed our bodies. Indeed, most of this era’s transcendent technological visions remain motivated by a fright of the body and its myriad susceptibilities, by a fear of our carnal embedment in a world ultimately beyond our control—by our terror of the very wildness that nourishes and sustains us.”

Of course, such a solution isn’t good for business, nor can it be considered particularly innovative. But in the long meantime, as I sit in the deep bowl of the Rose Garden, surrounded by various human and nonhuman bodies, inhabiting a reality interwoven by myriad bodily sensitivities besides my own—indeed, the very boundaries of my own body overcome by the smell of jasmine and just-ripening blackberry—I look down at my phone and wonder if it isn’t its own kind of sensory-deprivation chamber. That tiny, glowing world of metrics cannot compare to this one, which speaks to me instead in breezes, light and shadow, and the unruly, indescribable detail of the real.

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The Internet is a Scripted Space, where all our actions are designed and predetermined by those who engineer the platforms we brand ourselves on.

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07

The Self as Brand Writing and research on the history of the Self on the Internet.

- Jia Tolentino - Jenny Odell - Slavoj Zizek

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On Brand™

"The Brand Called You" was an article published in August of 1997 by Tom Peters in the magazine Fast Company. It is largely credited with popularizing the term and concept of the "personal brand."

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The Brand Called You Tom Peters

That cross-trainer you're wearing -- one look at the distinctive swoosh on the side tells everyone who's got you branded. That coffee travel mug you're carrying -- ah, you're a Starbucks woman! Your T-shirt with the distinctive Champion "C" on the sleeve, the blue jeans with the prominent Levi's rivets, the watch with the hey-this-certifies-I-made-it icon on the face, your fountain pen with the maker's symbol crafted into the end ...

You're branded, branded, branded, branded. It's time for me -- and you -- to take a lesson from the big brands, a lesson that's true for anyone who's interested in what it takes to stand out and prosper in the new world of work.

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding.

We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You. It's that simple -- and that hard. And that inescapable.

Behemoth companies may take turns buying each other or acquiring every hot startup that catches their eye -- mergers in 1996 set records. Hollywood may be interested in only blockbusters and book publishers may want to put out only guaranteed best-sellers.

But don't be fooled by all the frenzy at the humongous end of the size spectrum.

The real action is at the other end: the main chance is becoming a free agent in an economy of free agents, looking to have the best season you can imagine in your field, looking to do your best work and chalk up a remarkable track record, and looking to establish your own micro equivalent of the Nike swoosh. Because if you do, you'll not only reach out toward every opportunity within arm's (or laptop's) length, you'll not only make a noteworthy contribution to your team's success -- you'll also put yourself in a great bargaining position for next season's free-agency market. The good news -- and it is largely good news -- is that everyone has a chance to stand out.

On Brand™

The good news -- and it is largely good news -- is that everyone has a chance to stand out. Everyone has a chance to learn, improve, and build up their skills. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark.

Who understands this fundamental principle? The big companies do. They've come a long way in a short time: it was just over four years ago, April 2, 1993 to be precise, when Philip Morris cut the price of Marlboro cigarettes by 40 cents a pack. That was on a Friday. On Monday, the stock market value of packaged goods companies fell by $25 billion. Everybody agreed: brands were doomed.

Today brands are everything, and all kinds of products and services -from accounting firms to sneaker makers to restaurants -- are figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded by a Tommy Hilfiger-like buzz.

Who else understands it? Every single Web site sponsor.

In fact, the Web makes the case for branding more directly than any packaged good or consumer product ever could.

Here's what the Web says: Anyone can have a Web site.

And today, because anyone can ... anyone does! So how do you know which sites are worth visiting, which sites to bookmark, which sites are worth going to more than once?

The answer: branding. The sites you go back to are the sites you trust. They're the sites where the brand name tells you that the visit will be worth your time -- again and again. The brand is a promise of the value you'll receive.

The same holds true for that other killer app of the Net -- email. When everybody has email and anybody can send you email, how do you decide whose messages you're going to read and respond to first -- and whose you're going to send to the trash unread? The answer: personal branding. The name of the email sender is every bit as important a brand -- is a brand -- as the name of the Web site you visit. It's a promise

of the value you'll receive for the time you spend reading the message.

Nobody understands branding better than professional services firms. Look at McKinsey or Arthur Andersen for a model of the new rules of branding at the company and personal level. Almost every professional services firm works with the same business model. They have almost no hard assets -- my guess is that most probably go so far as to rent or lease every tangible item they possibly can to keep from having to own anything. They have lots of soft assets -- more conventionally known as people, preferably smart, motivated, talented people. And they have huge revenues -- and astounding profits.

They also have a very clear culture of work and life. You're hired, you report to work, you join a team -- and you immediately start figuring out how to deliver value to the customer. Along the way, you learn stuff, develop your skills, hone your abilities, move from project to project.

And if you're really smart, you figure out how to distinguish yourself from all the other very smart people walking around with $1,500 suits, high-powered laptops, and well-polished resumes. Along the way, if you're really smart, you figure out what it takes to create a distinctive role for yourself -- you create a message and a strategy to promote the brand called You. What makes You different? Start right now: as of this moment you're going to think of yourself differently! You're not an "employee" of General Motors, you're not a "staffer" at General Mills, you're not a "worker" at General Electric or a "human resource" at General Dynamics (ooops, it's gone!).

Forget the Generals! You don't "belong to" any company for life, and your chief affiliation isn't to any particular "function." You're not defined by your job title and you're not confined by your job description.

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Starting today you are a brand.

You're every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favorite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers at Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different? Give yourself the traditional 15-words-or-less contest challenge. Take the time to write down your answer. And then take the time to read it. Several times.

If your answer wouldn't light up the eyes of a prospective client or command a vote of confidence from a satisfied past client, or -- worst of all -- if it doesn't grab you, then you've got a big problem. It's time to give some serious thought and even more serious effort to imagining and developing yourself as a brand.

Start by identifying the qualities or characteristics that make you distinctive from your competitors -- or your colleagues. What have you done lately -- this week -- to make yourself stand out? What would your colleagues or your customers say is your greatest and clearest strength? Your most noteworthy (as in, worthy of note) personal trait?

Go back to the comparison between brand You and brand X -- the approach the corporate biggies take to creating a brand. The standard model they use is feature-benefit: every feature they offer in their product or service yields an identifiable and distinguishable benefit for their customer or client. A dominant feature of Nordstrom department stores is the personalized service it lavishes on each and every customer. The customer benefit: a feeling of being accorded individualized attention -- along with all of the choice of a large department store.

So what is the "feature-benefit model" that the brand called You offers?

Do you deliver your work on time, every time? Your internal or external customer gets dependable, reliable service that meets its strategic needs. Do you anticipate and solve problems before they become crises? Your client saves money and headaches just by having you on the team. Do you always complete your projects within the allotted budget?

I can't name a single client of a professional services firm who doesn't go ballistic at cost overruns.

Your next step is to cast aside all the usual descriptors that employees and workers depend on to locate themselves in the company structure. Forget your job title. Ask yourself: What do I do that adds remarkable, measurable, distinguished, distinctive value? Forget your job description.

Ask yourself: What do I do that I am most proud of? Most of all, forget about the standard rungs of progression you've climbed in your career up to now. Burn that damnable "ladder" and ask yourself: What have I accomplished that I can unabashedly brag about? If you're going to be a brand, you've got to become relentlessly focused on what you do that adds value, that you're proud of, and most important, that you can shamelessly take credit for.

When you've done that, sit down and ask yourself one more question to define your brand: What do I want to be famous for? That's right -famous for!

What's the pitch for You? So it's a cliché: don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle. it's also a principle that every corporate brand understands implicitly, from Omaha Steaks's through-the-mail sales program to Wendy's "we're just regular folks" ad campaign. No matter how beefy your set of skills, no matter how tasty you've made that feature-benefit proposition, you still have to market the bejesus out of your brand -- to customers, colleagues, and your virtual network of associates.

For most branding campaigns, the first step is visibility. If you're General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler, that usually means a full flight of TV and print ads designed to get billions of "impressions" of your brand in front of the consuming public. If you're brand You, you've got the same need for visibility -- but no budget to buy it.

So how do you market brand You? There's literally no limit to the ways you can go about enhancing your profile. Try moonlighting! Sign up for an extra project inside your organization, just to introduce yourself to new colleagues and showcase your skills -- or work on new ones. Or, if you can carve out the time, take on a freelance project that gets you in touch with a totally novel group of people. If you can get them singing your praises, they'll help spread the word about what a remarkable contributor you are.

If those ideas don't appeal, try teaching a class at a community college, in an adult education program, or in your own company. You get credit for being an expert, you increase your standing as a professional, and you increase the likelihood that people will come back to you with more

requests and more opportunities to stand out from the crowd.

If you're a better writer than you are a teacher, try contributing a column or an opinion piece to your local newspaper.

And when I say local, I mean local. You don't have to make the op-ed page of the New York Times to make the grade.

Community newspapers, professional newsletters, even inhouse company publications have white space they need to fill. Once you get started, you've got a track record -- and clips that you can use to snatch more chances.

And if you're a better talker than you are teacher or writer, try to get yourself on a panel discussion at a conference or sign up to make a presentation at a workshop. Visibility has a funny way of multiplying; the hardest part is getting started. But a couple of good panel presentations can earn you a chance to give a "little" solo speech -- and from there it's just a few jumps to a major address at your industry's annual convention.

The second important thing to remember about your personal visibility campaign is: it all matters. When you're promoting brand You, everything you do -- and everything you choose not to do -- communicates the value and character of the brand. Everything from the way you handle phone conversations to the email messages you send to the way you conduct business in a meeting is part of the larger message you're sending about your brand.

Partly it's a matter of substance: what you have to say and how well you get it said. But it's also a matter of style. On the Net, do your communications demonstrate a command of the technology? In meetings, do you keep your contributions short and to the point? It even gets down to the level of your brand You business card: Have you designed a cool-looking logo for your own card? Are you demonstrating an appreciation for design that shows you understand that packaging counts -a lot -- in a crowded world?

The key to any personal branding campaign is "word-ofmouth marketing." Your network of friends, colleagues, clients, and customers is the most important marketing vehicle you've got; what they say about you and your contributions is what the market will ultimately gauge as the value of your brand. So the big trick to building your brand is to find ways to nurture your network of colleagues -- consciously.

What's the real power of You? If you want to grow your brand, you've got to come to terms with power -- your own. The key lesson: power is not a dirty word!

In fact, power for the most part is a badly misunderstood term and a badly misused capability. I'm talking about a different kind of power than we usually refer to. It's not ladder power, as in who's best at climbing over the adjacent bods.

It's not who's-got-the-biggest-office-by-six-square-inches power or who's-got-the-fanciest-title power.

It's influence power. It's being known for making the most significant contribution in your particular area. It's reputational power. If you were a scholar, you'd measure it by the number of times your publications get cited by other people. If you were a consultant, you'd measure it by the number of CEOs who've got your business card in their Rolodexes. (And better yet, the number who know your beeper number by heart.)

Getting and using power -- intelligently, responsibly, and yes, powerfully -- are essential skills for growing your brand. One of the things that attracts us to certain brands is the power they project. As a consumer, you want to associate with brands whose powerful presence creates a halo effect that rubs off on you.

It's the same in the workplace. There are power trips that are worth taking -- and that you can take without appearing to be a self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing megalomaniacal jerk. You can do it in small, slow, and subtle ways. Is your team having a hard time organizing productive meetings? Volunteer to write the agenda for the next meeting. You're contributing to the team, and you get to decide what's on and off the agenda. When it's time to write a post-project report, does everyone on your team head for the door? Beg for the chance to write the report -- because the hand that holds the pen (or taps the keyboard) gets to write or at least shape the organization's history.

Most important, remember that power is largely a matter of perception. If you want people to see you as a powerful brand, act like a credible leader. When you're thinking like brand You, you don't need org-chart authority to be a leader. The fact is you are a leader. You're leading You! One key to growing your power is to recognize the simple fact that we now live in a project world. Almost all work today is organized into bitesized packets called projects. A project-based world is ideal for growing your brand: projects exist around deliverables, they create measurables, and they leave you with braggables. If you're not spending at least

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Starting Today You're a Brand.

On Brand™

70% of your time working on projects, creating projects, or organizing your (apparently mundane) tasks into projects, you are sadly living in the past. Today you have to think, breathe, act, and work in projects.

Project World makes it easier for you to assess -- and advertise -- the strength of brand You. Once again, think like the giants do. Imagine yourself a brand manager at Procter & Gamble: When you look at your brand's assets, what can you add to boost your power and felt presence? Would you be better off with a simple line extension -- taking on a project that adds incrementally to your existing base of skills and accomplishments? Or would you be better off with a whole new product line? Is it time to move overseas for a couple of years, venturing outside your comfort zone (even taking a lateral move -- damn the ladders), tackling something new and completely different?

