The excitement around social media and the immense wealth of young technologists glamorized entrepreneurs as the rock stars of twenty-first-century capitalism. Technology workers, media, and businesspeople valorized Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ev Williams as visionary leaders. Prestigious universities launched entrepreneurship programs, cities from New York to Waterloo invested significant public money into encouraging technology startups, and incubators popped up to nurture potential young entrepreneurs. Indeed, 77 percent of fifthto twelfth-graders stated in a 2011 Gallup poll that they wished to own their own business. Entrepreneurs were thought to embody bravery, gumption, self-promotion, and creativity, the predictors of contemporary success. Indeed, the ideal of entrepreneurship expanded beyond the technology industry into other aspects of life, including our most personal understandings of selfhood, relationships, and the body.

I hypothesized that studying the status structure of this community—the people who built virtually all the popular social media applications of the time—would reveal a great deal about how status was built into Web 2.0, and thus illuminate how popular social software may promote inequality rather than counter it.

For neoliberal market policies to operate properly, people must adopt actions, ways of thinking, and discourses that are congruent with neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, or the infiltration of market logic into everyday social relations, requires a willing subject and is far more effective when consensual and dispersed through micro-interactions than when imposed from the top down. This book argues that Web 2.0 models ideal neoliberal selves, and rewards those who adopt such subjectivities.

In this book, I treat Web 2.0 both as a historical moment and an ongoing discourse—one that combines technological progressivism (technology always makes things better) and technological determinism (technology determines social effects). The result is a set of characters, mythologies, and actions drawn from familiar American themes, like the rags-to-riches entrepreneur, and repositioned within startup culture.

While the term Web 2.0 seems dated, many of its guiding principles are more important today than they were in 2005. Others have virtually disappeared. Web 2.0 celebrated developments like open-source software and "interoperability," the ability to port data from one site to another. These ideals seem quaint in the context of closed networks like Facebook, proprietary formats like the Apple App Store, and highly regulated environments like mobile carriers. Even sites like Twitter, which once encouraged third-party development, now limit access to their data. But entrepreneurship, along with self-presentation techniques like micro-celebrity, self-quantification, and self-promotion, are more salient today than they were in the mid-2000s.

"Web 2.0" is also a kind of social, economic, technological, and intellectual "imaginary" in Benedict Anderson's sense of an "imagined community." It describes and opens up for consideration a world in which technology creates greater cultural participation, where creativity and control are disseminated throughout the population rather than concentrated in the hands of a few large corporations. Web 2.0 suggests that technology can be used to bring about positive political changes and new relationships between citizens and governments, individuals and movements, and customers and businesses. It also articulates a world of wealth in which regular people, without Ivy League educations or family connections, can use the tools of web and application development to become very rich. In addition, it allows one to imagine a work environment unfettered by hierarchy or boredom. These ideals provide a way to make sense of a rapidly changing technological and economic landscape.

Social media is intrinsically focused on individuals—the "profile" being the key unit of Web 2.0—who produce and consume content. Thus this book deals with self-presentation strategies. Individuals tend to adopt a neoliberal subjectivity that applies market principles to how they think about themselves, interact with others, and display their identity. People present themselves online based on a host of factors including their physical environment; social context; race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and economic background; the availability of technical infrastructure; the technical affordances of different applications; and the norms of those with whom they interact online. But the organizing principles of Web 2.0 technologies are deeply influenced by the context in which they were created: the venture-backed startup scene of San Francisco.

Around this industry has grown up a lively community of social media enthusiasts who socialize in person and online. This “tech scene” is comprised of people working at venture-backed technology startups, employees at big companies like Google, freelancers, social media “gurus,” engineers, academics, fanboys, and designers, many of whom move to San Francisco to participate in the community.

For the most part, this project is more a traditional ethnography than a “digital” or “virtual” one, since I myself witnessed most of the anecdotes and descriptions in this book. But the firm division between “online” and “offline” is immensely complicated in places like San Francisco with high rates of technology use.

I chose to investigate status in the tech scene so that I could analyze inequality from a perspective that incorporated more than any singular point of view, such as class, race, gender, or sexuality. As I delved into modern conceptions of status, I found that social media's broadcasting ability has transformed social status, encouraging people to prioritize attention and visibility. Social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube teach users strategies and practices to achieve “micro-celebrity”; these strategies combine the entrepreneurialism fetishized by techies and businesspeople with marketing and advertising techniques drawn from commercials and celebrity culture. Social media has brought the attention economy into the everyday lives and relationships of millions of people worldwide, and popular ized attention-getting techniques like self-branding and lifestreaming. To provide an example of just how far this has gone, I recently conducted a study with Nicole Ellison that found that people who maintain Facebook pages memorializing deceased individuals brag about the number of “Likes” they have received.

Borrowing from the French theorist Michel Foucault, I argue that these techniques constitute technologies of subjectivity; that is, social media has become a way that people govern themselves. Moreover, this self-governance ties into modern neoliberal market capitalism. The self-presentation techniques so valued by technology workers are intimately connected to the tech industry's strong faith in deregulated capitalism and entrepreneurship.

Neoliberalism describes an economic philosophy that privileges the unfettered functioning of the free market. Neoliberal policies advocate corporate deregulation, privatization, competition, entrepreneurialism, and open markets to achieve both financial success and individual self-actualization. According to neoliberal ideologies, the logic of the market can be used both to understand human behavior and to regulate it. Stemming from the economic philosophies of Chicago school economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, neoliberal economics came to prominence in the 1980s under politicians like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and later, Bill Clinton, all of whom advocated globalization and minimal government regulation.

So I use “neoliberalism” to indicate a form of governmentality, specifically the theory that the free market has become an or ga niz ing principle of society. Governmentality, as defined by Foucault, includes “the totality of practices, by which one can constitute, define, organize, [and] instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have in regard to each other.” In other words, governmentality is a way to govern people, a technique that determines the strategies available for people to use in interpersonal relationships and self-expression. Political power becomes intertwined with our ideals of our selves, and the very idea of what it means to be human. This governance takes place through the creation and popularization of technologies that encourage people to regulate their own behavior along business ideals. In the early twentieth century, the technology of public schooling was designed to regulate children to work in factories: children were trained to respond to bells, walk in lines, and perform repetitive tasks. This book argues that Web 2.0 technologies function similarly, teaching their users to be good corporate citizens in the postindustrial, post-union world by harnessing marketing techniques to boost attention and visibility.

In the past forty years, unionized industrial capitalism has declined in the United States and the Western world at large. The rise of neoliberalism is concurrent with a shift from factory and agricultural labor to service work, such as retail, customer ser vice, and fast food. While in 1955 a significant 28 percent of the workforce was unionized, in 2011 only 11 percent of Americans held union jobs. Real wages have stagnated since the 1980s. Large corporations have moved many manufacturing jobs overseas, and replaced other positions with automated machinery. In this environment, a worker trained for repetitive tasks, manual labor, and Pavlovian-style responses is at a disadvantage. A different set of skills is needed to succeed in a neoliberal environment, both as a worker and consumer.

Neoliberalism contains a discursively embedded ideal subject. In an uncertain economic climate, successful workers must be active, entrepreneurial risk-takers. Given corporate deregulation and the de-emphasis on government-provided social services, neoliberal citizens should be self-sufficient and responsible. The rapid pace of information technology and global labor requires a flexible workforce that learns quickly. An effective neoliberal subject attends to fashions, is focused on self-improvement, and purchases goods and ser vices to achieve “self-realization.” He or she is comfortable integrating market logics into many aspects of life, including education, parenting, and relationships. In other words, the ideal neoliberal citizen is an entrepreneur.

This ideal subject appears in many locations. She is present in makeover shows like What Not to Wear and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which contrast an undesirable “before” with a consumer-friendly “after.” He can be seen in reality television, which presents individuals as products (celebrities) and normalizes corporate and government surveillance. And she is apparent in Web 2.0 technologies, which idealize and reward a particular persona: highly visible, entrepreneurial, and self-configured to be watched and consumed by others. These technologies make it possible for the neoliberal subject to come into being through individual self-regulation, rather than through top-down governance.

Foucault’s concept of “technology of the self” refers to anything that helps people alter themselves to best fit an ideal, including therapy, plastic surgery, and self-help books. These technologies of the self intrinsically demonstrate how to be a proper modern person, be it one who is centered, thin, pretty, or productive. Since these ideals collude with the dominant political perspective, “technologies of the self” also function as a mode of governance, or governmentality. Rather than regulating people to fit into an ideal directly, technologies of subjectivity result in self-regulation. … Foucault argued that neoliberalism places homo economicus at the center of politics, promoting a model of people as rational, competitive, self-interested subjects rather than civic-minded citizens. This “subjectivity,” or way of thinking about the self, is furthered by media and discourse, and is achieved through technologies of the self. … People thus regulate and modify themselves along neoliberal principles to receive these benefits.

Web 2.0 is a neoliberal technology of subjectivity that teaches users how to succeed in postmodern American consumer capitalism. Social media not only demonstrates the lessons of white-collar business success by rewarding flexibility, entrepreneurialism, and risk-taking; it also provides a blueprint of how to prosper in a society where status is predicated on the cultural logic of celebrity, according to which the highest value is given to mediation, visibility, and attention. That is, the technical affordances of social media reward with higher social status the use of behaviors and self-presentation strategies that make people look.

