Recording of "Invisible, Inc.: The Behind-the-Screens Laborers Propelling the Social Media Economy"

Recording of Invisible, Inc.: The Behind-the-Screens Laborers Propelling the Social Media Economy.

Brooke Erin Duffy, Assistant Professor, Cornell University
This video was recorded on Friday, April 6 at Noon.
The event took place in Northrop, Crosby Seminar Room 240

While the role and status of women in technology fields remain astonishingly low, the rise of a digital media economy has furnished new opportunities for those aspiring to work with technology. Social media communication, which entails representing and promoting brands and products on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, signals a new media career field seemingly dominated by young women.  Yet, this sector has also been described as a “pink ghetto”—not only because of the mostly female workforce, but also because the profession is predicated on invisible labor, the assumed link between communication and femininity, and other hallmarks of under-valued, feminized work. This presentation will draw upon in-depth interviews with social media editors and other behind-the-screens laborers to examine the extent to which new modes of work reproduce or challenge the gendered division of labor in media and technology.

Please click here to watch the recording on youtube. This video has subtitles in English.

This talk was part of the Critical Social Media Studies Colloquium at the University of Minnesota and co-organized by Professor Laurie Ouellette and Nicholas-Brie Guarriello.

Brooke Erin Duffy, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where she studies the interrelationships between media, technology, and society.  She's the author of two books on gender and cultural production, including(Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017) and Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013).  Her research has also appeared in such journals as New Media & Society, the International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Social Media + Society, among others.