Whatever you decide, you should look at your brand's power as an exercise in new-look résumé; management -- an exercise that you start by doing away once and for all with the word "résumé." You don't have an old-fashioned résumé anymore! You've got a marketing brochure for brand You. Instead of a static list of titles held and positions occupied, your marketing brochure brings to life the skills you've mastered, the projects you've delivered, the braggables you can take credit for. And like any good marketing brochure, yours needs constant updating to reflect the growth -- breadth and depth -- of brand You. What's loyalty to You? Everyone is saying that loyalty is gone; loyalty is dead; loyalty is over. I think that's a bunch of crap.

I think loyalty is much more important than it ever was in the past. A 40year career with the same company once may have been called loyalty; from here it looks a lot like a work life with very few options, very few opportunities, and very little individual power. That's what we used to call indentured servitude.

Today loyalty is the only thing that matters. But it isn't blind loyalty to the company. It's loyalty to your colleagues, loyalty to your team, loyalty to your project, loyalty to your customers, and loyalty to yourself. I see it as a much deeper sense of loyalty than mindless loyalty to the Company Z logo.

I know this may sound like selfishness. But being CEO of Me Inc. requires you to act selfishly -- to grow yourself, to promote yourself, to get the market to reward yourself. Of course, the other side of the selfish coin is that any company you work for ought to applaud every single one of the efforts you make to develop yourself. After all, everything you do to grow Me Inc. is gravy for them: the projects you lead, the networks you develop, the customers you delight, the braggables you create generate credit for the firm. As long as you're learning, growing, building relationships, and delivering great results, it's good for you and it's great for the company.

That win-win logic holds for as long as you happen to be at that particular company. Which is precisely where the age of free agency comes into play. If you're treating your résumé as if it's a marketing brochure, you've learned the first lesson of free agency. The second lesson is one that today's professional athletes have all learned: you've got to check with the market on a regular basis to have a reliable read on your brand's value. You don't have to be looking for a job to go on a job interview. For that matter, you don't even have to go on an actual job interview to get useful, important feedback.

The real question is: How is brand You doing? Put together your own "user's group" -- the personal brand You equivalent of a software review group. Ask for -- insist on -- honest, helpful feedback on your performance, your growth, your value. It's the only way to know what you would be worth on the open market. It's the only way to make sure that, when you declare your free agency, you'll be in a strong bargaining position. It's not disloyalty to "them"; it's responsible brand management for brand You -- which also generates credit for them.

What's the future of You? It's over. No more vertical. No more ladder. That's not the way careers work anymore.

Linearity is out. A career is now a checkerboard. Or even a maze. It's full of moves that go sideways, forward, slide on the diagonal, even go backward when that makes sense.

(It often does.) A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand.

As you scope out the path your "career" will take, remember: the last thing you want to do is become a manager. Like "résumé," "manager" is an obsolete term. It's practically synonymous with "dead end job." What you want is a steady diet of more interesting, more challenging, more provocative projects. When you look at the progression of a career con-

structed out of projects, directionality is not only hard to track -- Which way is up? -- but it's also totally irrelevant.

Instead of making yourself a slave to the concept of a career ladder, reinvent yourself on a semiregular basis. Start by writing your own mission statement, to guide you as CEO of Me Inc. What turns you on? Learning something new? Gaining recognition for your skills as a technical wizard? Shepherding new ideas from concept to market?

What's your personal definition of success? Money? Power? Fame? Or doing what you love? However you answer these questions, search relentlessly for job or project opportunities that fit your mission statement. And review that mission statement every six months to make sure you still believe what you wrote.

No matter what you're doing today, there are four things you've got to measure yourself against. First, you've got to be a great teammate and a supportive colleague. Second, you've got to be an exceptional expert at something that has real value. Third, you've got to be a broad-gauged visionary -- a leader, a teacher, a farsighted "imagineer." Fourth, you've got to be a businessperson -- you've got to be obsessed with pragmatic outcomes.

It's this simple: You are a brand. You are in charge of your brand. There is no single path to success. And there is no one right way to create the brand called You. Except this: Start today. Or else.

Branding History

You're just as much a brand as the likes of:

You're branded, branded, branded!

Peters states: "That cross-trainer you're wearing one look at the distinctive swoosh on the side tells everyone who's got you branded. That coffee travel mug you're carrying ah, you're a Starbucks woman! Your T-shirt with the distinctive Champion "C" on the sleeve, the blue jeans with the prominent Levi's rivets, the watch with the hey-this-certifiesI-made-it icon on the face, your fountain pen with the maker's symbol crafted into the end...

You're branded, branded, branded, branded. It's time for me and you to

take a lesson from the big brands, a lesson that's true for anyone who's interested in what it takes to stand out and prosper in the new world of work.

His argument that branding the self is not an outrageous idea considering, by his logic, we are already branding ourselves by wearing logos, and consuming corporations' products.

This seems less an argument for personal branding, than for the ever-encroaching role of late-capitalism and consumerism as well.

Harlem-based designer Dapper Dan perhaps best illustrates the point that Peters, somewhat condescendingly, makes.

Dapper Dan is best known for appropriating the logos and patterns

of couture fashion for streetwear. It was the beginning of wearing a logo to associate yourself with the lifestyle associated with that brand-image.

“Personal branding startlingly overt inv commodification, invites deeper exa

g offers such a vitation for self the phenomenon amination.”

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The Ethics of Personal Branding Daniel J. Lair, Katie Sullivan, George Cheney

The business self-help genre of management communication traces its roots at least back to Dale Carnegie’s (1936/1982) How to Win Friends and Influence People. Countless other authors have followed Carnegie’s path, offering eager audiences insights to the keys of success, including Steven R. Covey’s (1989) wildly popular Seven Habits for Highly Effective People.

Key to these self-help management moments is the idea that individuals in the corporate world can achieve success by engaging in a process of self-managed self-improvement. In a 1997 article in the trendy management magazine Fast Company, however, influential management guru Tom Peters gave a name to the next self-help management movement: personal branding.

In many respects, the phenomenon of personal branding shares affinities with the self-help movements it drew from by offering a programmatic set of strategies for individuals to improve their chances at business success. But despite these continuities, the personal branding movement also represents something of a radical departure from previous self-help movements. Rather than focus- ing on self-improvement as the means to achievement, personal branding seems to suggest that the road to success is found instead in explicit self-packaging: Here, success is not determined by individuals’ internal sets of skills, motivations, and interests but, rather, by how effectively they are arranged, crystallized, and labeled—in other words, branded.

On Brand™

The business self-help genre of management communication traces its roots at least back to Dale Carnegie’s (1936/1982) How to Win Friends and Influence People. Countless other authors have followed Carnegie’s path, offering eager audiences insights to the keys of success, including Steven R. Covey’s (1989) wildly popular Seven Habits for Highly Effective People. Key to these self-help management moments is the idea that individuals in the corporate world can achieve success by engaging in a process of self-managed self-improvement. In a 1997 article in the trendy management magazine Fast Company, however, influential management guru Tom Peters gave a name to the next selfhelp management movement: personal branding.

In many respects, the phenomenon of personal branding shares affinities with the self-help movements it drew from by offering a programmatic set of strategies for individuals to improve their chances at business success. But despite these continuities, the personal branding movement also represents something of a radical departure from previous self-help movements. Rather than focus- ing on self-improvement as the means to achievement, personal branding seems to suggest that the road to success is found instead in explicit self-packaging: Here, success is not determined by individuals’ internal sets of skills, motivations, and interests but, rather, by how effectively they are arranged, crystallized, and labeled—in other words, branded.

Branding itself is not a new concept or set of practices, although its uses have clearly reached new levels of market penetration in recent years. Branding of some sort has been evident in product development and promotion since the mid-19th century with the linkage of certain stores and factories to particular products through print advertising.

In this article, we define branding as a programmatic approach to the selling of a product, service, organization, cause, or person that is fashioned as a proactive response to the emerging desires of a target audience or market (see Cheney & Christensen, 2001). In personal branding, the concepts of product development and promotion are used to market persons for entry into or transition within the labor market.

These concepts cover a variety of personal branding practices ranging from concrete branding products such as the personal advertisement brochures (which resemble, in many respects, the slick promotional materials sent by colleges and universities to prospective students) offered by Peter Montoya (n.d.) to the more expansive packaging of a total identity such as Genece Hamby’s “Personal Branding D.N.A.,” which asks individuals to project concise and coherent identities based on the questions, “What is unique about you and distinguishable?”; “What is remarkable and notable about you?” and “What is genuinely real and authentic about you?” (Hamby, n.d.). Although the use of such strategies for self-promotion in the business world is certainly nothing new, personal branding as a movement broadens their impact by turning branding from a simple business tactic into an ideological under- standing of the corporate world capable of an embracing influence over workers’ very sense of self.

As a trend in popular management and employment consultation, personal branding appears to be enjoying a surge in popularity. A keyword search for the term personal branding yields books, magazines, web sites, training programs, personal coaches, and specialized literature about how exactly to brand yourself for success in the business world.

At face value, these various re- sources promise their consumers an appealing, proven strategy to negotiate the chaotic employment environment around them. How- ever, because personal branding offers such a startlingly overt invitation to self-commodification, the phenomenon invites deeper examination.

This essay offers such a critical-empirical interrogation of the personal branding movement centered around four questions: (a) How has the personal branding movement positioned itself as a sociocultural institution? (b) What are the principal rhetorical strategies and appeals of the personal branding movement? (c) What are the cultural biases and constraints of personal branding, particularly regarding gender, race, class, and age—both for the individual self and for the larger society? and (d) What are the ethical implications and limitations of personal branding? Addressing these questions is the primary purpose of this essay.

In answering the four questions above, we consider both the expressed motives for the personal branding movement as well as its implications. Our analysis in this essay is centered on the discourse of the personal branding movement: We make no claims regarding the measurable effects of this discourse or as to how such discourse is taken up by its audiences. Instead, we are concerned here by the potential

identifications invited by personal branding discourse and the limitations of those identifications should they be adopted by audiences uncritically. We start by examining parallel developments in contemporary communication and employment climates and exploring how personal branding arises as a rhetorically fitting response. We then trace the contours of the personal branding movement and emphasize the rhetorical tactics with which it responds to increasingly complex communication and employment environments. Next, we examine personal branding with a critical eye to both its effects on individuals and the power relations it instantiates on the basis of social categories such as gender, age, race, and class. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on the broader ethical implications of personal branding as a communication strategy. In doing so, we suggest that personal branding is more than a simple and necessary strategy for individuals to negotiate a turbulent economic environment; it also carries with it long-range and potentially damaging implications, unanticipated and unacknowledged by its proponents and practitioners, as it promotes a vision of the working self that is superficial at best, devoid of opportunities for self-reflection and improvement.

POSITIONING PERSONAL BRANDING Personal branding emerged as a movement in the late 1990s at a time when observers of both the corporate communication and employment worlds were making similar but largely independent observations about the increasingly complex and chaotic nature of each environment. Personal branding, however, connected these developments in practice where they had not been in theory by positioning itself as a communicative response to an economic situation and allowing its practitioners to stand out both as communicators and (prospective) employees. In this section, then, we trace the parallel developments of the contemporary communication and employment environments to illustrate the unique position of personal branding as a sociocultural institution to respond simultaneously to both of these trends.

THE CONTEMPORARY CORPORATE COMMUNICATION ENVIRONMENT The organizational environment of the late 20th and early 21st century is marked by turbulence spurred by economic globalization, new arenas of competition, and rapidly evolving information technologies (March, 1995). As Cheney, Christensen, Conrad, and Lair (2004) observed, that turbulence is often framed in explic- itly communicative terms. The common narrative is that an ever- increasing number of messages in the corporate communication climate demands increasingly innovative communication strate- gies for organizations to stand out (cf. Blythe, 2000; Ries & Trout, 1981; Schultz, Tannebaum, & Lauterborn, 1994).

Paradoxically, communication emerges as both the cause of and the solution to the crowded corporate communication environment. The history of branding as a corporate communication strategy is but a microcosm of this overall development.

Although the metaphor of branding derives from the designated ownership of livestock, in the world of corporate communications, it represents an attempt to make direct, clear, and persistent bonds between symbols and products or services. As a communication strategy, branding is most traditionally associated with consumer products. The idea of a consumer brand emerged in the late 19th century, and consumer branding—the association of consumer products with a readily identifiable brand name—enjoyed its hey- day from approximately 1920 to 1970. Here, advertising focused on mundane, primarily household-related, consumer products targeted especially at housewives (Olins, 2000). Brand products were marketed as unique goods able to provide unique advantages to consumers; it was the brand name that distinguished a product— for example, Spic’N’Span— from other household cleaners.