While this book is quite SFW, NSFW reflects how business norms affect technology workers' self-presentation strategies. An online self-presentation must quite literally be "safe for work" to accrue status and benefit its creator. Whether this entails promoting one's image as a company would promote a brand or celebrity, or adhering to a single verifiable identity so that status can persist across sites, people follow online norms that will increase their status. But what is high status in social media is often that which benefits technology companies and sustains neoliberal discourse. A verifiable identity makes it possible to leverage status across websites, but it also makes it simple to track people as they move around the web. A strong self-brand is a self-regulating mechanism that functions as a response to economic uncertainties. And while the social information created and shared through social media strengthens social ties, it does so in a limited way. "Authenticity" and "being yourself," advice that is emphasized over and over again in social media discourse, have become marketing strategies that encourage instrumental emotional labor. For all of these reasons, social media has come to promote an individualistic, competitive notion of identity that prioritizes individual status-seeking over collective action or openness.

The social norms of the tech scene are, in many ways, the social context of social media. Many of the loudest voices in public discourse around technology belong to this group: they appear on television and radio to discuss new technology, meet at South by Southwest and Foo Camp, write op-eds and bestselling nonfiction books, and read each other's blogs. The whirlwind of hype around social media, both positive and negative, comes from the people most acquainted with these technologies, with the most to gain from their use. It is also the people who create Web 2.0 technologies who share these norms and values. While social media is used in a dizzying variety of ways around the world, many of the presumptions about use and users follow from Silicon Valley and San Francisco culture. This book sheds some light on these taken-for-granted assumptions. Understanding the presumptions and discursive notions of self, other, friendships, and status promoted within the technology scene helps us to uncover some larger notions embedded in social media applications themselves, even if users do not receive or act on these notions in the same way that the technology scene does.

The leaders in this culture are the same people that technology discourse has celebrated for fifty years: young, white, rich men. The communicative infrastructure of the Valley rewards quantifiable metrics, like venture capital raised, number of Twitter followers, company valuation, employee number, and stock options. While the technology scene couches this hierarchy in arguments about "meritocracy" that are identical to those used by Web 2.0 celebrants, those deemed successful at social media usually fit into a narrow mold, and, as we will see, those who don't are criticized. The techniques that are required to achieve status in the tech scene do not celebrate, for instance, outspoken women, discussion of race in technology, or openly gay entrepreneurs. To get the kind and amount of attention that is so valued in the tech industry, it is best to fit a limited set of social norms.

When I started this project in July 2007, the economy was vastly different than it is now. Like the dot-com boom before it, Web 2.0 was hyped as a revolutionary schism with the past that would transform the world for the better. Those claims are heard less frequently today. People who spoke lovingly of a new age of participation and equality facilitated by Web 2.0 have begun to contribute to nuanced critiques of social software, critiques that involve visual culture analysis, the commercial contexts of user interaction, and larger cultural impacts. (Even Facebook's IPO did not turn out to be as lucrative as promised.) This project was conceived as a response to a celebratory rhetoric that has, to a certain extent, diminished.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web … not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

The political arm of Web 2.0, such as it is, is focused on net neutrality, copyright reform, peer-to-peer advocacy, and government reform; Larry Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons and the Free Culture movement, launched “Change Congress,” a campaign against government corruption and the influence of special interests in the Senate, with Howard Dean’s former campaign manager Joe Trippi. Cory Doctorow, the science-fiction writer and co-author of the popular blog Boing Boing, moonlights as a copyright activist whose scope includes proprietary technologies of all kinds, from genetically engineered seeds that last only a season to printer cartridges that automatically stop working after a certain period of time.

These technologies purportedly foretold freedom from traditional media sources, or “Big Media.” They promised the democratization of celebrity and entertainment, new forms of activism, and the potential for open, transparent information of all kinds. Web 2.0 celebrated the adoption of social technologies as a precursor to a better, freer society, and framed the collection and sharing of information as the bedrock of revolution. Any institution that prevented people from accessing information and using cultural products as raw materials for creativity became an obstacle to overcome, through collective action if necessary.

These beliefs, which draw heavily from hacker and free and open-source software (FOSS) development, are on their face antithetical to the libertarian, free-market ethos of entrepreneurial capitalism that also characterizes Web 2.0.

The tech scene assigned the highest status to venture-backed startups: capitalism was considered an agent of political change rather than something to be questioned. The web made possible genuinely innovative and potentially disruptive cultural products, but the San Francisco tech scene more often focused on the wealth and fame accrued by the founders of successful companies like Twitter, Digg, and Facebook (replace with “Instagram, Pinterest, and Quora,” or whatever startups are in fashion as you read this). Even as the mainstream media celebrated the presumed upheaval of the establishment, they made cover stars of tech founders and newly minted social media millionaires like Digg’s Kevin Rose, Twitter’s Ev Williams, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

These developments seemed doubly exciting because popular wisdom had all but written off the web after the 2001 dot-com crash. Investors and journalists claimed that people would never again pay for online content, that Amazon was the victor in the e-commerce wars, and that money, funding, and attention had left the internet, possibly for good. Web 2.0 shone a spotlight back on the young entrepreneurs and "thought leaders" of Silicon Valley. In the process, it brought utopianism back to the front lines and created new investments and personal fortunes.

While the Californian Ideology is still widespread in Silicon Valley, the Bay Area’s strong countercultural influence has also, and in equal measure, shaped the contemporary technology scene. Web 2.0 ideology is the child of both Silicon Valley entrepreneurial capitalism and activist subcultures like independent publishing, anti-globalization activism, Burning Man, cyberdelic rave culture, and free and open-source software. These countercultural movements can be hard to detangle. Many anti-corporate activists believed that the consolidation of media companies during the Reagan and Clinton eras created a homogenized, profit-led mass media, resulting in toothless journalism that lacked the muscle to check corporate or government power. During the early web era, dot-com workers built personal homepages in their free time to provide an alternative to mainstream entertainment. In the Web 2.0 age, blogs and Twitter facilitated "citizen journalism," a bottom-up form of media that was thought to be able to compensate for the shortcomings of mainstream media. Web 2.0 situated itself in allegiance with the countercultural critique of mainstream media, but positioned social technology, rather than protest or political participation, as the solution. The preexisting affinity between West Coast anti-establishment activism and the homebrew ethos of technology culture created a fertile environment for these ideologies to intermingle. This combination of radical activism and business culture created a strain of idealistic techno-determinism that, rather than rejecting mainstream capitalism, embraces it.

What do I mean by the "discourse" of Web 2.0? I mean that when everyday people, popular media, and scholars discuss Web 2.0, they often abstract real events, technologies, and people into an all-encompassing metanarrative. Talk about Web 2.0 is a part of social life in the tech community, and is itself reflected in social media, blog posts, popular books, and presentations. These texts have far-reaching effects on how people think about themselves and their actions, on which technologies are attended to and which are ignored, and on how financial resources circulate.

Web 2.0 discourse demonstrates what is called "digital exceptionalism," the idea that the internet is different from other forms of communication and therefore not bound by the same legal and market forces. … During the mid-1990s, "cyberspace" was frequently conceptualized as a sphere separate from daily life. This "disembodiment hypothesis" suggested that internet communication freed people from their earthly bodies, allowing for pure communication unfettered from discrimination. Theorists like Sherry Turkle and Sandy Stone hypothesized that digital communication could transcend structural power relations like sexism and racism. (Research instead indicated that internet communication reflects the power relations of the people communicating.)

Web 2.0 narratives also frequently assume that simply introducing social technology to a community will result in greater participation and democracy, while disrupting those institutions and industries that do not adapt. The idea that the adoption of technology causes behavioral changes and social effects, regardless of context, is false. Historical analyses of science and technology show that this technological determinism is a fiction, because political, economic, and social differences in places and times affect the deployment and use of technology. The printing press and the Gutenberg Bible did not cause the Protestant Reformation. To say so would ignore factors such as the rise of anti-clericalism, the breakdown of feudalism, the rise of urbanism and the merchant class, and the Renaissance. Likewise, when we introduce new technologies into different social settings, they find different uses. American teenagers, Japanese teenagers, West African entrepreneurs, and Egyptian activists, for instance, demonstrate different patterns of mobile phone use, and understand the use of technology differently.

To unravel the complex assumptions within Web 2.0 ideology, it is necessary to understand its origins. The term began as a marketing ploy to differentiate a new crop of tech companies from their failed dot-com counterparts. Web 2.0 is firmly grounded in a history of labor that emphasizes creative capitalism, personal fulfillment through work, and entrepreneurialism. These traditions combined with grassroots initiatives to engender a Web 2.0 “scene” of San Francisco technology workers. This scene was predominantly young, white, and male, and favored developers who were simultaneously committed to venture-backed startups and core Web 2.0 principles like openness and transparency. That is, Web 2.0 emerged from a geographically rooted history, dragging its baggage into a new era. Social media thus has to be understood as a continuation of preexisting cultural forces rather than as deterministically transformative.

Web 2.0 discourse positioned the entrepreneur as the mythic hero and venture-backed startups as the epitome of high status. In other words, social media positioned capitalism to be an agent of social change without challenging underlying inequalities. And while many of the preceding social movements were diverse, Web 2.0 was primarily white, male, and technologically determinist. Web 2.0 thus selectively drew from elements of San Franciscan counterculture while embracing Silicon Valley's technologically fueled economic success.

This ethic is not espoused by all hackers, who love to debate and argue the meaning of their own actions. But taking the hacker ethic as an ideal, intrinsic within it is the idea that information is supposed to benefit everyone. This concept of freely circulating information was especially valuable to those collaborating on iterative hardware and software improvements in the early days, when there was no possibility of proprietary profit.

