![]() Social media is thus undergirded by the neoliberal values of the Northern San Francisco tech scene. This self requires constant self-surveillance and monitoring and has real emotional affects, which constitute immaterial emotional labor. These self-presentation strategies involve the creation of an edited self that can be safely viewed by a networked audience consisting of friends, family members, and co-workers. Self-branding is the strategic creation of identity to be promoted and sold for enterprise purposes, promoted by self-help gurus and career strategists. In a group of lifestreamers, the digital instantiation of personal information through social media creates a rich backdrop of social information to be scrutinized. Lifestreaming is the process of tracking and digitizing personal information and broadcasting it to a networked audience, creating a digital portrait of one's actions and thoughts. Micro-celebrity involves creating a persona, performing intimate connections to create the illusion of closeness, acknowledging an audience and viewing them as fans, and using strategic reveal of information to maintain interest. ![]() Based on fieldwork in the San Francisco technology scene from 2006-2009, I identify and describe these status-seeking techniques, how they are experienced, and their implications. Drawing from discourses of celebrity, branding, and public relations, I describe three self-presentation strategies people adopt within social media applications to gain status, attention and visibility. These status-seeking techniques constitute technologies of subjectivity which encourage people to apply free-market principles to the organization of social life. I argue that Web 2.0 originated in the Northern California technology community, influenced both by counter-cultural movements which positioned new media as a solution to structural deficits of government, business, and mass culture, and the Silicon Valley tradition of entrepreneurial capitalism used as a model for neoliberal development world-wide. ![]() This dissertation examines three status-seeking techniques enabled by social media-micro-celebrity, self-branding, and life-streaming-to provide an alternate view. When social media technologies, or "Web 2.0," emerged, scholars and technologists hailed them as a new era of participatory, egalitarian culture.
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