The 1970s and 1980s, however, saw increased competition in an expanding market, both for consumer products themselves and the media through which they were marketed. The advent of cable tele- vision in particular posed new challenges as well as opportunities for branding as a communication strategy, because television now addressed broader audience groups (e.g., CNN’s global audience by the 1990s) and audiences organized around more specific interests (e.g., Lifetime, Animal Planet, and Outdoor Life networks). The result of this simultaneous expansion and fragmenting of audiences was the elevation

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of branding’s importance as a communication strategy in navigating a crowded market. As Christensen and Cheney (2000) observed, “The market of today seems to be demanding well-crafted identities, identities that are able to stand out and break through the clutter” (p.

246). Because branding is so well suited to present images as identity, branding as a strategy has be- come increasingly important as a flexible response to a crowded communication world.

This flexibility has driven the evolution of branding as a communication strategy in several important ways. According to Olins (2000), consumer brands are no longer primarily associated with products; now brands represent services, too.

In fact, service brands appear to be more innovative than many product brands and are becoming increasingly dominant. Consider, for example, the widening array of personalized services—including even personal shoppers—who bill themselves as able to handle the personal demands of an affluent but extemely busy client. Olins also observed that brands are now promoted in increasingly varied and complex ways. Although conventional advertising through paid media maintains a strong strategic presence, multimedia promotion involving e-commerce is becoming more and more common and promises in some cases to become the lead medium of branding. In some instances, the preparation of the market before the product arrives effectively creates a consumer frenzy for the label/commodity, as was the case in mid-2004 with the anticipation of the last episode of the popular TV program Friends. Finally, economic and cultural forms of globalization have led to the growth of major worldwide brands, an overall decline in the number of brands, and a growing flexibility in the use of brands.

In addition to consumer branding, types of branding include retail brands, product brands, corporate brands (Olins, 2000), and, we would add, personal brands. With retail brands, retail corporations have begun to cash in on their brand name by selling products that go far beyond what they are traditionally known for. Thus, Costco and Safeway sell gasoline, Super Wal-Mart sells tires and lettuce under the same roof, and AT&T sells Internet access and cable television. As corporations diversify their product lines, they must deliberately create differences between their own internal brands to project product brands. So, for example, Toyota markets its non-Toyota-identified Lexus brand to consumers in markets similar to other high-end Toyota models. Corporate brands represent the growing efforts of corporations at branding themselves somewhat independently of their product lines. Nike is perhaps the example par excellence of a corporate brand, offering advertisements that promote only the corporate name and logo with no association to a specific product. In branding themselves, corporations seek to (a) project an image of unity to various stakeholders and (b) unify multiple brands under one umbrella brand.

The phenomenon of personal brands represents the logical ex- tension of these previous brand forms. Increasingly, celebrities are cashing in on name recognition to brand themselves: In the late 1990s, David Bowie’s initial public offering in “Bowie Bonds” raised $55 million, and James Brown sold $30 million worth of stock in his future earnings (Peters, 1999). In fact, celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Madonna serve as the primary examples held up by Peters (1999), Montoya (n.d.), and other consultants to demonstrate the efficacy of personal branding. As these celebrity examples are offered as lessons to the lives of ordinary professionals, they speak to a long history of professional packaging movements: Carnegie’s (1936/1982) How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1937; the 1970s “Dress for Success” movement; and Games Mother Never Taught You (Harragan, 1977), to name a few that promise to give individuals control over their own economic destiny by shaping the package they present to others.

The marketing culture has matured at the same time that the communication explosion (or implosion) has begun to encounter its own logical limits (Baudrillard, 1988; Belch & Belch, 1998; Cheney & Christensen, 2001; Ewen, 1988; Fill, 1999; Laufer & Paradeise, 1990). That is to say, the society of symbols has become so cluttered and the juxtapositioning of different signs so rampant that the sheer cry for attention (see Davenport & Beck, 2001) becomes the a priori aim of any media, advertising, or public relations campaign. In a symbolic environment where arguments are made through apparently novel linkages between symbols, ethos is recast in transitory terms (Cheney, 2004). For what is credible, really, is what is appealing at a particular moment: The standing of a product, brand, or political candidate, no matter how much it rests on tradition, can be undermined at any time if the new alignment

of symbols (style, spectacle, scandal, whatever) is no longer in its favor (Baudrillard, 2000).

Branding itself may be seen within this broader communicative and cultural context. The progress from consumer branding to company branding to the branding of a person and a career is hardly surprising when we consider the push for consolidating the branding movement via an ideology of individual efficacy, identity, and control. In a way, this development represents the ultimate marriage of marketing culture with the mythos of the American individual: In a world of change and opportunity, you can create and recreate yourself so as to be the master of your own destiny. In addition, personal branding carries the elevation of image over substance one step further: The world of appearance is not only articulated and accepted, it is valorized and held up as the only reasonable way to negotiate the contemporary world of work and professions. In short, the personal branding movement positions workers as irrational when they attempt to preserve and promote what they experience as their true or authentic selves. Personal branding, then, promotes a hyper-individuality based on a lack of deeper identity and self-awareness.

THE CONTEMPORARY EMPLOYMENT CLIMATE The major economic shifts in the industrial world since the mid- 1980s have been well documented (V. Smith, 1997, 2001). Significant trends include the widespread privatization of public services, corporate mergers and consolidation of industries, technological replacement of many jobs, elimination of middle management in many firms, reduced labor costs through industrial relocation, dis- aggregation (or molecularization) of the organizational value chain (Tapscott, 1997), outsourcing of non-core functions, and team- based restructuring with a new emphasis on individual entrepreneurship. In some nations, notably the United States, there has also been a widening gap between the rich and the poor, an increase in the number of persons working two or three jobs, and a dramatic increase in the length of the work week (Schor, 1992, 2003). The transition from an industrial to an information-based economy has unquestionably produced dramatic upheavals in the social organization of work (Casey, 1995; Castells, 2000; V. Smith, 2001).

Work in the industrial economy was, in certain ways, far more stable; jobs were comparatively secure (i.e., for those who had them), retirement benefits were more reliably and readily available, and workers stayed with jobs and companies for extended periods of time. The twilight years of the 20th century, however, saw a transformation of these employment conditions (see Ackerman, Goodwin, Dougherty, & Gallagher, 1998). Work became much less stable as companies such as IBM—famous for their promise of life- long employment—began to lay off large numbers of workers for the first time in their history (see Sennett, 1998); benefits packages shrunk; available jobs were increasingly located in low-paying, part-time service sectors (Noyelle, 1990); and temporary and con- tract labor became increasingly prominent (V. Smith, 2001). In fact, temporary workers make up the fastest growing segment of the American workforce with Manpower one of the United States’s largest employers (Zorn, Christensen, & Cheney, 1999). Contingent employment includes part-time, seasonal, episodic, contract- based, and socalled temp work and is characterized by (a) diminished or absent job security, (b) comparatively lower pay, (c) reduced or absent benefits, (d) lower status, and (e) minimal personal identification with the organization (Gossett, 2003). These disruptions leave workers working longer hours to make ends meet and worrying about the erosion of benefits (Sennett, 1998; V. Smith, 2001).

In the era of the information economy, not only do workers confront the traditional specter of unemployment, they also must navigate the increasing uncertainties of contemporary employment. Management fads such as downsizing, reengineering, and change for change’s sake (e.g., see Hammer & Champy, 1993) have in certain ways ruptured the traditional relationship between corporate financial success and job security for many employees. Taken together, these trends create an employment environment that parallels the complexity of the contemporary corporate communication climate and, like that climate, places a high emphasis on stand- ing out entrepreneurially as a prerequisite for success.

On Brand™

Unlike corporate efforts to stand out in the communication environment, however, standing out in the contemporary employment climate is an almost entirely individual affair.

Casey (1995) argued that such structural dislocations, coupled with the increasingly specialized organization of work in the informational economy, have led to the erosion of traditional social identifications along lines such as class. The effect of this individualization of workers is the privileging of worker agency (V. Smith, 2001). Workers are encouraged to view themselves as entrepreneurs within corporate employment or while seeking corporate employment. Accordingly, workers often view themselves as responsible for job loss or job dissatisfaction, even when they know that larger social forces are primarily responsible for casting their lot (cf.

Sennett, 1998). This tension is problematic for workers, for even though work becomes increasingly decentered and unstable, work remains a primary source of individual identity (Casey, 1995).

The notion of a career is not new. It was well established by the time Weber (1978) was observing the careers of public servants at the turn of the 20th century. For him, the idea of a career, especially in a public-sector organization, involved commitment to the value of fairness, grounding in technical expertise, and aspirations toward the public good. In this way, Weber did not fear but, rather, trusted the dedicated and experienced bureaucrat. It was in the temptation to elevate formal over substantive rationality in the performance of a job in any sector that vexed Weber. That is to say, he wanted bureaucracies to somehow avoid what he saw as an almost inevitable turn toward the calculation of narrow means rather than maintaining a fix on important ends (such as the public good or the manufacture of an excellent product). For Weber, as for Durkheim (1964, 1996) and other observers of what we now consider to be modern industrial society, the notion of a career is distinctly social and not something held or pursued only by individuals. Weber’s career person may have become narrowly preoccupied, but she was not self-centered.

In scholarly as well as popular writings on the career, the concept has become noticeably desocialized. In fact, it can be argued that career is seldom associated today with anything other than individual choice, pursuit, and possession,

even though any individual’s career may certainly have a social or societal orientation. In the United States especially, but also in a number of other Western industrialized nations, the career is a more vaunted idea than “just a job”; it is also an increasingly portable holding by a per- son—an intangible marker of identity that individuals may carry from job to job, from organization to organization. For the individual career person, the career is something serious and suggestive of identity (Clair, 1996). Finally, the prevailing root metaphor for career in the United States is undoubtedly linear, as crystallized in the term the career ladder (Buzzanell & Goldzwig, 1991). So powerful is this root metaphor—often made explicit in everyday dis- course—that flat careers, career cycles, or dual ladders are often inconceivable, thereby leading people to question as unorthodox or simply crazy decisions not to accept promotions, transfers, and other options for advancement. Thus, although the career is de facto commodified as something the individual carries with him from organization to organization and city to city, its interpretation is shaped by powerful social norms and pressures. In the era of late industrial capitalism, those very norms and pressures have become increasingly unstable.

Within this arena of trends, entrepreneurship (du Gay, 1996) became a buzzword in the late 1980s; today it continues to serve as a center of mythic energy. Originally used to refer to small enterprises launched by creative and resourceful individuals, entrepreneurship gradually came to symbolize the aggressive and dedicated performance of employees of established firms as well as capturing an approach to specific projects. As du Gay (1996) explained, we have reimagined our lives as an enterprise with the individual responsible for managing that enterprise and the language of entrepreneurship (rather than bureaucratic management) being central to how that enterprise is conceptualized and managed.

The personal branding movement to some extent relies upon the image of an independent, resourceful, creative, and aggressive professional. This person is expected to be agile in a fluctuating job market, responsive to any opportunities, self-motivating, and self- promoting. As we will see in our analysis of books, web sites, and seminars related to

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personal branding, the movement treats society and work chiefly at the individual level. This cosmology (if you will) does not presume that everyone can be effective at personal branding, but it does try to foster an implicit identification with a fairly large segment of educated, experienced professionals who, for one reason or another, are at a juncture in their career path. Against this backdrop of destabilized work conditions, personal branding emphasizes control over one’s work identity as the primary solution to structural uncertainties in the work economy. In that regard, it will be important to observe the extent to which personal branding extends to a range of jobs not typically considered professional but nevertheless subject to packaging.

RESPONDING TO COMPLEXITY: THE EMERGENCE OF PERSONAL BRANDING The popularization of personal branding is generally attributed to Peters’s (1997) article in Fast Company, entitled “The Brand Called You” (cf. Diekmeyer, 1999), although Montoya (n.d.), the other of personal branding’s two most prominent proponents, also lays claim to pioneering the concept in 1997. In the years since the idea of personal branding was first popularized, a virtual personal branding industry has blossomed. At least 15 popular management books were explicitly devoted to the topic from 1997 to 2004; many more incorporate the issue as a part of a more general discussion of branding in the contemporary marketplace (Tamsevicius, n.d.). A web search reveals dozens of web pages of consultants offering or specializing in personal branding services. Montoya has even issued Personal Branding, a quarterly magazine devoted to the topic.