The first microcomputer available for home use, the Altair 8800, illustrates how this hacker ethic influenced the development of new technologies. It appeared on the cover of Popular Mechanics in 1975, and unlike today’s home computers, came as a bundle of circuit boards and transistors that had to be soldered together by hand. The company manufacturing the hardware, MITS, could barely keep up with the demand and worked directly with hardware hackers to improve the product, giving out data sheets on the chips and encouraging hobbyists to write code for the machine and build devices like input-output boards and joysticks. In 1976, two college students surmised that MITS would need some sort of operating system; they called the company and proposed a version of BASIC for the Altair. BASIC is a programming language appropriate for a computer like the Altair, which doesn’t have a lot of storage space. One of the students hacked a version of BASIC together in eight weeks. The other flew to Albuquerque to pitch it to MITS, who bought it. The two students were Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who promptly quit school to found Microsoft.

Free culture advocates assert that people should be able to critically comment on mainstream culture, employ cultural raw material for their own uses, and create “transformative works” such as fan fiction or mash-ups without fear of litigation or punitive damages from the entertainment industry.

Benkler argued that the internet allowed for a shift from an “industrial information economy” to a “networked information economy” focused on non-market, individual, decentralized production using nonproprietary strategies.

The ideals of the hacker culture are the foundations of internet culture. Dissatisfaction with mainstream culture, however, was felt deeply by people other than hackers.

In 1995, John Katz wrote in Wired magazine that “net culture, as it happens, is an even greater medium for individual expression than the pamphlets cranked by hand presses in colonial America.” Katz wasn’t referring to blogs; the term “weblog” was coined two years later. He wasn’t referring to social network sites or online newspapers. Instead, he was talking about a sprawling network of textual internet communication that included Usenet, listservs, and personal homepages, which existed years before the dot-com boom, and which were often described using the familiar rhetoric of self-expression, participation, and demo cratization. This rich digital culture gave rise to personal homepages and in de pen dent e-zines, online magazines positioned as alternatives to mainstream media.

Zines are photocopied magazines written by individuals and passed around by mail and through in de pen dent bookstores. Zines originated in science fiction fandom, but by the 1990s ran the gamut from obscure topics like The Brady Bunch to autobiographical accounts of personal experiences. Zines are sold for small amounts of money or are exchanged through a barter system, and they often emphasize the futility of wage-slave labor and lower-middle-class existence.

In an era marked by the rapid centralization of corporate media, zines are in de pen dent and localized, coming out of cities, suburbs, and small towns across the USA, assembled on kitchen tables. They celebrate the everyperson in a world of celebrity, losers in a society that rewards the best and the brightest. Rejecting the corporate dream of an atomized population broken down into discrete and instrumental target markets, zine writers form networks and forge communities around diverse identities and interests. Employed within the grim new economy of ser vice, temporary, and “flexible” work, they redefine work, setting out their creative labor done on zines as a protest against the drudgery of working for another’s profit. And defining themselves against a society predicated on consumption, zinesters privilege the ethic of DIY, do-it-yourself: make your own culture and stop consuming that which is made for you.

Notably, many claims about zines—small, in de pen dent, self-expressive, user-created, alternatives to Big Media—are identical to those made about YouTube videos and blogs. Also notable is the strong political ethos that Duncombe highlights. While some zine writers overtly write about politics, the process of writing and distributing a zine itself requires certain elements that palpably reject corporate capitalism, like “borrowing” photocopies and computer time from an employer, corresponding with like-minded zinesters and fans through the mail, and utilizing a barter system.

Hackers also enthusiastically embraced zines, but from within the burgeoning personal computer culture rather than punk rock. “Textfiles,” plain text documents spread through dial-up bulletin boards, emerged as an indigenous online literature during the 1980s. Jason Scott, an internet historian, manages an online archive of textfiles. He writes that a textfile, or t-file, is an ASCII file “written to explain in detail an important new computer discovery, a great new concept, or an old piece of knowledge that needed to be passed on. It included stories, poems, songs, ramblings, and long treatises on theories that the writer couldn’t possibly have known.” Since longer files were more likely to be downloaded, textfile creators who wanted to increase their readership compiled multiple t-files into a single newsletter-like format, known as an “e-zine.”

Michelle Comstock, in her study of grrrl zines, sniffed that “unlike their print zine colleagues, [e-zine editors] seem more committed to making a name in the commercial end of technology as professional writers, Web designers, or computer technicians.”

For Junell, Webzine was a reaction to the “gold rush” of the dotcom era, which turned an “open, non-commercial medium of free expression” into “a huge, greedy strip mall.” Like zinesters, many in de pen dent web publishers saw themselves as taking a stand against homogenized corporate content, and as exercising their right to free speech as citizens of a democracy. E-zines were a way for dot-commers to express themselves creatively and celebrate the potential of the web, rather than working day jobs that were often boring and frustrating.

Both print and webzines had a significant feminist presence. Print zines spawned the Riot Grrrl feminist punk scene of the 1990s, and continue to be a significant part of the young feminist community.

Zines like Bamboo Girl and Slant, written by young women of color, provided an anti-imperialist analysis of whiteness in punk rock and Riot Grrrl, complicating the idea of a unified “zine culture.” This work was directly influenced by critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and feminist theory, and contributed sophisticated self-reflexivity and critique to young women’s understanding of feminism.

A collection of women's webzines also popped up in the mid-to late 1990s. Rather than competing with each other, the most successful of these sites formed alliances in "webrings" to promote each other's content. … These sites primarily focused on edgy, personal content, and were maintained on shoestring budgets by a handful of people. They combined the Riot Grrrl aesthetic of reclaimed girl culture like Hello Kitty and plastic barrettes with ironic 1950s clip art, which Michelle Comstock calls the "kitten-with-whip" look. … Women's webzines were inspired by a drive for self-expression and a frustration with the shallow content of women's magazines, rather than a more esoteric interest in the theoretical intricacies present in many print zines.

Mainstream women's sites like iVillage and Oxygen hired several webzine veterans to write and produce their content, probably due to their early adopter status and comfort with the web medium. Eventually, the early in de pen dent webzines petered out, or turned into blogs, and the most popular sites for women remained those about "online horoscopes, sex tips, celebrities and parenting advice." The anti-capitalist, multicultural perspectives disappeared entirely from mainstream women's sites.

The ethic of "doing it yourself," of learning from others without a profit motive, of self-expression, and of focusing on obscure interests and sharing personal experiences, became part of the creative fabric of Web 2.0 at the same time that it was depoliticized. The shift to content that was less likely to offend the mainstream culture was no accident.

While blogs can be a very empowering medium, there aren't many people out there capable of fully hosting their own blogs. Therefore, there is usually an Internet ser vice provider that has the power to pull the plug on something it deems offensive, be it because of politics, sex, religion, copyright, or anything else. It's also much more difficult for the average blogger to be truly anonymous than it is for a zinester. Being able to violate copyright and readers' ethics or sensibilities [has its] good and bad points. Part of what makes zines what they are and what makes them so great is the total freedom not afforded to, but taken by the zinesters.

Blogs and e-zines lacked the anti-capitalist ethos and rhetoric around “selling out” that characterized punk and zine culture. As Freeman points out, hosting a blog on a commercial server makes one vulnerable to the whims of a ser vice provider. Moreover, the explicit feminist ethos found in abundance in paper and webzine culture is a marginal part of blog culture, and almost entirely absent from Web 2.0. (The most popular women’s blogs are about food, fashion, or parenting, while the “feminist blogosphere” focuses almost entirely on traditional politics and feminist theory.) Although zines and DIY culture celebrated the individual and rejected Big Media, they did so within a critique of labor and the ser vice industry. Not so with Web 2.0.

The anti-corporate movement protested the rise of multinational corporations, their environmental impact, the homogenization of mass culture, media consolidation, and the pervasiveness of advertising. These criticisms were brought to popular attention in Naomi Klein’s No Logo, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, the films The Corporation and Super Size Me, and the magazines Adbusters, Stay Free! and The Baffler. Anti-corporate activists advocated ethical consumption, supporting small businesses, and boycotting major multinational corporations, and they organized events like “Buy Nothing Day” and “Turn Off Your TV Week.” These organizations used networked, distributed structures and technologies to create nonoppressive collaborative strategies and principles. Jeff Juris writes that anti-globalization practices enact a “dual politics” by “intervening within dominant publics while generating decentralized network forms that prefigure the utopian worlds they are struggling to create.” Like open-source software, the movements themselves are instantiations of political principles.

The WTO protesters adopted techniques from activist history, such as affinity groups—small groups of activists with personal ties networked together in a rhizome-like structure for collective action—which have been used by anarchists since the Spanish Civil War.

Seattle was a major center for dot-com activity and is the home of multinational technology corporations Microsoft, Nintendo, and Amazon.com, as well as a top-ten computer science school, the University of Washington. Just as in San Francisco, this technology culture influenced the choices of activist groups.

Pickard writes, “In the case of Indymedia, the technology and institutional structure are mutually constitutive. Undoing one would disable the other … the radical openness of Indymedia’s technology is predicated on a radical demo cratic institutional structure; this structure could not exist without internet communications, especially on the global network level.”

