Platform-Specific Self-Branding: Imagined Affordances of the Social Media Ecology

Abstract

Despite the recent uptick in academic literature on self-branding across the fields of Internet studies, business/marketing, and media/cultural industries, the ways in which the digital self-brand gets reproduced across a sprawling social media ecology remains comparatively under-theorized. Our paper draws upon in-depth interviews with 42 creative workers---including designers/artists, bloggers/writers, online content creators, and marketers/publicists---to understand how independent professionals present themselves and their work in the digital economy. We show that despite the common refrain of maintaining a "consistent" online persona, creative workers continuously negotiate their self-presentation activities through a logic we term 'platform-specific self-branding'. The platform-specific self-brand, we contend, is based upon the "imagined affordances" [44] of individual platforms and their placement within the larger social media ecology. Such imaginations are constructed through the interplay of: 1) platform features; 2) assumptions about the audience; and 3) the producer's own self-concept. We conclude that creative workers' incitement to incessantly monitor and re-fashion their digital personae in platform-specific ways marks an intensification of the 'always on' laboring subjectivity required to vie for attention in a precarious creative economy.