In this essay, we examine a representative sample of personal branding texts from a variety of sources. Although our focus is on the most prominent and widely referenced texts in personal brand- ing discourse, we also analyze representations of personal brand- ing on the web sites of prominent individual consultants. Thus, we read a diverse collection of personal branding texts ranging from popular books such as Peters’s (1999) The Brand You 50 and Robin Fisher-Roffer’s (2000) Make a Name for Yourself to promotional literature for Peter Montoya, Inc., the most prominent personal branding consultancy, to several web sites of other consultants offering personal branding services. Our purpose in collecting these texts is not to offer a comprehensive survey of personal branding discourse but, rather, to offer a fair representation of the various themes and issues presented in that discourse from a variety of sources. (In fact, we did find the same relatively small set of names of consultants and writers in this area to be recurring across the variety of texts and artifacts we surveyed.) We feel that such an approach is well suited to our analysis: the personal branding literature, regardless of its source, displays remarkably similar themes across authors and contexts.

THE RHETORICAL APPEAL(S) OF PERSONAL BRANDING At its most general level, the rhetoric of personal branding encourages and endorses the process of turning oneself into a product—in effect, engaging in self-commodification. This call to self-commodification is the common denominator across the personal branding literature. Peters (1999), for example, continually exhorted employees to conceive of themselves as products: I am as good as my last-next gig. (p. 5) Survivors will “be” a product . . . and exhibit clear cut distinction at . . . something. (p. 9) I AM MY PROJECTS. (p. 41) Everybody is a package. (“He’s a ball of fire.” “She’s a pistol.”

“He’s the biggest bore I’ve ever met.”) The trick for Brand You is making sure you control your package and the message it sends. (p. 46)

On Brand™

“The representation of an identity will vary in some degree from the identity itself and therefore inevitably misrepresent it.”

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Other consultants and personal branding advocates echo similar calls.

For example, William Arruda of Reach Communications Consultancy argued, “Gone are the days where your value to your company or clients is from your offerings alone. Today, people want to buy brands–unique promises of value” (Arruda, 2002, p. 5). Similarly, Jan Austin (n.d.) encouraged clients to view themselves as products rather than people who actively sell products, observing, “Branding makes people, products and services ‘easy to buy’ because brands operate like magnets.

Wouldn’t you rather be a magnet that attracts business than someone who sells?” (¶ 5). Arruda, Austin, Peters, and others all frame the idea of personal branding in a fashion that at least implicitly recalls the unique sell- ing proposition (Olins, 2000) of more traditional forms of branding by encouraging individuals to discover and develop their unique qualities as a product and use those qualities as selling points.

Although such statements treat the individual as unique, they do so only on a superficial level. Peters presents Brand You as a veneer of individuality standing in for the real thing.

Phillipson (2002) summed up this process: Peters’ latest book [Brand You 50] is a blatant call to transform the self into an instrumental object that is constituted and directed by the market. It fundamentally eschews a self that longs for true recognition and acceptance. Instead, it places a premium on those of us who can shift our needs and personae to accommodate the twists and turns of today’s economy. (p. 99) The model of power exhibited in personal branding discourse’s call to self-commodification is a different brand of power than the overt commodification-as-domination thesis offered by Marx (1867/ 1967). Instead, discourses such as personal branding invite individuals to consent to their own self-packaging all the while celebrating their sense of personal efficacy. To the extent that this process and the associated discourses rise up from and contribute to a larger cutural milieu, personal branding may be seen in terms of the two- sided process of hegemony (Gramsci, 1971). Participants are not cultural dupes, but neither are they as free as the rhetoric of the genre in which they indulge would assume (cf. Mumby, 1997).

Employees are encouraged to buy into the personal branding discourse with three strands of argument working together to create a unified

vision of personal branding as the perfect solution to a tur- bulent economic environment. Peters (1999) captured these themes in identifying the general ethos of personal branding: The point of this book series: (1) TAKE YOUR/MY LIFE BACK FROM “THEM.” (2) SCREW DILBERT: CYNICISM IS FOR WHINERS. (3) SELF- RELIANCE IS ALL AMERICAN. (p. 34) Peters’s remarks exhibit the general tenor of the personal branding discourse. Specifically, the themes sounded by Peters—and the legions of other consultants advocating personal branding—meld together a series of arguments about personal branding as inevitable, as inextricably linked with the American mythos, and as positive or upbeat—a rejection of both cynicism and resignation. We treat each of these themes briefly in turn.

Conveying inevitability. Peters (1999) and others argue that— like it or not—personal branding represents the only way to survive economic dislocations. The argument goes that, because the economic environment is out of the control of the individual, the individual must be ready to respond to that turbulence. Peters, for instance, argued that “IT IS THE NEW MILLENIUM. YOU CAN- NOT STAND ON A PAT HAND. PERIOD. Unless you’ve got a trust fund up your sleeve, this radical reinvention of yourself . . .into Brand You is a necessity!” (p. 23).

Similarly, personal brand strategist and coach Catherine Kaputa (n.d.) claimed that “there is no security in a job, any job, unless you add value to what the company does, or add value to what the customer gets for his money” (¶ 22). For Kaputa and others, a personal brand is the method by which one demonstrates their ability to add value to the company thus providing oneself with at least some degree of security.

Taking control of your own success and security in a turbulent economy through the development of a personal brand becomes even more urgent as personal branding becomes more popular. Reach Communications Consultancy explicitly advances this argument on its web site, arguing, It is only a matter of time before your peers or competitors jump on the “brandwagon.” So uncovering, building and nurturing your brand now will ensure that you get out in front of the pack and experience professional success beyond your

On Brand™

dreams. (1-2-3 Success!, n.d., ¶ 4) Thus, personal branding attempts to guarantee its success through a cycle of inevitability: Economic turmoil is inevitable; personal branding is the solution; others will brand themselves; therefore, you must brand yourself to succeed. Consultant Jan Austin captures this personal branding imperative well on her web site with the admonishment that “everyone must learn to use unconventional methods in order to stand out and command the attention of one’s audience. YOU MUST BE A BRAND!” (Austin, n.d., ¶ 1).

The root metaphor of much of this advice, as in most advertising for technology, is that of a race that must be run. The fear is constantly of falling behind or not being able to catch up.

The American mythos. The highly individualistic nature of personal branding resonates strongly with the by-your-own-bootstrap mythos that has historically played a central role in American culture in general and American business culture in particular, as well as with the neoliberal economic philosophy that has become so prominent for many Western governments. In this manner, personal branding speaks into the long-standing presupposition— perhaps most famously articulated in Horatio Alger’s (1990) 19th- century novel, Ragged Dick—that a strong work ethic, centered on individual initiative, is the key to realizing the American dream. The personal branding literature consistently positions individuals as responsible for charting their own futures. Kaputa (n.d.), for example, played on the bootstrap theme by writing on her web site that “self branders establish the greatest freedom, which is responsibility. Self branders make their own luck [and] create their own opportunities. Self-branders are always working for themselves, even when they are working for a boss” (¶ 24). Not only does Kaputa draw on American notions of self-reliance, but she also connects such self-reliance to the equally American celebration of freedom.

Such connections are common from personal branding consultants; often, the turbulent economic environment is portrayed as a uniquely exciting venue to exercise Americanism. Nowhere is this connection more striking, however, than in Peters’s (1999) explicit connection of personal branding to the American mythos: America has always been the Self-Help Nation. Bootstrap Nation. Pioneer Nation. In the early years of our democracy, everybody provided for themselves and their families (and their neighbors in times of need).

Nobody expected to be taken care of. Self-reliance, independence, and the freedom that goes with them were what we stood for, what defined us. And then, about 150 years ago, when Giant Corp. arrived on the scene (Giant Govt. came about 75 years later), we started to lose “it.” Our Franklinian “it.” Our Emersonian “it.” We succumbed—exactly the right word—to Babbitry. To Big. Corp.-That-Will-Be-Mummy-andDaddy-for-Life. (p. 14) Here, Peters positions personal branding not only as a highly American phenomenon but also as one that restores traditional American values lost in the era of Whyte’s (1956) Organization Man. Personal branding is desirable because it affords individuals a strategy to negotiate a turbulent economy and it recaptures the ideals of self- reliance and self-sufficiency embodied in American icons such as Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Horatio Alger.

Disidentifying with cynicism. Finally, the arguments for personal branding are unassailable within the walls of Brand You: to attack the idea is to be cynical; and to be cynical is to throw your hands up and take what the economy gives you. Peters (1997, 1999) repeatedly railed against cynicism, often using Dilbert cartoons as a target of his ire: We want (desperately) an anti-Dilbert character. (I love Dilbert. He’s right. He’s funny. But I hate the cynicism, except as a wake-up call. It’s my life, and I’ll not spend it pushing paper in some crummy cubicle. And you?) (1999, p. 39) Other consultants similarly frame personal branding as a positive, solution-oriented effort. Kaputa (n.d.), for example, argued that “acting like a self brand arises out of the decision that you want to take control and that there is more to do. You want to be part of the solution, not complaining about the problem” (¶ 23). Personal branding advocates consistently stress a positive outlook consistent with both the portrayal of economic turmoil as inevitable and the call to American-style self-reliance: To give in to the turbulence is to accept defeat; to lose faith in one’s ability to succeed is to give up on the American dream. Cynicism, then, is not an option; it can only prevent one from succeeding. Instead, personal branding encourages individuals to embrace the challenge of the contemporary economy by using personal branding as a strategy to succeed, leaving the cynics behind to have their situations dictated to them by the whims of the

economy.

Taken together, each of these general appeals works to form an interlocking series of arguments insulating personal branding from criticism. Personal branding proponents demonstrate an awareness of the potential criticisms of personal branding and attempt to dis- miss them outright. For example, Peters (1999) wrote, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel in the least bit offended, demeaned, or dehumanized by the thought of Brand You or Brand Me. Or Me Inc., another of my favorites” (p. 26). Similarly, Montoya (n.d.) argued, “A Personal Brand is not you; it’s the public projection of your personality and abilities. That doesn’t mean you are losing ‘you the person’; it does mean you are shaping the perception people have of ‘you the person’” (¶ 1). Each of these defenses of personal branding is in fact bolstered by the circularity of the arguments above: Professionals should not feel guilty about branding themselves, because branding is a necessary response to inevitable economic turmoil and a very American response in terms of the celebration of individual enterprise. And, after all, any criticism of the strategy is just plain cynical. In effect, then, these arguments work together to close in on the discursive space necessary to resist the encroachment of branding discourse into deeper issues of personal and professional identity. We would characterize this argumentative containment as a prime example of what Deetz (1992) termed discursive closure, referring to the control of communication where alternatives to the dominant position scarcely have a chance to be heard.

Personal branding is by its very design reductionistic because of its style of expression. Also, it diverts attention from what Weber (1978) would have called more substantive aspects of individual rationality and identity and toward superficial and technically executed representations. Weber was certainly aware of the power of representation in his interpretive sociology of organizations; in fact, he accorded organizational images a certain reality when people acted as if those images were important. On the other hand, Weber was deeply concerned that modern rationality would play out in such a way as to obscure penetrating questions about values, identity, and decision making. This was a concern for organizations as well as individuals. Although we are certainly not suggesting a sharp line between substance and representation (see Burke, 1945/ 1969), we do observe ways in which one’s identity (and role performances) can be represented in more or less reductionistic ways. Reduction, as Burke (1945/1969) observed, is a type of representation and, in his way of thinking, an expression of motives. But just as the representation can stand for the thing represented, so can the thing represented stand for the representation. So, the real questions become the following: What sort of symbolic equation are we favoring by using personal brands?

What does brand identification highlight? Obscure or conceal? Ultimately, in this case, one can choose (or not choose) to surrender identity projections to the fleet- ing dictates of fashion.

With personal branding, the rhetorical adjustment of the self to the whims of management and how-to trends becomes not only a strategic activity one has to do but what one actively pursues as a personal goal—at least if we take the web sites of personal brand- ing consultants seriously. Personal branding offers itself as a pro- active, personal option and in some ways, it is. But it also suffers from the constraints of an overpackaged, time-bound genre of self- expression that scarcely asks for much self-reflection. Indeed, personal branding leaves little room for audiences to experience authentic selves (or in Burke’s, 1945/1969, terms, multiple “motives”).

THE CULTURAL CONSTRAINTS OF PERSONAL BRANDING Once one steps outside of the circular arguments with which personal branding insulates itself from criticism, the unintended con- sequences of the strategy become apparent. In addition to (or per- haps because of) persuading employees to turn themselves into saleable commodities, the personal branding discourse under- scores several ongoing social pathologies including overwork and the erosion of personal relationships.

Certainly, the by-your-own-bootstrap themes echoed by personal branding consultants call on individuals to stand out from their competitors through hard work. Unfortunately, hard work is often defined in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. Psychologist Phillipson, in her recent book Married to the Job (2002), drew an explicit connection between

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the Peters’s (1999) ideological stance toward work and the pathological role that work plays in the lives of her patients.