That anyone could use the IMC newswires to publish a news story was the IMC's challenge to corporate media coverage of radical politics. Participants in the WTO protests were disgusted by what they saw as sensational and inaccurate coverage of their activism, which they attributed to media consolidation. In 1996, the Telecommunications Act dissolved a number of laws that regulated the number of media outlets a company could own. The resulting mergers concentrated media ownership in six huge companies, including Disney and Viacom, that now control virtually all mainstream media. Scholars like Lance Bennett, Robert McChesney, and Eric Klinenberg have thoroughly documented the effects of media consolidation on the corporate news media. These include a decline in the coverage of foreign and local news, a reliance on mainstream sources, a decrease in minority viewpoints, a reduction in substantive educational content, an increase in cross-promotion and sponsor-driven content, and a pro-government, pro-capitalist bias. These problems were especially relevant during the post– September 11 Bush administration, when progressives criticized corporate media for cheerleading the war effort and for failing to investigate policies carefully or provide historical context for government decisions. In contrast, online publishing provided a platform for people with views outside the mainstream to voice opinions and practice amateur investigative journalism.

Blogs were heralded as the new frontier of this participatory journalism. During the beginning of the second Iraq War, “warblogging” spread “trustworthy alternative views concerning the objectives of the Bush Administration and Pentagon and the corporate media spin surrounding them.”

And in 2002, then-senator Trent Lott made a pro-segregationist remark at a birthday dinner for venerable former Dixiecrat senator Strom Thurmond. While it was largely ignored by the mainstream media, which treated it as a minor tidbit, it was picked up by two major liberal blogs: Talking Points Memo and Eschaton. A few days later, the New York Times began covering the story, and two weeks later, Lott stepped down. Blogs exemplified the FOSS maxim “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” though in this case, inadequate reporting by the mainstream media, not a computer programming “bug,” was what was being overcome by a helpful group of citizens.

In Republic.com, Cass Sunstein claimed that the blogosphere would result in “echo chambers” where people with similar political beliefs would talk only to each other, creating political isolationism. This proposition has been fiercely debated, with some scholars finding the ideological divide between right-and left-wing bloggers widening over time, and others observing the opposite effect.

Grassroots media activists positioned blogs and IMCs as an accessible way for everyone to participate in demo cratic journalism, but Indymedia found it difficult to separate itself from the norms of Big Media. It was tricky to find untrained contributors who could create coverage of the same quality as that provided by mainstream newspapers. The legitimacy of online journalism was often measured by whether or not Big Media picked up a story, as in the Lott case. Although blogs and in de pen dent media were positioned as an anti-institutional alternative, the realities of dealing with capitalist structures were more complex.

Hacker culture and various forms of in de pen dent publishing and activism upheld the belief that social technology could be a direct instantiation of political ideals and could succeed where established institutions had failed. One of the reasons "Web 2.0" was so discursively prevalent is that it appealed to multiple, disparate audiences. But rather than accepting the full radicalism of these ideals, Web 2.0 ideology was dampened in its transformative potential by Silicon Valley orthodoxy.

The term "Silicon Valley" was coined by Don Hoefler in Microelectronics News in 1971 to describe the prevalence of micro-electronics companies headquartered in the South Bay, including Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. Until the 1970s, this area was primarily agricultural, with only a few scattered radio machinists and engineers. But a massive boom in the production of semiconductors and other electronic components led to an international concentration of technical resources and infrastructure in the cities of Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose. This enormous expansion in microelectronics was due to an extensive history of defense contracts, the intellectual power of Palo Alto's Stanford University, and innovative manufacturing and business processes pioneered by the radio and machinist industries, including stock options and profit-sharing.

The political sensibility of Silicon Valley tends to be of a decidedly libertarian bent, espousing self-improvement, meritocracy, and “work-life balance.” Of course, what passes for libertarianism in Northern California is distinct from the conservative right-wing version. Silicon Valley libertarian beliefs are rooted in a strong belief that intelligence and drive are indicators of success, an almost mythological trust in entrepreneurialism, the “do it yourself” ethic, and an idealized view of the internet as utopian space—à la Castells’s layers of internet culture. Silicon Valley encourages a faith in technological solutions, and imagines that widespread adoption of computer technologies will lead to positive social change (in the case of Web 2.0, increased participation, democracy, and community). This almost contradictory combination of “technological determinism and libertarian individualism” is, as discussed earlier, what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron labeled the “Californian Ideology.”

Barbrook and Cameron claim that the demo cratic emancipation fantasized about by “hi-tech artisans” excludes the mostly nonwhite underclass who cannot afford computers and internet access. It is well known that the Silicon Valley culture depends on undocumented labor to build microchips, clean offices, and mow the lawns of technology workers relocated from Bangalore, Shanghai, Dublin, and Des Moines—even though these undocumented workers rarely appear in rapturous press descriptions of the area. The authors of The Silicon Valley of Dreams note that while one narrative of Silicon Valley focuses on wealth, egalitarianism, and brilliant ideas, the other describes “a place of considerable human suffering, preventable illness and premature death, the exploitation of thousands of workers, widespread ecological devastation, and increasing social inequality.”

Overwhelmingly, the Californian Ideology is neoliberal, meaning that it adheres to a political philosophy that advocates deregulated, free-market economic policies as a means to freedom and prosperity. Silicon Valley has become a model of neoliberal economic development and a fantasy about the possibilities of space. The success of the Californian Ideology has encouraged other governments to promote their own “siliconia” in the hope that it would offer a universal solution to localized problems; a Wikipedia page lists Silicon Gulf in the Philippines, Silicon Wadi in Israel, Silicon Saxony, Cwm Silicon in Wales, Silicon Beach, Silicon Corridor, Silicon Prairie, and so forth. The varying degrees of success of these other initiatives underscore the importance of geography and history to Silicon Valley’s own story.

Reality hackers, nuts, flakes, entrepreneurs, trippers, conmen, students, artists, mad engineers—Californians with the naïve belief that a) There is a Better Way and b) I Can Do It Myself. To put it in a clear gelatin capsule for you, I’d say that (a) and (b) are the two beliefs that underlie every single entry in the “Mondo 2000 User’s Guide.” The way that Big Business or The Pig does things is obviously not the best way; it’s intrusive, kludgy, unkind, and not at all what you really want … Now, thanks to high-tech and the breakdown of society, you’re free to turn your back on the way “they” do it, whatever it might be, and do it yourself.

Cyborganic’s central premise was that online and face-to-face interaction are mutually sustaining and can be used together to build uniquely robust communities. The project was to use computer-mediated communication, not to transcend geographical place, but to build a local, networked community. Those who led the project wanted to create such a community in their own lives. But they also wanted to demonstrate the possibilities of using technology in this way out of a sense that others, too, would benefit from Cyborganic’s example and its project to spread the gospel of networked, local community. The project was pursued as a business startup and though that enterprise provided the impetus and framework (both technical and imaginative) for the community, the two were symbiotic aspects of a whole that can only be understood holistically and within the context of the Web industry that emerged in San Francisco in the 1990s.

Steuer made a conscious decision to use the entrepreneurial culture of dot-com-era San Francisco to accomplish his goal of spreading the gospel of “networked, local community.” Steuer and Cool envisioned a multi-sited community: an online bulletin board, a hosting platform for personal publishing, and a cyber café that would teach classes and serve as a meeting place for like-minded web devotees. To this end, they wrote up a business plan, incorporated as Cyborganic Corporation, and sought funding. … Jenny Cool wrote the first Cyborganic manifesto in 1995, which concluded, “We must use [new technologies] to serve our own ends, not as ends in themselves, and we must work together to build a future we want, in our imaginations and in our lives.” The founders of Cyb-organic recognized that although internet technologies had immense potential, they were not intrinsically positive. Instead, improving community and connection required hard work.

In some ways, the project succeeded. The Cyborganic apartments on Ramona hosted weekly Thursday night dinners and became a central meeting space for up-and-coming digerati. Cool estimates that the extended Cyborganic community at the time comprised 100 to 150 people, with a disproportionately significant influence on San Francisco’s technology scene. Cyborganic members worked at Wired and its online offshoot HotWired; founded Organic.com, C|Net, ChickClick, and a variety of other startups; and contributed to high-profile open-source projects like Apache. Justin Hall of links.net, often cited as the first blogger, was a member.

Burning Man demonstrates a commitment to the same values that Web 2.0 idealizes, and allows technologists to affirm the validity, importance, and presence of these ideals in their lives. Just as Burning Man is a blueprint for creating a community that runs on gifts, bartering, and volunteerism, the rhetoric of Web 2.0 suggests that technology as a business can embody the same values.

Fred Turner argues that Burning Man provides a cultural infrastructure for new media labor, modeling commons-based peer production, gift economies, community participation, and the potential of “vocational ecstasy”: self-fulfillment through creative work and radical self-expression. Turner links the social structure of Burning Man to Google’s company culture, which emphasizes collaboration, a relatively flat corporate hierarchy, and the pursuit of individual passion projects through “20 percent time.” He maintains that for Bay Area technologists, Burning Man represents a week where the idealistic principles of new media production are brought to life, cementing the rich social networks that flexible labor models make necessary, and “work[ing] through the contradictions” of locating these ideals in a corporate setting.

While Google can create and maintain infrastructures like YouTube that facilitate commons-based peer production, ultimately it is responsible to its shareholders and cannot operate on an economy of gift exchange. The belief that creative expression through technical labor is the path to self-actualization often results in long hours at work and the integration of personal and corporate life.

And while in some ways Burning Man is a radical space, it is also primarily inhabited by the wealthy, white people who run the technology industry: further, the values of Burning Man have been transformed by the technical enterprise into business practices that justify unstable labor models and valorize neoliberalism.

Dot-commers emphasized the “five c’s”—content, commerce, community, context, and connectivity—and extolled the massive changes that the “New Economy” would bring about. The New Economy, a buzzword popularized in 1997 by a series of articles in BusinessWeek, referred to the massive changes that the technology industry would bring to the economic climate of the United States, specifically low unemployment rates, fast growth, low inflation, and increased productivity.

