Amateur, Autonomous, and Collaborative: Myths of Aspiring Female Cultural Producers in Web 2.0

AbstractDiscourses of democratization, authenticity, and collaboration have become increasingly salient in the web 2.0 era of amateur content creation and distribution. However, these narratives sit uneasily with strategic, individualized self-branding practices undertaken by cultural workers in an unstable and precarious economy. This article uses the case of fashion blogging to explore the extent to which these contradictions get reconciled through three interrelated myths: amateurism, creative autonomy, and collaboration. The strategic deployment of such myths, I argue, effectively conceals the very real ways that digitally enabled forms of creative production emulate traditional industry structures and logics. Indeed, far from being authentic, autonomous, and collaborative, the organization of fashion blogging is increasingly hierarchical, market-driven, and self-promotional. I close by suggesting how fashion blogging and other forms of gendered 3. social media production may be understood as aspirational labor, a term which highlights the potential for these activities to provide social and economic capital while keeping female content creators fully immersed in the consumer culture.Keywords: Cultural ProductionGenderFashion BloggingParticipatory CultureDigital Labor Notes1 Beginning with the site's launch in September 2007 and up through September 2012, I collected a full month's articles and comments (responses) for seventeen months, which were selectively sampled to account for variations in the seasonal fashion calendar.2 Of course, street-style photography (capturing the looks of "real" people on the street) and blogs that focus on thrift-store fashions are noteworthy exceptions to this argument for they do not require funding for the content of the photography.