Phillipson offered a unique and compelling argument that our obsession with work is due not only (or even primarily) to our drive for consumption (cf. Schor, 1992) but, rather, to the fact that work increasingly provides the emotional connections that we lack in our (post)modern lives. Framing work through personal branding seems to strengthen the forces driving the dramatic increase in the American workweek at a time when some other industrialized nations are decreasing their working hours.

Time spent is a zero-sum game. If we spend more time working, we spend less elsewhere. Phillipson (2002) certainly saw this connection in her patients. But personal branding’s effects on relationships threaten to be more direct by calling for the worker to sacrifice family and relationships in the interests of developing and maintaining Brand You. Peters (1999), for example, wrote, If Brand You is about your signature WOW Projects . . . and it is . . . then you must somehow (consult the Time Management gurus) weed out the 96(!) percent of distractions . . . and Work-the-Hell- Out-of-Your-Signature-WOW Project (come Bloody Hell and Bloody High Water). We all know folks who are going to . . . start a business . . . write a book . . . learn to skydive ... build a house ... as soon as they “find the time.”

BULLSHIT! When you CARE you MAKE the time . . . and if that means saying “NO!” to your friends, your spouse, your kids (hey, I never said there would be no sacri- fices), well, there it is! (When I’m at work on a book—i.e., now—I am unspeakably rude to friends, family, colleagues. Sometimes correspondence goes unanswered for a . . . year. And far too many Little League games have been missed. And Mom has gone far too long without a phone call. Etc. Fact is: I don’t know how else to do it?! And there may well be no other way?) (p. 72).

Here, Peters calls for individuals to place their brands above their relationships. Other consultants take the idea of branding even further by arguing that personal branding as a strategy should be imported into relationships to save them. Consultant Chuck Pettis (n.d.), for example, relayed the narrative of one of his clients to make this point: “Will theorized that ‘Branding works for our clients, why won’t it work for me and

help me ‘sell’my ‘product’(i.e., me) to my ‘customer’(i.e., my wife?)” (¶ 11). The discourse of personal branding, then, threatens to either lead people to ignore their relationships or to commodify such relationships within the frame of a market discourse.

Certainly, areas of personal life beyond time and relationships are jeopardized by the incursion of branding discourse into issues of personal identity. In this essay, however, we would like to focus our attention on personal branding’s implications for broader social issues revolving around dimensions such as gender, race, age, and class.

We will develop the gender-based analysis in some detail be- cause of gender’s obvious presence in the texts under study. With race, age, and class, we wish to make parallel observations in terms of their potent absence from the discourses of personal branding.

GENDER-BASED LIMITATIONS TO PERSONAL BRANDING’S IDENTITY MANAGEMENT Personal branding has the potential to objectify all workers; however, for women, the concept of personal branding may be even more problematic than for their male counterparts. In particular, personal branding promotes a feminine surface identity and a masculine internal identity, all the while perpetuating the work/home dualism. Personal branding encourages women to get ahead at work, work as hard or harder than their male counterparts, and reach for the top but also to look womanly, take care of their external appearance, be there for their children and husbands (if a woman has them—but recognize that if she does, she may not be viewed as a 100% company woman), and routinely act in the care- taker role at work.

Although women are urged to adopt the external appearance of culturally defined femininity, the personal branding literature also insists that women internally deny that same feminine identity. Since the 1970s, books about organizations such as Games Mother Never Taught You: Corporate Gamesmanship for Women (Harragan, 1977) and The New

On Brand™

Fisher-Roffer (2000) is just one example of how personal brand- ing strategists target working women to make them feel as though they have no other option to get ahead than to brand themselves. Hamby (n.d.) explicitly targeted women by equating personal branding to a marriage. She claimed that you have to treat your brand like a marriage giving it your “unique strengths, values and talents.” If you don’t give your brand everything you’ve got, that you will inevitably go through a “brand divorce.” Brand divorce, Hamby argued, occurs when women do not give their all to their personal brand and do not accept that fact that “the reality is that we are each responsible for our own business succeeding or not” (n.d., ¶ 7). Hamby places the burden of success squarely on the shoulders of women and tells them that failure is because of their own flaws and mistakes. Similarly, personal branding strategist and coach Kaputa (n.d.) offers a specialized seminar on personal branding for women. Kaputa claims that in this seminar, women will learn to “break through the glass ceiling through effective self branding.

Women will learn to look at themselves as a marketer would look at a product that she wants to make a winning brand” (n.d., ¶ 1). Once again, women are asked to perceive themselves as products, and to do it willingly and happily, in order to get ahead.

The discourse of personal branding, then, carries with it particularly troublesome gender implications by simultaneously suggesting women feel as though they need to brand themselves to get ahead while at the same time making them feel individually responsible for failure, thus effectively placing women in a discursive double bind. Brands connote consistency of roles, a promise of success, and a standard mode of operation—a daunting task for any human being to achieve. In their double role, working women with families are at risk of suffering an even greater work-home tension by committing themselves to becoming a brand.

(Above) “Bliss“ (1998) by Charles “Chuck” O’Rear is believed to be the most viewed photograph in history. Estimated to have been viewed by well over a billion people. It was used by Windows as the default wallpaper for the Windows XP OS.

AGE, RACE, AND CLASS IN PERSONAL BRANDING Executive Women: A Guide to Business Success (Williams, 1977) have been telling women that to succeed in industry, they must diminish the feminine and embody the masculine—but not on the outside, of course! The message is that femininity is deficient when it comes to organizational success and that, to succeed, women need to adopt particular strategies to deny the feminine. Personal branding sends the same message but in a much more covert manner. The danger for working women who buy into personal branding lies in what personal branding rules out while offering the appearance of empowerment.

An example of this can be seen in Fisher-Roffer’s (2000) Make a Name for Yourself: 8 Steps Every Woman Needs to Create a Personal Brand Strategy for Success. Fisher-Roffer’s book, a prominent text in the personal branding literature, explicitly takes the personal branding concept into a gendered context thus affording an excellent window into the gender-based implications of personal branding discourse. Fisher-Roffer claimed she targets women because “I haven’t found many [books] that resonate with a woman’s emotional experience in striving to get ahead in work” (p. 8), going on to claim that: Building a personal brand strategy allows us to wield our truest selves. Instead of an assault on the marketplace, we come bearing the gift of our own best qualities, packaged in a way to attract pre- cisely the people who need us, and want us, and will appreciate us the most. (Fisher-Roffer, 2000) Although at first glance such statements seem relatively innocuous, a closer examination of the ways in which women are asked to brand themselves proves to be problematic. Women fight against the stereotype of being a sex object in the workplace (Wood, 2001). Fisher-Roffer did not say that women should attempt to be sex objects, but her book does contain an entire chapter on how to pack- age your brand, complete with hair, make-up, nail color, and cloth- ing tips. Fisher-Roffer also makes more difficult the very real work- home dualism that many women face (Hochschild, 1989). Personal branding exacerbates the problem by simultaneously telling women that they need to act like a brand, be indispensable to their organization, handle every situation, network with the higher ups, and at the same time “be the good girl scout” and have a backup plan for their children’s crises (Fisher-Roffer, 2000, p. 101).

Personal branding treats race, age, and class in a similar manner by excluding them from conversations of who is allowed to succeed through personal branding. An article found on Latinoforum.com (Personal Branding Books, 2003), stated, It’s not clear that everyone can or even should be branded, however. Speak, for example, finds it easiest to teach personal branding techniques to corporate employees; other consultants prefer to work with self-employed entrepreneurs. Montoya, for his part, doubts that everyone has the ability to do the soul searching required to become a brand. Although he feels that the ability to look at oneself honestly and openly is the most powerful and important skill in becoming a good personal brand, he says, “Some people have it and some people don’t. I’m not sure if it’s something that can be learned or not.” (¶ 13) We would agree that personal branding does not appear to be for everyone, nor does it send the message that it is.

Personal branding, by the language it uses, the depictions of those who use personal branding on promotional materials, and the implicit absence of any discussion of difference, tells us who can be a brand and who can- not. The message of personal branding is problematic for workers in general, but it poses additional problems for workers who fall outside the realm of a White, middle-aged professional.

Age is one aspect that personal branding either ignores or views as a downfall to personal branding. Bergstrom and Holmes (2003) observed that the U.S. labor force will dramatically grey as the number of workers aged 55 to 64 increases by 11.3 million by 2010. The necessity and/or desire of many workers to remain in the work- force longer is often met with resistance, as older workers continue to face discrimination in the face of evidence that demonstrates that they are equally competent on the job (Bergstrom & Holmes, 2003). When older workers apply for jobs, they may run into dis- criminatory hiring practices; when struggling to stay in their cur- rent jobs, they may run into obstacles as well.

Personal branding, for the most part, rarely mentions the unique difficulties faced by the older working population; however, one example stands out. Kaputa (n.d.), a self-described company and personal branding strategy coach, has developed a personal brand- ing seminar specifically for the 50+ market. In this seminar, Kaputa explains why the self-brand concept is crucial for people older than

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50. Personal branding asks older workers to turn themselves into products to secure or maintain employment. Older workers are told to “reinvent themselves” for the “second act” when they should be experts in the “first act” (Kaputa, n.d.). From the perspective of personal branding, then, the experience and expertise that come from years of work are beneficial only to the extent that they can be branded as a marketable commodity.

Although age has at least one mention in the current personal branding literature, race does not. We have not found discussions of race, whether in books, on the Internet, in articles, or in marketing materials such as newsletters and brochures. A thorough examination of personal branding web sites and promotional materials revealed only two web sites that had pictures of people whose race was other than White; in all of the pictures, older workers and nonwhite-collar-looking workers were absent. In short, the literature of personal branding is overwhelmingly silent on the issue of race. The only non-White personal branding consultant we found was Stedman Graham, author of the personal branding book, Build Your Own Life Brand (2001). Graham is probably best known for his long-time association with Oprah Winfrey and Graham frequently mentions Oprah as a model in his prescription for personal branding.

The racial blindness of personal branding speaks to the larger racial blindness apparent in organizational studies within the United States.

Cheney and Ashcraft (2003) claimed that “organizational communication scholars have said much less about the racial dimensions of work than they have about gender dynamics” and urged “sustained attention to the racial division of labor, for we observe that the images of many professionals are coded for Whiteness, even when the intention to do so is below the surface of awareness” (p. 16). Personal branding appears to support the status quo image or brand, if you will, of the professional as largely White. Ashcraft and Allen (2003) have argued that if a person of color is admitted into the organization, they are expected to conform to the general practice of Whiteness to be viewed as a professional, whereas the white-collar worker is never asked to perform anything other than simply being White (i.e., culturally speaking). Personal branding not only helps to fix the idea of the White professional but also leaves little room for alternative identities.

As for issues of race, issues of class are largely ignored in the personal branding literature. The personal branding literature exhibits a marked absence of class awareness. Although this literature is certainly addressed to a white-collar audience, Peters (1999) framed that audience as “ninety-plus percent of us” (p. ix). Regard- less of the accuracy of Peters’s “fact,” such a statement speaks volumes about the presumed applicability of personal branding as an employment strategy. This elitist perspective, with its implicit assumption that everyone is climbing the ladder, is blind to the lim- its on possibilities imposed by class positions. Consider, for example, the class differences implicit between the types of jobs avail- able to those in Peters’s Brand You world versus those jobs in the condemned Dilbert world (see the appendix). The assumptions behind these differences are predicated on a white-collar work world, presenting options that may not be available in the work- place for those whose jobs offer significantly less room for individual initiative and freedom.

The seemingly classless perspective advanced in personal branding discourse, then, functions as a double-edged sword. On one hand, it serves to recast the other side of the self-reliance- equals-success mythology—in effect, blaming the poor for poverty. By invoking the rags-to-riches Alger (1990) myth through its emphasis on the individual’s ability to succeed if only they can find the right way to promote themselves, personal branding discourse leaves those who are economically marginalized as responsible for their own lot. Their economic failures become simply a result of their inability or unwillingness to package themselves correctly. Missing from this perspective, however, is how service workers— seemingly cast as white collar by Peters’s reckoning—are to develop the skills and resources that they would need to market them- selves; they certainly could not afford the $5,000 Fisher-Roffer charges for an initial three-hour personal branding consultation (Noxon, 2003).

The message is clear: If you’re working in a Dilbert (low-paying service or technical) job, it is because you have not successfully branded yourself; it is no fault of your employer or broader structures or policies. If you are an older worker who is struggling with developing or keeping a career in the current employment climate, it is because you have not found a way to brand yourself for the “second act.” And if you are not

White you will have trouble find- ing a prefabricated seminar that seems to invite your ethnic identity. We believe that by ignoring issues of race, personal branding functions to keep the image of the White professional intact. The message is clear in its absence: Race does not appear to be a brandable characteristic.