While there are several key differences between the type of companies involved in the dot-com boom and those dubbed Web 2.0, dot-com companies served as a template for the way that creative, technically savvy labor functioned in urban centers from the 1990s onward. The emphasis on self-actualization through work was drawn directly from boomtime philosophy. The philosophy of self-branding, or promoting oneself like a corporate entity, appeared during the boom, as did the lofty idealism and wild rhetoric of changing the world that permeated the time period.

The second major change concerned the working conditions under which new media professionals labored. Richard Florida’s influential The Rise of the Creative Class chronicled the increase in creative labor, “people in design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content.” New Economy rhetoric rejected the hierarchical, buttoned-down company or ga ni za tion of large, traditional business, which was derided as Dilbert-ish cubicle culture. Instead, dot-com companies were supposedly structured to indulge and reward skilled artisans by emphasizing self-actualization, creativity, and autonomy. Workers could wear what they wanted, show up at noon, play foosball and video games on break, pursue creative interests outside of work, freely voice their opinions and concerns, and collaborate with others in intellectually stimulating environments. Ross writes that “in such a workplace, the zeal of employees was more like a quest for personal and existential stimulation, closer in spirit to extreme sport or adventure travel than to the sobriety of the self-dependent man who saw himself as a pious and productive member of society.” Inculcating this passion in workers, particularly young workers willing to work sixty or even eighty hour weeks without overtime, was of course more advantageous to companies than to their employees.

While the dot-com bust seemingly decimated the San Francisco technology scene, it in fact only restructured it. The next iteration of Northern California technology excitement was precipitated by a strategic marketing ploy to leave “dot-com” behind and move forward. Web 2.0’s transformation from a buzzword to a scene was geographic; even post-boom, large numbers of people interested and inspired by technology remained in the Bay Area.

O'Reilly and Battelle chose "2.0," the language of "versioning," to describe their conference. They did so more to distance themselves from the failures of the dot-com boom than to describe a paradigm shift in technological innovation. Indeed, "the web as platform"—the vague explanation of the term used by O'Reilly and Battelle—did not describe a singular technological innovation, nor did it mark the beginning of "social software" or "social media." Paul Graham, an attendee and future founder of Y Combinator, an incubator for young entrepreneurs, wrote: "I don't think there was any deliberate plan to suggest there was a new version of the web. They just wanted to make the point that the web mattered again. It was a kind of semantic deficit spending: they knew new things were coming, and the "2.0" referred to whatever those might turn out to be." In fact, most of the technologies described as "Web 2.0" existed before the term was coined, including wikis, online journals, blogs, user-generated content, and online community.

“Web 2.0” represented a “reboot” back to the ideals of the early web, the “five c’s.” One of the reasons Web 2.0 was so successful is because it both revived and revitalized long-held techno-utopian beliefs held by dot-com survivors, activists, and old-school geeks, as well as presenting another opportunity for wealth generation. The appellation “2.0” suggested a return to the early web as an exciting space of creativity and innovation, rather than the crass, carpetbagger gold rush of the dot-com boom. From the start, Web 2.0 encompassed both financial and idealistic motivations for technological innovation.

While the mainstream media largely ignored the conference (even the San Francisco Chronicle dismissed it as an “online lovefest”), it was embraced by West Coast technologists. Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis live-blogged the conference, while venture capitalist Esther Dyson snapped photos and instantly posted them to Flickr, the photo-sharing site that served as a centerpiece to the conference.

The importance of conferences and social interactions to technologically mediated cultures has been well documented. From MIT's Model Railroad club and Stewart Brand's original hacker conference to today's free and open-source software “cons,” these events not only allow for face-to-face interactions between people who share common interests, but also create “scenes” of people who become friends, work together, and support each other. Despite near-constant discussion and chit-chat through the online communication tool du jour, it is often in-person socialization and collaboration that bring to bear the geographical importance of a scene.

The 2005 festival, for instance, featured keynotes from Malcolm Gladwell, Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox, and science-fiction author Bruce Sterling. For Web 2.0, “South By” represented what Burning Man did for an earlier generation of geeks. It helped to constitute a social world, providing an annual touchstone for people to reconnect and revive their passion for technology. It allowed hard-working geeks to blow off steam and eat barbeque in the sun while nattering about RSS feeds and trading business cards. SXSW could kickstart careers; Twitter broke into the mainstream during SXSW 2007 and Foursquare was launched there in 2009.

The year 2005 was also the first for two largely ad-hoc gatherings, SuperHappyDevHouse and BarCamp, which attracted social media enthusiasts primarily working at venture-backed startups. … Beale was using WordPress software and learned from Mullenweg's Flickr stream that Mullenweg had just relocated to the Bay Area and was hosting a meetup. Beale was eager to meet the man behind the software: “This is so hard to conceive of now but I'm like, 'Wow! I could actually meet the guy who made the script that I use for my blog.'”

“Bar” was a joke: “foo” and “bar” are both metasyntactic variables that programmers use for placeholders. A few weeks later, Çelik, King, Chris Messina, Andy Smith, Matt Mullenweg, and Eris Free met at Ritual Roasters to plan the first BarCamp, which was held six days later.

Scott Beale recalls the importance of BarCamp in bringing together key figures of Web 2.0, including Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington, two of the most influential Web 2.0 bloggers: “BarCamp is seminal. This is like the most important thing of all of this … Scoble came by, and he was really into it. It was actually the very first public demo of Flock and Pandora. It was a really big deal, those things coming out of it, and the funny thing that we always think about is Arrington was there. None of us knew him.”

The “camp” metaphor suggests rugged informality and collectiveness, a back-to-basics approach that contrasts with the modernity of technology. BarCamp is constructed as an authentic space where the ideals of collectivity can flourish without the infiltration of profit motives. The BarCamp format has proven immensely popular and has been used for hundreds of conferences worldwide; in 2009, there were more than 450 BarCamps in sixty-seven countries.

By 2006, the technology industry was bubbling over with enthusiasm for social-network-site success stories, YouTube celebrities, user-created content, and exciting young entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Kevin Rose of Digg. Fox bought MySpace for $770 million and Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. The enormous valuations of these companies made the financial aspects of interactive technology as attractive as they had been during the late 1990s.

While many of the first set of Web 2.0 companies failed, others succeeded spectacularly. The preferred term became "social media" and Northern California reemerged as a center for venture capital investment and enormous acquisitions. By 2012, even small companies like Instagram and OMGPOP were valued at millions, even billions, of dollars.

It's always that way, with new technology … the [people] who first get into, say, radio, love the medium for what it is. the second wave of [people] come because they sense a gold rush. it is the way of things. nobody will love the medium as much as the [people] who first found it, and invented it. you can sit around lamenting its demise, and drink cocktails and get misty-eyed about the golden age, but it's not coming back.

The ascendant tribe is composed of folks from the open culture / Creative Commons world, the Linux community, folks associated with the artificial intelligence approach to computer science, the Web 2.0 people, the anticontext file sharers and remashers, and a variety of others. Their capital is Silicon Valley, but they have power bases all over the world, wherever digital culture is being created. Their favorite blogs include Boing Boing, TechCrunch and Slashdot, and their embassy in the old country is Wired.

Every social group has a pecking order, and those higher on the ladder reap the benefits of respect, money, and freedom. Alain de Botton, in his book Status Anxiety, defines status as “one’s value and importance in the eyes of the world.” Status is what your peers think of you, whether they hold you in esteem or contempt, and the privileges that accord from this position. Status is a powerful tool that reveals the values and assumptions shared by a group; it shows power dynamics and the limits of egalitarian ideals. Yet what’s considered high status differs from context to context: an individual can have high status in one context and low status in another. The TechCrunch employee believed that his job granted him high status, but this meant nothing to the bouncer, a hired hand who was not a member of the tech community and thus did not share this opinion. I was virtually unknown in the scene, but my roommate was popular and well connected. In this case, the social capital accrued by being “in the know” garnered more weight than self-important blustering.

A survey of Wikipedia participants, for instance, found that only 13 percent of contributors and editors are women. Wikipedia researcher Joseph Reagle argues that the values of openness and transparency found in hacker and free and open-source software culture may actually serve to limit women’s involvement by giving priority to small groups of argumentative or misogynistic men while labeling concerns about sexism as “censorship.” That is, although the culture pays lip service to “an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” this “anyone” is circumscribed by the status hierarchy of the community.

Given that communities without built-in status signals create them anyway, the prevalence of online status hierarchies calls into question the mid-2000s belief that sites like Wikipedia and You-Tube demonstrate open and democratic online participation. In reality, a close examination of practically any online group will reveal tightly wound status hierarchies that often serve to limit participation, sometimes by following timeworn lines of power.

Reputation and trust, which many others have written about, are not the same as status. Online reputation and trust both refer to systemized ranking systems, or slightly more ineffable qualities that are roughly “what people say about you online” and “whether this website will steal your money.” Status incorporates and reveals more—the contextual nature of status means that a person’s status can ebb and flow not only throughout their life, but also in the course of a day, making it impossible to pin down with a single metric. Status is reflected in a wide range of characteristics, from personality type to accent to fashion, but the same trait can signal different levels of status depending on the context. For example, within a group of friends, having a deep knowledge of Star Trek may be deeply admired. But in the broader, popularity-driven world of high school, that knowledge can brand one as a nerd. Status can either be ascribed or achieved, in that it can encompass characteristics like gender and race as well as accomplishments, like education or material possessions. Ascribed status comes from what one is recognized to inherently have, whereas achieved status comes from what one is recognized as having done. For instance, “ascribed” status might include one’s family owning a cabin in the popular ski destination of Lake Tahoe, whereas speaking at an exclusive conference is an accomplishment that grants “achieved” status.

