Judy Perly owned a small restaurant, and used vine as a marketing tool to promote her brunch specials. One day she decided to post a vine of herself on an airplane, just for fun. Instead, her vine become viral, having millions of loops, and many people parodied the original vine for comedic purposes. Judy Perly was not intentionally attempting to self brand herself, but instead was trying to promote her restaurant using vine. Judy Perly unconventionally achieved Alice Markwick's criteria of self branding by creating an authentic self and an image in which viewers see you as REAL and OPEN with your viewers. Her little makeup, unflattering angle and piece of food lingering on her face, along with her unique accent seemed to make viewers adore her. In Fuchs, "Social media and Productive labour" he discusses that Marx distinguished the workplace and social realms to be different, but social media has instead blurred the boundaries of this relationship. Our obligation to network online had be a priority, utilizing the internet as a institution has proven successful for many businesses. This has become very true for Perly, as her work and social activities have become synonymous with the use of vine. However, Mark Andrejevic in his article, "Estranged Free Labour" discusses that our tendency to use social media and the online infrastructure for socialization is problematic. He explains that we do not have control over our creativity on the internet because we often cannot control how our content is used. This is evident due to the numerous "trolls", parodies and "gifs" created of this single vine Perly created. Unfortunately for Perly, this vine success did not impact her business success in a financially positive way, but her own self brand has become known by millions.
How can it be problematic for people to lose control over their creative on the internet? Do you think there are more benefits or losses in publishing your content via the internet/social media?
Read the Buzzfeed article here
Read the Buzzfeed article here
Posting anything online is always a risk, no matter how unlikely we might think it is to go viral. While it may have benefitted Perly in some respects (despite the parodies and lack of financial gain), there are plenty of documented cases where posting something online has resulted terribly for others, such as examples of racist tweets getting people fired. However, as we've discussed previously in class, in the Information Age it's important to have an online presence so employers feel like they know who they're hiring as social media profiles now act like a resume. It's definitely becoming increasingly obvious that it's important to monitor what we post online, as the risks are real and our content is readily accessible to anyone who wants it.
ReplyDeleteI think that its a double sided sword for sure! On one hand, going viral could be like millions of dollars in unpaid marketing and advertising. On the other hand, perhaps going viral isn't always as great as one might think. If you go viral, tons of people have access and copies of the content you have put up. This is detrimental if you ever decide that you want to remove your video or take down your content- you could never full scrape out all of the layers of duplication that exit across hundreds of platforms. I also think that since you do not have rights to the content in the first place (i.e. if you post on Facebook then you do not technically own the viral content) if you do go viral, it complicates the situation further. For example: the content could be removed at any time without your permission and your biggest success could be lost in seconds. Or, the more people see something, the higher of a chance you have of it getting reported for various reasons, which again, would result in the loss of your success without your discretion.
ReplyDeleteI think that of course there are positive and negative sides to going viral. I personally know of someone whose photo became a viral meme and she had to delete all of her social media accounts because of it. The fact that your image is being used and reproduced without your permission or credit reminds me of the concept of estranged free labour. People are not getting paid for this types of virality most of the time and are often caught unaware when the image or video does go viral. On the other hand many people are able to capitalize on their viral content and use it to their advantage.
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