CONCLUSION: PERSONAL BRANDING, ETHICS, AND COMMUNICATION The broad tendency of personal branding is to shield itself from ethical scrutiny. This is in part because of the way it wraps itself in an upbeat celebration of democratic choice and opportunity—per the ethos of marketing in general. As we will show, an ethically conscious rhetorical critique of the personal branding movement reveals the true limitations of the movement’s claims regarding personal agency and efficacy. At the same time, the movement dis- plays rather narrow conceptions of gender, race, and class. Finally, the movement can function to distort social relations through a further commodification of intersubjectivity.

To develop in more specific terms our ethical critique, we would like to consider these four areas: the implied audience of personal branding, the implied individual person, the distortion of social relations, and the diversion from systemic analysis.

THE IMPLIED AUDIENCE We are now in a good position to comment on the implied audience (cf. Black, 1970; Wander, 1984) of the personal branding movement.

We have already observed some of the gender-oriented, race-based, and class-specific aspects of personal branding—at least as the movement has been articulated by its key proponents. We can now say that the primary audience—though not the exclusive one—is a largely White, male, professional class of middle managers and other dislocated professionals who are seeking a new formula for success in a world seemingly turned upside down. To the extent that other groups are addressed by personal branders, they are either assumed to fit this dominant mold (i.e., by being conspicuously absent from the discourse and imagery of the books, web sites, and seminars) or they are implicitly instructed to resolve individually any tensions that might be present between their cultural norms for work and career and those of the packaged professional. From the sources we have surveyed, we would say that the personal branding movement makes a nod toward diversity in the category of gender but that it in fact perpetuates stereotypes of women and does not adequately deal with either the second shift or the glass ceiling. Age is rarely mentioned; when it is, it is treated as a problem that one must overcome by developing the perfect brand.

THE IMPLIED INDIVIDUAL The personal branding movement, as revealed in the web sites, books, and seminars treated here, draws heavily on an ethos of self- reliance and atomized responsibility and on the mythos of the mar- ket as a democratic domain of possibility. The position of the individual within the discursive universe of personal branding is both elevated and highly constrained. Although the individual is being told that he or she is the center and urged to formulate and reformulate a distinctive identity, there is little talk of internal spiritual or emotional growth and even less questioning of the system that supposedly requires the branding of self and career. The personal branding movement presents itself as the only reasonable alter- native for individual success but does not engage the fact that the range of options under discussion is remarkably narrow, especially when seen in a wider historical and cultural context.

THE DISTORTION OF SOCIAL RELATIONS In his controversial book, The Corrosion of Character, Sennett (1998) described well how the contingent work culture has not only undermined bonds of loyalty between employer and employee but also has fostered a kind of shallowness in human relations at work. At the same time, organizations of all sorts are renewing their per- suasive

On Brand™

campaigns that portray their work environments as warm, friendly, supportive, and attuned to the needs of individuals and families. Put in neo-Kantian terms, the ethos of personal branding offers little concern for others and no regard, in logical terms, for the results of generalizing the very kinds of behavior and think- ing that personal branding promotes. That is, a professional work world where personal branding predominates would also be one with few enduring bonds and little trust but a great deal of political maneuvering, competition, and cynicism.

Social values have little depth beyond their packaging and promotion, and inhabitants of this marketed world would not be expected to hold or demonstrate lasting social commitments. Players would be looking at them- selves in the mirror as well as over the shoulders of others while they strive to fashion and refashion themselves without concern for values, deep satisfactions, or contributions to society.

THE DIVERSION FROM SYSTEMIC ISSUES Ultimately, personal branding suggests a highly individualized professional world of activity and relationships within the parameters of conformity and cynical game playing. In our survey of major sources and resources for personal branding, we have found little to suggest the importance of collaboration and even less to suggest that people work together to change the rules of the game. In this case, the lack of systemic reflection equates perfectly with a lack of ethical self-examination. If a form of virtue ethics were employed alongside the promotional discourse of personal branding, there would be some hope for the noble professional. Instead, an exceedingly narrow form of instrumentality underlies the main discourse of personal branding, and it offers no encouragement to the individual professional to reevaluate or apply values.

In sum, by capitalizing (pun intended) on a crisis image of economic turbulence and individual disorientation, the personal branding movement threatens to perpetuate individuals’ sense of alienation. At the very least, we find nothing in the books, web sites, or seminars to encourage individuals toward self or social transformation. However, because our analysis here is focused on the possibilities of subject positions invited by personal branding discourse, it cannot speak to the ways in which that discourse is actually taken up and used (or misused) by its ultimate consumers. An interesting extension of this analysis of personal branding would be to follow the path of other researchers (e.g., see Nadesan & Trethewey, 2000) to explore the reactions of

actual consumers of personal branding and to see how they manage the tensions of identity presented in the discourse.

For the study of organizational communication and for organizational studies in general, the case of personal branding offers an important way of illuminating the contemporary relationships between work and culture. In personal branding, we find yet another application and extension of marketing’s concepts, in line with U.S. individualism and as a response to the changing nature of the labor market and professional life. Personal branding represents yet another reason that we should question the container model of organizations as a set of boundaries for our analyses (Carlone & Taylor, 1998; Cheney & Christensen, 2001; R. Smith, 1997). Although a certain kind of communication is offered by the personal branders as the solution to economic disadvantage and dislocation, that communication itself may contribute to social alienation as well as to a delay in the necessary structural changes of the society.

CLOSING CAVEAT We are at risk in this essay for offering a one-sided critique of personal branding. We have adopted a critical standpoint that presumes, to some extent, real, foundational depth to personal identity. This position is tempered, however, by postmodern understandings of the multiplicity of identity and rationality, the ongoing play of symbols, and the folly of neatly elevating what we would deem to be substance over what is apparent on the surface. Our commentary is certainly not unidimensional in its attention to issues of gender, race, and class, but we sometimes talk about personal branding as if it had both a monolithic message and a univocal possibility for expression. This is, of course, not necessarily the case. Diverse studies of consumerism and marketization (broadly speaking) reveal that even within genres of experience and communication as seemingly constrained as personals ads (!), multiple avenues of use and expression are possible and actual (Coupland, 1996). Just as Gabriel and Lang (1995) have pointed out the doors to multiple consumer identities, we wish to be open to meanings and practices of personal branding still unforeseen. For example, how might savvy, self-reflexive, or even cynical appropriations of personal brands actually lead to a form of social transformation—on the level of the individual, organizational, professional community, or even beyond? So, what is your brand—er, stand?

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Shou I Self Bran On Brand™

uld f nd?

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Self Brand Decision Points Flowchart

Branding and online ID get confused for each other.

Yes

Are you branding because you think its what’s cool or fashionable?

NO

There are many reasons that can compel someone to seek to brand themselves. There are many decision points that need to be considered, but often aren't.

Is bra how y you c your o

Would give ter w cially ing wi

This flowchart outlines several key and common routes that people follow in order to brand, and illustrates the right and wrong reasons, as well more ambiguous points that eschew a binary Yes or No answer.

Does to br from ers/

NO

Is th for a desi fa

NO

No Branding should be driven by a desire to tell a story, not self-serving.

NO

Do you want fame from esteem rather than delivering a product/ service?

Yes

Can you authentically live this brand and represent the product/service?

Have you considered how this product/ service benefits from a personal vs. a business brand?

Yes

Yes

Is this a product/ service?

Do I Somet to Se

Yes

NO

Is this a Lifestyle?

Yes Yes

NO

Is this a Lifestyle?

NO

Yes

Yes

Don’t create noise/waste.

If there is no demand then the brand isnt necessary

Do you plan to acturately represent yourself and your views?

Yes

Yes

Are you looking to capitalize off of existing messages/trends?

NO

No

Personal brands are different from Business brands, they must authentically represent you.

On Brand™

NO

anding just yoy believe can define r identity online?

Yes

Do you feel your online self represents you offline?

Branding and online ID get confused for each other.

Yes

NO

Yes

d branding you a betway of soy interactith others?

NO

Would this brand help you gain professional opportunities?

If your brand is unique and accurately represents you, then go for it!

Yes

Yes

Yes

the need rand come influenc/society?

NO

Yes

Do most other people in your social media network hava a brand?

Yes

Would this brand help you gain professional opportunities?

Yes

his desire a brand a ire to be amous?

NO

Do I feel pressured to brand myself?

Yes

Yes NO

NO

Should I Brand Myself?

have thing ell?

No

Is there a niche you could fill as a brand?

Will Branding help create a demand for you?

Don’t create noise/waste.

If there is no demand then the brand isnt necessary

NO

Yes NO

NO

Yes Do you have extensive knowlege about this niche?

Do I have something to say?

Yes

Can You bring value to this niche with a unique POV / Service / Product?

NO

NO Yes

NO

Is your message unique, and can it benefit from your brand?

Is this looking to capitalize on existing trends

NO

NO Yes

Yes

Do you plan to acturately represent yourself and your views?

Yes

If your brand is unique and accurately represents you, then go for it!

Branding History

No

Brands are viable if they have a unique story to tell.

Who’s listenign?

Yes

The issue of forming brands around people is that it recenters the ethics of the person within that of a corporation.

Chapter

08 Person Woman Man Brand Tweet

Why all th same

is it he e?!*

*branding, both personal and not, on social media platforms.

"Everyth brand brand is e

hing is d, and everything."

–Dan Pallotta, Harvard Business Review (2014)

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What Happens When People and Companies are Both Brands?

Amanda Hess

Some ideas are bigger than others. Some even grow so large that they turn into paradigms, their logic organizing the way we see everything around them. And if you’re uncertain what framework dominates modern life, well, you can take it from the TED conference fixture and Advertising for Humanity founder Dan Pallotta, who put it bluntly enough in a 2011 article for Harvard Business Review: “Brand is everything, and everything is brand.”

He was writing in the service of building his own brand, which is about rebranding other people’s brands. The brand, in fact, is such a ubiquitous organizing principle for so many things — companies, products, people — that it has been forced to spawn an expansive glossary of subcategories and varieties. There are “public brands” (civic institutions), “brand extensions” (new products from existing brands), “fighter brands” (cheaper brands released by costlier brands to reattract lost brand loyalty) and “brand leaders” (the very best brands). Even aspects of branding itself are branded, with “brand managers” (marketers) building “brand equity” (likability) through the cultivation of “brandface” (the way the consumer sees herself when she engages with the brand). The apotheosis of all this might be the “lifestyle brand” — a corporate bid to escape the humdrum reality of selling products and instead market an entire way of being. Taco Bell is entering the category with a Forever 21 clothing line targeted at “making wardrobes a whole lot saucier.” Lexus has chased the luxury lifestyle into the sea by introducing a yacht. A vice president for Good Foods describes its guacamole as part of “a lifestyle brand that adds optimum nutrition and wellness, along with the fun factor that can be enjoyed during holidays like Cinco de Mayo.”

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Anything that can be consumed is now understood as a brand — and on the internet, that’s every last bit of content. This is how a consultant like Eric Garland can, on the strength of a viral tweet storm about the “game theory” behind American politics, brand himself as a Russian conspiracy sage and market subscriptions to @gametheorytoday. It’s also why actual brands, like Hamburger Helper or Denny’s, hang around social media masquerading as people, posting jokes and memes and roasting haters. Even the most cynical internet users speak semiseriously about our posts being “on brand” or “off brand.” There is no refuge from the logic of the brand — and if there is, some up-and-coming strategist will soon enough bolster her own brand by colonizing it.

Corporate branding first emerged as a practical measure. In the 1920s, the rise of American consumer culture produced a glut of products that couldn’t be differentiated from one another on sight. The branding that emerged around them has, at points, had a glimmer of utility to it, serving as a way to establish the authenticity and reliability of a particular thing from a particular source. But the idea of a “brand” rapidly spread beyond that seal of quality and subsumed a whole constellation of sentiments a company might provoke in a person, many of them wholly abstracted from the product itself. In her 1999 book, “No Logo,” Naomi Klein presents the acceleration of corporate branding as a kind of hollowing out: Companies that used to manufacture wares or harvest foods — that used to sell things — became brands, which sell ideas. Actual production processes became secondary, outsourced to subcontractors. The brand’s real investment was to imbue the products with meaning.

“Nike isn’t a running-shoe company,” Klein wrote, “it's about the idea of transcendence through sports.”

At its core, branding is a process of humanization: It imbues companies with personalities. Often the personification is overt.

Once there were Aunt Jemima and Betty Crocker; now there’s the Trump Organization and Fenty Beauty. As the celebrity adman Bruce Barton once said: “Institutions have souls, just as men and nations have souls.” A company with a soul becomes relatable, but in a deceptive way: The more we think of it as a “brand,” the more our focus shifts away from things like labor practices and supply chains and onto issues of narrative and identity.