The technology scene outwardly values openness, transparency, and creativity, maintaining a vestige of meritocracy. But Silicon Valley has long prioritized entrepreneurship, technical knowledge, and wealth. The mixture of these two sets of ideals peculiar to Web 2.0 creates a climate in which participating in the culture of techno-business, sharing personal information online, and commanding and maintaining a large audience have become modern status symbols. The highest status is still wrapped up in engineering culture and technology-fueled wealth, but the popularity of social media has given rise to an equivalent hierarchy based on attention and visibility. Since this shared set of values and beliefs is the context that fuels the creation of social software, unpacking it helps us to understand the assumptions that technology creators make about “users” and “social behavior.”

The technology scene ascribes high value to wealth, risk-taking, entrepreneurship, visibility, access to others, technical know-how, and intelligence. The conflicts between some of these status symbols and practices reveal the inherent tension in Web 2.0 culture. For instance, it’s cool to be rich, but not in a flashy way, only in a way appropriate to a smart, idealistic rich person. The idealism of Web 2.0’s countercultural roots, the belief in meritocracy embedded in engineering culture, and the neoliberal ethic of work-life integration and relentless self-marketing have created a strange mishmash of wealth and privilege framed as pious self-improvement, all taking place in public.

The technology scene has a well understood and clear social hierarchy, notwithstanding proclamations of its inclusiveness or openness. Despite frequent claims by technologists that the scene was egalitarian, during my period of study insiders were happy to describe divisions in great detail. Blogger and marketing entrepreneur Tara Hunt, for example, explained her perceptions of the community to me this way: the “lower rungs of the hierarchy,” she said, are “those who are talking about it.” These are the people who follow the happenings of the community and network in hopes that their plans for a startup might one day come true. Hunt then described the “middle class” as those who are “working on it”—actually creating a startup. (Note her use of “on it” as a universally understood synonym for “founding a startup,” indicating a shared knowledge and priorities.) The lowest in that stratum are those “just doing it for money” or pursuing projects with dubious prospects for success; those who are working on something promising lead that class. “The top, the upper crust, are the people that have done it,” Hunt said. “They had a company people loved. They sold it. They are now doing whatever the hell they please.”

Talking, working, doing—Hunt describes a hierarchy in which the majority of people milling around at technology events exchanging business cards are at the bottom, while successful, wealthy entrepreneurs are at the top. What's clear in her description is that status level is conferred through one's position in the business of technology. Work is conflated with value, morality, personality, and character.

But entrepreneurship represents the lauded qualities of independence and risk-taking, not to mention the possibility of creating what some refer to as "fuck you money"—the type of money where, if you have it, you don't have to do anything you don't want to, ever again.

As Jeremy Stop-pelman, the founder of Yelp, said, "In 2005, it was not necessarily cool to have a start-up. It was cooler to work for a great company or have a job that was layoff free. And so now, the pendulum [has] shifted back to you're uncool unless you're a founder of a company." Being "safe" isn't cool, and brands you as a fuddy-duddy tied down to someone else's dream. If you are a rank-and-file employee, it is better to be one at a hot startup than a large company; there's more risk, but more chance of getting rich by proxy. While the chance for massive wealth rarely pans out—something like 85 percent of startups fail—it is this hope that fuels entrepreneurs and workers alike.

The highest position on the status hierarchy is reserved for entrepreneurs. As one high-ranking social media executive who preferred to remain anonymous explained: "Even if you're not going to make money it's like other people will give you more respect if you've started a company than if you're an employee. A lot of the employees are really important and they, a lot of [the] time, add more value to the world as an employee than they would as a founder of a company that isn't going to go anywhere." Even founding an unsuccessful company can lead to higher status than working at a successful company.

Another demonstration of how business ideals are integrated with social values is the extent to which one’s work for a particular company defines one’s self. English-Lueck describes work as “the lodestone of SV life,” an emphasis that has characterized Silicon Valley for decades. The anonymous executive elaborated, “The companies are almost like a cult, right?” He described a startup as a “clan” with t-shirts, membership in which requires workers to spend all of their time at “weird events like Hackathons” that isolate them from their families and discourage outside interests. Unlike in other parts of the world, he said, “here [work is] woven into people’s life more.”

When asked about work-life balance in a speech to Girls in Tech, Leah Culver, founder of the now defunct micro-blogging site Pownce, said, “Pick one or the other, make your choices, whatever makes you happy.” The “life” in “work-life balance” is often a gendered euphemism for family and children. The prioritization of work implied that these things were unimportant; I did not hear any young men discussing their concerns in this area. The common attitude was that one could not have both; the underlying implication was that one should pick work.

The San Francisco tech scene does pride itself on an ostensible sheen of work-life balance. In San Francisco, I was told, people love to snowboard, ride bikes, and go to concerts, as opposed to their boring suburban counterparts who just work all the time. But during fieldwork, when I asked people what they did, they answered with a list of work projects. When I first met someone, she often gave me an elevator pitch for her latest project. In their free time, people pursued personal projects that looked remarkably similar to their paid work, such as building a personal website rather than coding one for a client. Social occasions were frequently sponsored by companies or held at startup headquarters. People wore t-shirts and hats with company logos, and roomed and socialized with their co-workers. Work was a source of satisfaction, fulfillment, and personal worth, both literally and figuratively.

This uneasy prioritization of work and social change played out in the tech community’s definition of status symbols. The San Francisco technology scene adhered to an ethos of visible consumption focused on “functional” goods, experiences, and travel. Certain expenses were deemed acceptable if they could be linked to pursuits with a larger purpose, but anything that couldn’t be linked to either work or self-improvement was frowned on. For instance, it was totally acceptable to carry a Chrome messenger bag filled with the latest gadgets and ride a fancy bike, but spending on clothes or luxury brand names for everyday goods was terribly gauche. (Apple products were an exception, since electronics were considered necessary work tools.) The most popular sports in the tech scene–rock climbing, biking, and yoga–can be practiced cheaply, but usually are not. It is important to note that this is not an ethic of anti-consumption. Tech people had no problem spending large, even exorbitant, sums of money on personal possessions or travel as long as they could be framed as part of their work life.

Even so, extremely rich people in the scene are expected to avoid flaunting their wealth. Technology writer Kara Swisher explains: “They’re a better class of rich people. They do mingle. Bill Gates does mingle with the hoi polloi, kind of thing. He doesn’t really have to. He can go to a little island by himself as far as I’m concerned, but I think there is a lot more equality in mingling … They don’t have Hamptons houses and they don’t exclude themselves and you can run into them in Palo Alto … There’s not a lot of limousines and that kind of stuff. But there is status related to their wealth.” The first dot-com boom abounded with tales of newly minted millionaires living in studio apartments and wearing torn t-shirts. Flaunting one’s wealth is considered tacky, because it defies the scene’s emphasis on intelligence and technological savvy; a focus on looks or superfluous material possessions is viewed somewhat suspiciously as non-techie or at least non-nerdy.

Rational, justifiable consumption was invariably contrasted against the popular image of the wasteful, frivolous luxury consumer. Technology workers unconsciously labored to ensure that they were not seen as superficial consumers, a subject position that has historically and consistently been assigned to women. In the mass culture of post-Depression America, there was widespread social anxiety that the newly founded mass media would inculcate unbridled consumption among passive audiences, leading to excess, indulgence, and madness. This archetype was, as historian Alison Clarke writes, “a self-indulgent woman, freed from household drudgery by labor-saving devices to wile away her time in non-productive pursuits, [who] shopped as an act of pleasure, self-fulfillment, and autonomy rather than household provisioning.” By contrast, technology workers in the late 2000s, whether male or female, adhered to a supposedly masculine ethos of spending in which consumerism was justifiable only if it could be linked to more worthy pursuits: self-improvement or work.

Another perfectly acceptable expense was conference travel. Tech workers frequently flew to expensive, exclusive events like TED, Sundance, Coachella, South by Southwest, New York Internet Week, and technology conferences all over the world. Frequent travel, and the subsequent accumulation of frequent flier miles, showed that one was lucky enough to have a flexible work schedule, plenty of money, and worldliness. Meeting up with peers in airport lounges and hotel rooms created a sense of a far-flung diaspora, in which members were connected through wealth, travel, and technology—while also making it clear that this style of meeting required immense privilege.

Conferences in the tech scene create new friendships and cement older ones, produce stories to retell later, and foster a sense of intimacy and inclusion among participants. Many of these interactions are public, and conference attendees post pictures from events, tweet about sessions, and write blog posts about their experiences. This conspicuousness marks conference consumption as a way to display one's access and connections to others, not to mention the status of being invited in the first place. As a graduate student, I experienced waves of jealousy when I saw my Twitter followers talking about Foo Camp and the Microsoft Social Software Symposium, both invite-only events with very limited guest lists. The prevalence of social media made conference attendance obvious and made it clear to anyone paying attention that those attending were part of the "in crowd."

Social media consultant Laura "Pistachio" Fitton explains, "South By Southwest, all the years I've gone, has been a huge point of acceleration, so there's something also very interesting about, not only social media that leads to face to face, but face to face that persists more effectively and more connectedly because of a social media connection." Meeting at SXSW often leads to following people on Twitter or reading their blogs, further cementing social ties.

It is considered a breakout site for new technology launches, and it served that purpose for Twitter and Foursquare. Get Satisfaction founder Thor Muller told me: "The thing about South by Southwest is that first and foremost, it's a music festival. It's where the rock stars, or the budding rock stars, go. So, as an interactive festival, in my opinion, it always had an element of that rock and roll mystique to it. It was a different kind of birthplace for a new kind of ethos around what we were building."

While at South By, it is clear who the “celebrities” are, because people constantly gossip about them, they appear on panels and give keynotes, and they all seem to know each other. This inclusivity is compounded by the practice of waiving the registration fee for SXSW if an attendee organizes or speaks on a panel: many repeat attendees arrange to speak on their friends’ panels not only to obtain speaker status, but also to save money.

At one South By, I received a pack of “Internet ALL STARS” trading cards as a promo for a software company. They featured people like Robert Scoble and Gary Vaynerchuk, and included their websites and Twitter handles. The importance of Web 2.0 celebrities is frequently reinforced, meaning that even if you don’t know who they are at your first SXSW, you will afterward.

As Tristan Walker explained, "I've been fortunate that I've been immersed in that network, and it's a very, very small network, but it's hard to get in that small network." Those with these connections are often careful to make them public.

The tech scene is very much a publicly articulated social network, in that social media like Twitter makes it easy to see who is connected to whom. Databases like CrunchBase extend informal social connections to funding and investment, as tech insiders attempt to drum up "angel investment" for their projects from wealthy friends.

Implicit in this quote is that some people are "legit" and others are not, a distinction that is primarily determined through social relationships. For example, at a Digg meetup in November 2008, I was talking to Valleywag blogger Nick Douglas when a woman came up to us, took our picture, and immediately handed us cards promoting her "Smart Mom's Network." Her business card had three different product links on it, an e-mail address, and a cell phone number. Neither of us knew her and we were not employed in a field related to her business, so this networking seemed both aggressive and meaningless. Indiscriminately blanketing an event with business cards shows a lack of access to those networks necessary to make a business a success, and demonstrates a limited understanding of who is or is not considered important (Nick and I were not important). Networking only works if you are already somewhat inside the network.

Success in the technology scene is thus at least partially dependent on the ability to access a preexisting social network. Melissa Gira Grant, activist and former Valleywag blogger, describes the difference between people integral to this network and those outside of it: those outside "have no perspective or scale. They have this thing that they heard somewhere in some marketing article in like, Fast Company, that everybody you talk to is important and then they don't really know how to weigh the human reality in front of them against these tips that they got for how to succeed, which I see all the time." At the time, the trendiness of Web 2.0 was attracting outsiders to the tech scene hoping to share in its wealth (the previously mentioned term "Web 2.0 carpetbaggers" fits here, because it implied outsiders rushing to San Francisco with no "authentic" interest in tech besides the possibility of getting rich quick). But social connections and knowledge of the scene functioned as gatekeeping mechanisms to maintain boundaries between scene insiders and outsiders. That is, while people already in the tech scene viewed it as open to all and easy to access, they themselves were often dismissive of outsiders, who often described the scene as a "high school." The insiders' claims of meritocracy, then, were undermined by the fact that in order to succeed, newcomers had to have already accessed preexisting, elite networks.

Social media plays a key role in maintaining inequalities between high-and low-status people by reducing complex relationships to visual displays of quantity and quality. As we have seen, while the values of engineering and geek culture play into what is considered high status, so does the attention one garners within most popular social media sites, which often rank users based on how large an audience they can command. Technologies like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs encourage status-seeking behaviors that blur the lines between work and play and promote the infiltration of marketing and advertising techniques into relationships and social behavior. The emphasis on metrics, which track attention and visibility, shows how significant these values are in the Web 2.0 scene.

The site launched in 2006 and broke into the mainstream in 2008-2009, when user accounts and media attention increased exponentially. For the first two years of its existence, Twitter was used almost exclusively by San Francisco tech workers. By 2009, the bloggers, technologists, and company founders who were its most frequent users had been replaced by musicians, actors, television shows, and news organizations. When I began conducting interviews in 2007, it was possible to have two hundred followers and rank among the top users: the technology had a clubby, insider feel. Popular video blogger Veronica Belmont summed it up: Twitter was very much in the Valley and very much in San Francisco in its early days.

I think Twitter absolutely is part of that [status] … it rewards popularity above pretty much all else. And we try to build in things that can break out of the popularity. Like the way we built retweet which was for the purpose of trying to get good information spread most efficiently to where it wanted to go. But still, in general, what's rewarded is popularity. You could argue [that] you can get popular by creating really good stuff. Or you can get popular by doing sensationalistic crap.

Not only does follower number literally measure popularity; it also implies a level of influence, visibility, and attention. Veronica Belmont can tweet something like “For future reference, a vodka tonic before cardio kickboxing is probably not the best course of action” and have it read by more than half a million people—more than the reach of some television shows. Because number of followers connotes such status, some people actively court new followers by cultivating an audience, frequently replying to followers, and tailoring tweets to their followers’ interests.

Kawasaki implies that follower count is less useful than re-tweets as a metric because one’s number of followers does not indicate the usefulness of one’s tweets—but he still relies on a metric to determine whether or not his account is helpful to others. Metrics, whether automatically or algorithmically generated, are socially interpreted as measures of self-worth. Kawasaki wants to be useful to others, echoing an instrumental, business-like approach to social media use, but he also uses metrics to determine how he himself measures up.

In these tweets, @replies are used to notify others that the people referenced are geographically proximate. In the tech scene, Twitter was presumed to be reciprocal, a true technology of the networked audience rather than a broadcast mechanism. As a result, it was considered proper to include someone in an @reply if they were in attendance at an event, or were part of an ongoing conversation. Re-tweets were attribution, so rebroadcasting someone’s tweet without crediting them was akin to plagiarism. People who continually tweeted without acknowledging anyone else, responding to @replies, or re-tweeting their friends were derided. Interaction designer Adrian Chan called these frequent references to others a way to delineate a tribe, a form of “social inclusion.”

The ability to attract and command attention is highly valued because it demonstrates significance and information quality; informants assumed that people with very high follower numbers were “good at Twitter,” which entails attracting a wide audience through interesting content and ongoing interactions with the audience.

For my informants, Twitter was the primary way in which they immersed themselves in the current concerns of the tech scene. They used it to follow real-life friends and acquaintances in the field as well as high-status tech people and celebrities. Further, because individual tweets are typically viewed within a Twitter stream comprised of other people's tweets, the roles of follower and broadcaster blend, forming an aggregate social context. Then as today, this context is rich with social information about relationships, mores, customs, and trends, and thus provides more information than the sum of its parts. For instance, looking at how the tech scene defined acceptable Twitter use reveals the key role that Twitter followers played in determining status in the community.

While virtually everyone I met in the tech scene used Twitter, a set of norms governed how information was shared and how the service was used. These norms were not universal to all Twitter users. Since Twitter is open-ended, it is used in many different ways; among fan groups, for example, there is a lot of direct tweeting to celebrities, while teenagers often participate in #hashtag games that show up on the trending topics. Neither were these norms implicit. People had very particular ideas about how Twitter should be used, which were debated in person, on Twitter, at conferences, and on blogs. Sites like Twitctionary and Twittonary attempted to formalize the emerging rules of the medium, but norms were often reinforced through micro-interaction.

Kazaroth tells rhipadmore that she should not protect her updates and includes a link to an article called “The Ten Commandments of Twitter” by James Dickey. She clearly feels that Twitter “should” be public, in line with social expectations that private accounts are “wrong” (90 percent of Twitter accounts are public). Because Twitter is considered a broadcast medium, and because it is used so frequently for self-promotion, making accounts private defeats this purpose.

Now for the most controversial option—locking your Tweets. Unless you're a minor (in which case I'm not sure you should be on Twitter at all), don't. It's the Twitter equivalent of walking into a room and asking everyone else who's already there to put on earplugs while you talk to the 3 people you like the most. Mostly it just makes you look like you don't understand Twitter. If someone's a bore, or a spammer, or a creep, block them. Assume everyone else is just another nice person like yourself looking for a new outlet to reach whatever goal they selected.

Ferriss discusses two competing norms and explains why he chose one of them. It is through these types of public discussions and micro-interactions that the norms of an emerging technology are worked out within a social group. Eventually some controversies were settled by the technology; the emerging practice of re-tweeting was incorporated into Twitter's software and people no longer argued that it was an illegitimate use of the site.

The follower count is such a crucial display of status on Twitter that unfollowing someone becomes the ultimate act of protest, sending a message about the acceptability of a behavior: Adactio: Concurring with @briansuda.

The internet has facilitated the decentralized production of content that can be easily distributed to a networked audience. The possibility of one's blog, online videos, or digital pictures reaching millions of people worldwide was impossible before the World Wide Web, and its potential today means that attention and visibility are highly valued, because larger audiences translate into more influence and more recognition. One's audience, too, can be easily quantified due to the metrics built into most social media that measure readers or followers, which provide a way, however clunky, to compare people to each other that does not require an understanding of their subtle personal interactions. Metrics are thus used not only to measure a website's success, traffic, or profitability, but also as a way of determining personal status. Megan McCarthy explains: "A lot of people around here are engineers, they're not very good with subtleties and cues and the numbers are easy … Numbers don't change on you."

In 2008 the startup Klout began aggregating data from multiple social sites to see how often individuals are “liked,” re-blogged, @replied, and so forth, claiming that they measure “influence based on your ability to drive action.” If your algorithmically generated “Klout Score” is high enough, you might qualify for perks such as free Essie nail polish or a visit to the set of Dallas. (My Klout score hovers around fifty, making me eligible for nothing.) Klout never uses the term status, but it measures influence in three vectors: the number of people you reach, how likely those people are to act on your content (for example, by commenting on it or re-tweeting it), and how influential your network is. Klout rewards people precisely for achieving the status metrics of Web 2.0.