So Wendy’s, which used to be personified by a little red-haired girl or by its founder, Dave Thomas, is now personified by a social-media team renowned for its ability to tweet like a rude teenager. Ever translating to human persona more. But if companies have come to act more like people, the reverse is also true: Now people act like companies, carefully monitoring the meanings we project into the world. The “brand management” of the Wendy’s team happens right alongside that of actual teenagers, who shape their images to attract attention and good will. Build up enough of those things, and a person, much like a company, can become profitable. A blockbuster persona like Rihanna’s might translate into the marketability of a $59 “body luminizer”; a “Bachelor” contestant’s persona might be limited to endorsing herbal supplements on Instagram; a popular internet figure might simply crowdfund to cover expenses. Companies still try to sell us things, but now we’re encouraged to pitch ourselves to them, too. A “lifestyle brand,” after all, is just a regular brand that appeals to people’s “personal brands” — which, in turn, are increasingly organized around courting relationships with lifestyle brands. It all collapses into branding.

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Trump Tower in New York.

Photographer: Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

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“Personal brand” was coined by a writer named Tom Peters in a Fast Company article, “The Brand Called You.” This was in 1997, as lifestyle branding was beginning to emerge: “All kinds of products,” Peters wrote, “are figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded

by Tommy Hilfiger-like buzz.” At the end of the essay, he plugged his new CD-ROM. Part of what Peters envisioned was human beings’ thinking of themselves in the same way. The internet had made people identical, too, just messages stacked in a virtual box; like the snacks and sneakers that came before them, they needed ways to differentiate themselves. Where “The Brand Called You” becomes fascinating, though, is when it applies this logic to employment. Peters saw personal branding as a way to liberate yourself from the constraints of corporate life; he described lifelong steady employment as “what we used to call indentured servitude.”

In its place, he hailed the emergence of a new “project world,” where work “is organized into bite-sized packets.” To thrive in such a world, he encouraged readers to collect and market skills and connections — to throw out their résumés in favor of a “marketing brochure for brand You.” He imagined empowered workers divesting themselves from corporate drudgery, but what actually happened was the opposite: Our corporations divested from us. Over the two decades since “The Brand Called You,” full-time employment has steadily atomized into casual, part-time and temporary work, culminating in the “project world” of the gig economy — microjobs driving for Uber, running errands for TaskRabbit or cooking up side hustles on Fiverr, a company whose subway ads glamorize pitiless overwork (“sleep deprivation is your drug of choice”) despite its being named after a woefully small amount of cash.

The opportunities to market ourselves online are never-ending, but the financial rewards remain elusive.

Headlines heralding the multimillion-dollar incomes of YouTube stars can make cultivating a brand there seem like a real career option, but a recent study

found that even channels among the top 3 percent of viewership can bring in as little as $16,800 a year.

(When a would-be YouTube star opened fire in the company’s offices, it was perhaps the first workplace shooting of the gig economy.) Marketing money flows through Instagram, but few of the “influencers” there see much of it; the Cornell professor Brooke Erin Duffy has described them as engaging in “aspirational labor,” a “mode of (mostly) uncompensated, independent work that is propelled by the much-venerated ideal of getting paid to do what you love.”

They burnish their brands based on the unspoken assumption that a successful brand leads naturally to actual success. But this tricky conversion rarely takes place, and the work behind it tends to be less valuable to us than it is, in the aggregate, to the companies that facilitate it. All the time I thought I was building my own brand, seeding the internet with personal information in a bid to dominate the Google results — fending off challengers like Amanda Hess, the saintly doctor who delayed giving birth in order to deliver another woman’s baby first — I was enriching any number of tech companies.

Tom Peters encouraged us to break the chains of the corporate world in favor of pursuing a life of autonomous creativity. But now branding has taken over not just work but life itself, seizing control of our appearances, our social relationships, even our approach to civil society. After Starbucks staff called the police on two black men waiting in one of their stores — then closed 8,000 locations to conduct bias training for employees — a Forbes contributor praised the company for showing “brand purpose and promise” that could “provide direction for both Starbucks and society at large.” Even in the age of the personal brand, corporations rule.

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THE Existential ist HUMAN Rhetoricity OF BRANDS' Social Media HABITS 314

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Human Era Brands Author In the beginning the internet seemed good. “I was in love with the internet the first time I used it at my dad’s office and thought it was the ULTIMATE COOL,” I wrote, when I was ten, on an Angelfire subpage titled “The Story of How Jia Got Her Web Addiction.” In a text box superimposed on a hideous violet background, I continued: But that was in third grade and all I was doing was going to Beanie Baby sites. Having an old, icky bicky computer at home, we didn’t have the Internet. Even AOL seemed like a far-off dream. Then we got a new top-o’-the-line computer in spring break ’99, and of course it came with all that demo stuff. So I finally had AOL and I was completely amazed at the marvel of having a profile and chatting and IMS!! Then, I wrote, I discovered personal webpages. (“I was astonished!”) I learned HTML and “little Javascript trickies.” I built my own site on the beginner-hosting site Expage, choosing pastel colors and then switching to a “starry night theme.” Then I ran out of space, so I “decided to move to Angelfire. Wow.” I learned how to make my own graphics. “This was all in the course of four months,” I wrote, marveling at how quickly my ten-year-old internet citizenry was evolving. I had recently revisited the sites that had once inspired me, and realized “how much of an idiot I was to be wowed by that.”

I have no memory of inadvertently starting this essay two decades ago, or of making this Angelfire subpage, which I found while hunting for early traces of myself on the internet. It’s now eroded to its skeleton: its landing page, titled “THE VERY BEST,” features a sepia-toned photo of Andie from Dawson’s Creek and a dead link to a new site called “THE FROSTED FIELD,” which is “BETTER!” There’s a page dedicated to a blinking mouse GIF named Susie, and a “Cool Lyrics Page” with a scrolling banner and the lyrics to Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and the TLC diss track “No Pigeons,” by Sporty Thievz. On an On Brand™

Star,” Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and the TLC diss track “No Pigeons,” by Sporty Thievz. On an FAQ page— there was an FAQ page—I write that I had to close down my customizable cartoon-doll section, as “the response has been enormous.” It appears that I built and used this Angelfire site over just a few months in 1999, immediately after my parents got a computer. My insane FAQ page specifies that the site was started in June, and a page titled “Journal”—which proclaims, “I am going to be completely honest about my life, although I won’t go too deeply into personal thoughts, though”—features entries only from October. One entry begins: “It’s so HOT outside and I can’t count the times acorns have fallen on my head, maybe from exhaustion.” Later on, I write, rather prophetically: “I’m going insane! I literally am addicted to the web!”

In 1999, it felt different to spend all day on the internet. This was true for everyone, not just for ten-yearolds: this was the You’ve Got Mail era, when it seemed that the very worst thing that could happen online was that you might fall in love with your business rival. Throughout the eighties and nineties, people had been gathering on the internet in open forums, drawn, like butterflies, to the puddles and blossoms of other people’s curiosity and expertise. Self-regulated newsgroups like Usenet cultivated lively and relatively civil discussion about space exploration, meteorology, recipes, rare albums. Users gave advice, answered questions, made friendships, and wondered what this new internet would become.

Because there were so few search engines and no centralized social platforms, discovery on the early internet took place mainly in private, and pleasure existed as its own solitary reward. A 1995 book called You Can Surf the Net! listed sites where you could read movie reviews or learn about martial arts. It urged

readers to follow basic etiquette (don’t use all caps; don’t waste other people’s expensive bandwidth with overly long posts) and encouraged them to feel comfortable in this new world (“Don’t worry,” the author advised. “You have to really mess up to get flamed.”). Around this time, GeoCities began offering personal website hosting for dads who wanted to put up their own golfing sites or kids who built glittery, blinking shrines to Tolkien or Ricky Martin or unicorns, most capped off with a primitive guest book and a green-and-black visitor counter. GeoCities, like the internet itself, was clumsy, ugly, only half functional, and organized into neighborhoods: /area51/ was for sci-fi, / westhollywood / for LGBTQ life, /enchantedforest/ for children, /petsburgh/ for pets. If you left GeoCities, you could walk around other streets in this ever-expanding village of curiosities. You could stroll through Expage or Angelfire, as I did, and pause on the thoroughfare where the tiny cartoon hamsters danced. There was an emergent aesthetic—blinking text, crude animation. If you found something you liked, if you wanted to spend more time in any of these neighborhoods, you could build your own house from HTML frames and start decorating.

This period of the internet has been labeled Web 1.0—a name that works backward from the term Web 2.0, which was coined by the writer and user-experience designer Darcy DiNucci in an article called “Fragmented Future,” published in 1999. “The Web we know now,” she wrote, “which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear….The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of texts and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.” On Web 2.0, the structures would be dynamic, she predicted: instead of

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rise to power is inseparable from the existence of social networks that must continually aggravate their / users in order to continue making money. But lately 327 I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along. How did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our disappearing free time in an openly torturous environment? How did the internet get so bad, so confining, so inescapably personal, so politically determinative—and why are all those questions asking the same thing?

I’ll admit that I’m not sure that this inquiry is even productive. The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving. And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life.

It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever possible in primitive times. It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages— you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near- impossible to regulate or control.

The internet is also in large part inextricable from life’s pleasures: our friends, our families, our communities, our pursuits of happiness, and— sometimes, if we’re lucky—our work. In part out of a desire to preserve what’s worthwhile from the decay that surrounds it, I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.

In 1959, the sociologist Erving Goffman laid out a theory of identity that revolved around playacting. In every human interaction, he wrote in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a person must put on a sort of performance, create an impression for an audience. The performance might be calculated, as with the man at a job interview who’s practiced every answer; it might be unconscious, as with the man who’s gone on so many interviews that he naturally performs as expected; it might be automatic, as with the man who creates the correct impression primarily because he is an upper-middle-class white man with an MBA. A performer might be fully taken in by his own performance—he might actually believe that his biggest flaw is “perfectionism”—or he might know that his act is a sham. But no matter what, he’s performing. Even if he stops trying to perform, he still has an audience, his actions still create an effect. “All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify,” Goffman wrote.

To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion. A performer, in order to be convincing, must conceal “the discreditable facts that he has had to learn about the performance; in everyday terms, there will be things he knows, or has known, that he will not be able to tell himself.” The interviewee, for example, avoids thinking about the fact that his biggest flaw actually involves drinking at the office. A friend sitting across from you at dinner, called to play therapist for your trivial romantic hang-ups, has to pretend to herself that she wouldn’t rather just go home and

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get in bed to read Barbara Pym. No audience has to be physically present for a performer to engage in this sort of selective concealment: a woman, home alone for the weekend, might scrub the baseboards and watch nature documentaries even though she’d rather trash the place, buy an eight ball, and have a Craigslist orgy. People often make faces, in private, in front of bathroom mirrors, to convince themselves of their own attractiveness. The “lively belief that an unseen audience is present,” Goffman writes, can have a significant effect.

Offline, there are forms of relief built into this process. Audiences change over—the performance you stage at a job interview is different from the one you stage at a restaurant later for a friend’s birthday, which is different from the one you stage for a partner at home. At home, you might feel as if you could stop performing altogether; within Goffman’s dramaturgical framework, you might feel as if you had made it backstage. Goffman observed that we need both an audience to witness our performances as well as a backstage area where we can relax, often in the company of “teammates” who had been performing alongside us. Think of coworkers at the bar after they’ve delivered a big sales pitch, or a bride and groom in their hotel room after the wedding reception: everyone may still be performing, but they feel at ease, unguarded, alone. Ideally, the outside audience has believed the prior performance. The wedding guests think they’ve actually just seen a pair of flawless, blissful newlyweds, and the potential backers think they’ve met a group of geniuses who are going to make everyone very rich. “But this imputation—this self—is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it,” Goffman writes. The self is not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance. This effect can be believed or disbelieved at will.

Online—assuming you buy this framework—the system metastasizes into a wreck. The presentation of self in everyday internet still corresponds to Goffman’s playacting metaphor: there are stages, there is an audience. But the internet adds a host of other, nightmarish metaphorical structures: the mirror, the echo, the panopticon. As we move about the internet, our personal data is tracked, recorded, and resold by a series of corporations—a regime of involuntary technological surveillance, which subconsciously decreases our resistance to the practice of voluntary self-surveillance on social media. If we think about buying something, it follows us around everywhere.

We can, and probably do, limit our online activity to websites that further reinforce our own sense of identity, each of us reading things written for people just like us. On social media platforms, everything we see corresponds to our conscious choices and algorithmically guided preferences, and all news and culture and interpersonal interaction are filtered through the home base of the profile. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.

This system persists because it is profitable. As Tim Wu writes in The Attention Merchants, commerce has been slowly permeating human existence—entering our city streets in the nineteenth century through billboards and posters, then our homes in the twentieth century through radio and TV. Now, in the twenty-first

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century, in what appears to be something of a final stage, commerce has filtered into our identities and relationships. We have generated billions of dollars for social media platforms through our desire—and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural requirement—to replicate for the internet who we know, who we think we are, who we want to be.

Selfhood buckles under the weight of this commercial importance. In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.

(You can essentially be on a job interview in perpetuity.) In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action—you get invited over for dinner, or you lose the friendship, or you get the job. Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name. Worst of all, there’s essentially no backstage on the internet; where the offline audience necessarily empties out and changes over, the online audience never has to leave. The version of you that posts memes and selfies for your pre-cal classmates might end up sparring with the Trump administration after a school shooting, as happened to the Parkland kids—some of whom became so famous that they will never be allowed to drop the veneer of performance again. The self that traded jokes with white supremacists on Twitter is the self that might get hired, and then fired, by The New York Times, as happened to Quinn Norton in 2018. (Or, in the case of Sarah Jeong, the self that made jokes about white people might get Gamergated after being hired at the Times a few months thereafter.) People who maintain a public internet profile are building a self that can be viewed simultaneously by their mom, their boss, their potential future bosses, their eleven-year-old nephew, their past and future sex partners, their relatives who loathe their politics, as well as anyone who cares to look for any possible reason. Identity, according to Goffman, is a series of claims and promises. On the internet, a highly functional person is one who can promise everything to an indefinitely increasing audience at all times.

Incidents like Gamergate are partly a response to these conditions of hyper-visibility. The rise of trolling, and its ethos of disrespect and anonymity, has been so forceful in part because the internet’s insistence on consistent, approval- worthy identity is so strong. In particular, the misogyny embedded in trolling reflects the way women—who, as John Berger wrote, have always been required to maintain an external awareness of their own identity—often navigate these online conditions so profitably.

It’s the self-calibration that I learned as a girl, as a woman, that has helped me capitalize on “having” to be online. My only experience of the world has been one in which personal appeal is paramount and self- exposure is encouraged; this legitimately unfortunate paradigm, inhabited first by women and now generalized to the entire internet, is what trolls loathe and actively repudiate. They destabilize an internet built on transparency and likability. They pull us back toward the chaotic and the unknown.

Of course, there are many better ways of making the argument against hyper-visibility than trolling. As Werner Herzog told GQ, in 2011, speaking about psychoanalysis: “We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you

illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore.”

The first time I was ever paid to publish anything, it was 2013, the end of the blog era. Trying to make a living as a writer with the internet as a standing precondition of my livelihood has given me some professional motivation to stay active on social media, making my work and personality and face and political leanings and dog photos into a continually updated record that anyone can see. In doing this, I have sometimes felt the same sort of unease that washed over me when I was a cheerleader and learned how to convincingly fake happiness at football games—the feeling of acting as if conditions are fun and normal and worthwhile in the hopes that they will just magically become so. To try to write online, more specifically, is to operate on a set of assumptions that are already dubious when limited to writers and even more questionable when turned into a categorical imperative for everyone on the internet: the assumption that speech has an impact, that it’s something like action; the assumption that it’s fine or helpful or even ideal to be constantly writing down what you think.

I have benefited, I mean, from the internet’s unhealthy focus on opinion. This focus is rooted in the way the internet generally minimizes the need for physical action: you don’t have to do much of anything but sit behind a screen to live an acceptable, possibly valorized, twenty-first-century life. The internet can feel like an astonishingly direct line to reality—click if you want something and it’ll show up at your door two hours later; a series of tweets goes viral after a tragedy and soon there’s a nationwide high school walkout—but it can also feel like a shunt diverting our energy away from action, leaving the real- world sphere to the people who already control it, keeping us busy figuring out the precisely correct way of explaining our lives. In the run-up to the 2016 election and increasingly so afterward, I started to feel that there was almost nothing I could do about ninety-five percent of the things I cared about other than form an opinion—and that the conditions that allowed me to live in mild everyday hysterics about an unlimited supply of terrible information were related to the conditions that were, at the same time, consolidating power, sucking wealth upward, far outside my grasp.

I don’t mean to be naïvely fatalistic, to act like nothing can be done about anything. People are making the world better through concrete footwork every day. (Not me—I’m too busy sitting in front of the internet!) But their time and labor, too, has been devalued and stolen by the voracious form of capitalism that drives the internet, and which the internet drives in turn. There is less time these days for anything other than economic survival. The internet has moved seamlessly into the interstices of this situation, redistributing our minimum of free time into unsatisfying micro-installments, spread throughout the day. In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts seeming like an end in itself.

I started thinking about this when I was working as an editor at Jezebel, in 2014. I spent a lot of the day reading headlines on women’s websites, most of which had by then adopted a feminist slant. In this realm, speech was constantly framed as a sort of intensely satisfying action: you’d get headlines like “Miley Cyrus Spoke Out About Gender Fluidity on Snapchat

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Chapter

09

Strategy Development Writing and research on the history of the Self on the Internet.

- Jia Tolentino - Jenny Odell - Slavoj Zizek

All this re now what

esearch, t to do?! (

Make it a thesis.

)

I want to create an alternate solution to the social networks that force us to brand.

This stategy development will help to vet this and define how to effectively solve the crux of this theses.

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Relevant Trends™

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Background

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Social/Political Activism

A large part of activism in the 21st Century is how social media has been used to help galvanize people and to organize.

Many activist circles openly don’t like using social media to promote themselves, but have no other option.

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Process

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Social/Tech Isolationism

As our lives move more online we increasingly stick to our own circles. It moves us away from socialising offline, and isolates us further from broadening our circles of people we interact with.

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Process

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Economic

Gig Economy

The gig economy initially was conceived for people to use their free time and assets to make additional money. Now people use these Gig jobs as fulltime employment or as a second fulltime job. Social media has become an extension of this, where people commodify their identities and market them on social media.

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Process

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Economic

Late Capitalism

Late Capitalism describes the encroachment of capitalist values into all aspects of identity and life.

Since 2016, the term has been used in the United States and Canada to refer to perceived absurdities, contradictions, crises, injustices, and inequality created by modern business development.

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Process

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Sociological

COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 has completely changed our relationship to social media. Now the internet and our online presences have become the primary source of social interaction.

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Process

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Political

Polarization

We’re segregated in our own communities. Americans are increasingly segregating themselves by political party and ideology even in their residential communities. This segregation makes us more likely to demonize each other, as more and more people live alongside people who hold similar political beliefs to them.

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Process

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Social Media X Disinformation

Social media has largely been the source of damaging disinformation. Ranging from brands misrepresenting themselves to Q-ANON conspiracy theories.

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Process

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Competitors™

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Facebook

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Strength

Opportunity

- The largest social media company and the most used.

- Continue to expand and buy up rising social media networks to make up for its stagnating usership on Facebook platform.

- Is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp

Weakness

Threat

- Not widely used by younger generations.

- Due to the fact that Facebook owns many social media sites it is at risk of being broken up due to monopoly.

- Seen as outdated.

- Many have an unfavorable view of the company’s ethics.

Instagram

Strength

Opportunity

- Widely used app, immensely popular with young/ millenial users.

- Favored by celebrities and influencers.

- Expansion into shopping on the app.

- Instagram itself turning into lifestyle brand.

- The app itself using marketing and analytic tools.

Weakness

Threat

- Seen by many as the number one target of social media addiction.

- The changing of the app UX is off putting to many users.

- Not room for conversation or community.

-Too algorithm driven.

- The social attitude is constantly in flux given that its algorithm often marginalizes voice and is too secretive/not transparent.

Reddit

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Strength

Opportunity

- Used by niche communities that are not represented by other competitors.

- Content is not as policed as on other websites. Most of the power is put into users’ hands as admins.

- Increase ad revenue or monetize the service more.

Weakness

Threat

- Not widely used, is much more niche for users.

- Lack of growth for the platform.

- The UX is considered much more confusing.

- Explicit content does not encourage people to use the platform.

- Reach out to influencers to use the platform.

Snapchat

Strength

Opportunity

- Has loyal fans and users.

- Continue innovation of the platform, like face filters and AR opportunities.

- The badge system encourages users to use the app on a daily basis.

Weakness

Threat

- Refused to sell to Facebook putting it into competition with Instagram.

- Inability to discover new users means that connections must be already known or sought out outside of app.

- Other similar apps like Tik Tok are becoming more prevalent and widely used.

- Instagram adopts many of the Snapchat’s features for its own platform.

Twitter

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Strength

Opportunity

- Widely used social media network.

- Widely used by politicians and highly influential people.

Tweets are becoming enmeshed in the history books.

- Twitter is perhaps the most influential of these companies as it has redefined language completely. Changes to its platform has the potential to change how we communicate or use language on internet.

Weakness

Threat

- Bad images because of misinformation being spread on the platform.

- Issues of monopoly similar to that of Facebook.

- The negative press because of former President Trump’s use of the platform.

- Negative attention regarding its inconsistent use of blocking or suspending accounts depending on a person’s fame or influence.

358 / 359

User Archetypes ™

On Brand™

Background

360 / 361

Consumer Archetypes

Anti-Social Media User

Digital Activist

Innovator

Early Adopter

On Brand™

Woke-Fl

Early M

luencer

Majority

Digital Citizen

Hobbyist Networker

Late Majority

Late Minority

Process

362 / 363

Anti-Social Media User Innovator 21-28 Years Old

This user has been put off by social media in the mainstream.

They do not like the commodified nature of the platforms or that they are reliant on giant corporations in order to connect with friends and share their passions/ work.

On Brand™

Process

364 / 365

The Web Activist Early Adopter 18-27 Years Old

These are the activists who in the past are reliant on social media to organize their protests and to disseminate literature.

Often times they find they are organizing against the very platforms that they are using to do so.

On Brand™

Process

366 / 367

The Woke-Fluencer Early Majority 25-30 Years Old

Woke-fluencers like to pretend that they do not care about being popular on social media and that is only half true. They don’t like the platforms but they could never dream of not using them. They are waiting for a better option to come along.

On Brand™

Process

368 / 369

Web Citizens Late Majority 30-45 Years Old

The broadest sector of the audience. They are the ones who will flock to the new social media network once it has become popular and vetted.

On Brand™

Process

370 / 371

Hobbyist Networkers Late Minority 50-65 Years Old

These are the older version of the Web Citizens. They arrive late to the party as they are uncomfortable learning a new interface.

Largely they exist on Facebook and Twitter. They’re just on to reinforce their views and connect with friends.

On Brand™

Process

372 / 373

Consumer Trend Diffusion

Innovator

Early Adopter

On Brand™

Early Majority

Late Majority

Late Minority

Process

374 / 375

Mind Mapping™

On Brand™

Background

376 / 377

On Brand™

Process

378 / 379

On Brand™

Process

380 / 381

On Brand™

Process

382 / 383

On Brand™

Process

384 / 385

On Brand™

Process

386 / 387

On Brand™

Process

388 / 389

On Brand™

Process

390 / 391

Mind Map Takeaways Attributes • Discovery • Organic • Philosophical • Digital vs Physical Space • Humanistic • Open-Source • Empathetic • Knowledge-Driven • Fact-Based

On Brand™

Concept Ideas • Democratic Content Discovery • No Likes

• No Follower Counts

• Analog Social Media

• Social Media Book/Magazine made with binder, can add/subtract.

• Agora/Physical Forum, a dedicated space for dialogue.

• Dual physical/digital space • No Anonymity

• No Algorithms

• Shared Workspace

• Space for Bartering Background

392 / 393

Product Development™

On Brand™

Background

394 / 395

396 / 397

398 / 399

400 / 401

402 / 403

404 / 405

Visual Development™

On Brand™

Background

406 / 407

On Brand™

Visual Language Moodboard

Process

408 / 409

On Brand™

Typography Moodboard

Process

410 / 411

On Brand™

Print Moodboard

Process

412 / 413

On Brand™

Spatial Moodboard

Process

414 / 415

On Brand™

Book Moodboard

Process

416 / 417

Logo Development™

On Brand™

Background

418 / 419

1

2

5

6

On Brand™

Logo Development

3

4

7

8

Process

420 / 421

1

2

5

6 On Brand™

Logo Development

3

4

7

8 Process

Chapter

10

Closing Thoughts Writing and research on the history of the Self on the Internet.

- Jia Tolentino - Jenny Odell - Slavoj Zizek

Four Final

Conside

r

erations

1

The Internet distends our of sense of self, concept of space, body, time, and labor.

2

The confluence of the Gig Economy* and the Internet has led to the rise of personal brands.

*The Gig economy is a labor market characterized by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs.

3

Social media has facilitated the process of commodifying our free time and our own sense of selfhood.

4

There must be an option for users to social network that does not commercialize them or rely so heavily on the tropes of the digital culture in the 21st Century.

xii

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