Despite skepticism, this type of measure of influence is extremely valuable to brands and marketing firms. By 2012 Klout had $40 million in venture capital investment and a score of competitors, including PROSkore, Twitter Grader, and Peer Index. Word-of-mouth marketing is a huge buzzword, with advertisers salivating over the possibility of getting “authentic” person-to-person recommendations cheaply. (Adweek reported that Adidas was amazed when “some random user” made an animated .gif of one of their television ads, which garnered 90,000 reblogs on Tumblr without any money involved.) Klout is the ultimate status affordance, an entire business model based around the quantifiability of importance.

This can lead to a sense of life as an ongoing performance. Megan McCarthy scoffed, “If nobody was watching I think half the people in Web 2.0 would not know what to do with themselves.” People who attract attention without any sense of accomplishment or skill, however, are derided as “famewhores,” which suggests that visibility itself is not enough. Just as Kawasaki distinguished between followers and number of re-tweets, visibility based on merit—achieved status—is what people admire.

These tools are used widely not only by companies and brands, but also by individuals to track their @replies, re-tweets, and references to their friends, partner, band, and so forth. These applications reveal the expectation that individuals will want to monitor and manage their Twitter handle. And as we will see, users have come to use the same tactics for self-surveillance that companies use for brand management.

In social contexts like the tech scene where applications like Face-book, Foursquare, Flickr, and Twitter are part of daily life, status is signaled using both emergent status signals and status affordances. On Twitter, follower count is the primary metric, somewhat to Evan Williams's discomfort. @replies and RTs began as informal ways to communicate on Twitter (and incidentally display access, connection, and status). These conventions, which became accepted more widely through their use by early adopters in the tech scene, were implemented by Twitter itself and integrated into the software, becoming status affordances.

Offline status affects how people are seen online, and vice versa. A famous person with an infrequently updated or mundane Twitter feed might have hundreds of thousands of followers, while an unknown person with sparkling wit could come to prominence on the service. Those who use and talk about Twitter like to promote the idea that good content is rewarded most, but it is clear that often sensationalism or celebrity is more likely to boost follower numbers.

According to this informant, Quora answers, which do tend to be lengthy and informative, make it possible to determine other people's intelligence and knowledge, whereas Twitter popularity can be faked. If people are going to perform publicly for an audience in order to boost their status, this executive believes it is better for them to spend time on a site that rewards depth of content rather than just raw popularity. To a company founder, the end goal is determining who would be a good prospective employee based on a metric.

There are clearly tensions inherent in Web 2.0's combination of entrepreneurial capitalism and techno-utopianism. To achieve high status, one must be committed to the entrepreneurial startup culture, engage in self-conscious self-marketing, network continually, or do a combination of all three. Yet although the business of technology and social media may value and reward attention and wealth as much as technological knowledge and innovation, it is the knowledge and innovation piece that "really" matters. Status is crucial, but it must be the right kind of status.

At the same time, he actively courted attention and treated his rabid followers as a fan base to achieve micro-celebrity. Within the scene, both types of micro-celebrities are subject to scrutiny; pursuing attention and visibility for its own sake without commensurate achievement risks having one's personas and activities policed and judged by others.

Terri Senft, in her book Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks, defines micro-celebrity as “a new style of online performance in which people employ webcams, video, audio, blogs, and social networking sites to ‘amp up’ their popularity among readers, viewers, and those to whom they are linked online.” Celebrity has traditionally been viewed as something someone is, based on how well known he or she is; micro-celebrity, by contrast, is something someone does. Regardless of one’s actual audience, micro-celebrity is a way of thinking of oneself as a celebrity, and treating others accordingly. Micro-celebrity practitioners, be they professional video gamers, wannabe pop stars, YouTube beauty bloggers, or political activists, strategically construct their presentation to appeal to others. The people they interact with online are thought of as fans, rather than friends or strangers, and these relationships are carefully maintained to sustain popularity. The mindset and practices of micro-celebrity are made possible by social media technologies, which enable average people to gain the audiences of traditional celebrities.

People with highly visible online personas are dubbed "internet famous" (Ben Brown, founder of the short-lived geek dating site Consummating, christened himself the "internet rockstar" in 2000, and defined it as "all the fun with none of the pesky pressure to produce another top selling CD or make anybody rich or famous. Except you, Mr. Number One."). Wired magazine put Julia Allison on the cover with the headline "Get Internet famous! Even if you're nobody." Like Kevin Rose, many are swamped with attention at conferences: At South by Southwest, I witnessed "mommy blogger" Dooce, a.k.a. Heather Armstrong, backed against a wall by fans. Micro-celebrities are name-dropped on Facebook and Twitter ("At the Rev3 Holiday party with @veronica lamenting that @ryanblock & @kevinrose are nerdily playing chess"). People brag about meeting, hanging out with, and attending parties with the micro-famous; their technologies or accomplishments are followed closely; and their content is read, re-tweeted, and discussed. To many, the distinction between those famous for doing something and those famous for simply being famous is unimportant. What matters is the fame.

Micro-celebrity can be ascribed to people well-known in certain subcultures, often through the production of celebrity media about them. For example, a tech blog published paparazzi photos of the late Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt drinking coffee in Palo Alto; similar candid shots from Mark Zuckerberg's honeymoon ended up in Us Weekly. A paparazzi photo of someone marks them as a celebrity, or at least someone to pay attention to. While micro-celebrity is ascribed to people who are recognizable from online memes, such as the costumed super-fan "Tron Guy" or internet karaoke star "Numa Numa kid," high-status micro-celebrities in the tech scene are those with significant business or technological accomplishments, such as Gary Vaynerchuk and Kevin Rose. An ascribed micro-celebrity is not just someone popular, but someone treated with the celebrity-fan relationship of distance and aggrandizement.

Achieved micro-celebrity, by contrast, is a self-presentation strategy that includes creating a persona, sharing personal information about oneself, constructing intimate connections to create the illusion of friendship or closeness, acknowledging an audience and identifying them as fans, and strategically revealing information to increase or maintain this audience. Social media technologies are an intrinsic part of this process; for my informants, these activities primarily took place on Twitter, with its stark metrics of follower numbers that invite comparison and competition. Other technologies, particularly blogs, digital photos, and videos, are used to establish an online presence and live a public life. Significantly, micro-celebrity practice uses mediated self-presentation techniques drawn from "traditional" celebrity culture in day-to-day interactions with other people. Thus relationships between individuals become similar to relationships between celebrities and their audiences.

Becoming a micro-celebrity requires a degree of self-commodification to create a “publicizable personality”; as Ernest Sternberg writes, “performers now intentionally compose their persona for the market, and do so through methods learned from the celebrity world.” The micro-celebrity self, like that of celebrities more generally, is carefully constructed and performed to attract attention and publicity. Laura Fitton, a social media marketer who rose to fame as her persona, Pistachio, describes writing her Twitter account as “kind of like being a newspaper columnist”: “I get that that’s not a hundred percent me … But I do think of Pistachio as kind of a separate entity. It doesn’t have followers. It has readers. It’s a thing.” Fitton distinguishes herself from her online persona, which she admits is filtered to show her in a positive way. She thinks of Pistachio as a “thing” that has an audience. Virtually everyone I interviewed was strategic about using social media to reveal or conceal certain aspects of themselves. Owen Thomas, a former Valleywag editor, explained, “With social media, we have a sense of the tools to craft those identities. It’s almost like when previous programmers had to write in assembly language. And now we got Visual Basic for constructing identities.” Profile pictures, likes and dislikes, and subjects chosen to tweet or blog about are calculated to give off a certain impression.

Micro-celebrity involves closeness and accountability. Micro-celebrity practitioners view their online connections as an audience or fan base, and use communication technologies like Twitter, instant messaging (IM), and e-mail to respond to them. Many people I talked to felt that in order to boost their popularity they were obligated to continue this interaction, which broke down the traditional barriers between audience and performer, spectator and spectacle. The micro-celebrity has direct interaction with fans, while traditional celebrities only give the illusion of interaction and access. As Gabe Beneviste, founder of the music site SonicLiving, explained, “There [have] always been Brad Pitt fan clubs or musicians who have fan clubs.” He noted that even mainstream celebrities have traditionally incorporated elements of personal interaction, such as responses to fan letters or public appearances, into their personas, but now all that’s required is an @reply message on Twitter. In his view, personal interaction is “not a new phenomenon … there’s just a much lower barrier to entry.” This interaction is crucial to maintaining the micro-celebrity’s fame or notoriety.

I’m actually super, super lucky with my fans because there’s definitely a feeling of a conversation going on, as opposed to me just broadcasting things. On my blog, I respond to comments. I respond to all my email. On Twitter, I reply, not publicly always, but I will always direct message someone if they have a specific question or comment. I just want to keep the lines of communication open because I feel once you lose that, you lose that relatability, and you lose that ability to converse with your audience. Then, suddenly, you’re on this pedestal, and it’s just not as fun, and it’s not as watchable.

Regularly viewing the cast of a television show in your living room every week creates a feeling of intimacy and familiarity that communication scholars Horton and Wohl have called "para-social interaction." These para-social relationships can be emotionally gratifying, to the point where people tune in to particular programs to check in with their "friends." Micro-celebrity extends this idea to networked webs of direct interaction.

To Walker, "authenticity" is not so much about revealing deeply personal information as it is about consistency: "Tristan equals Tristan no matter where you go." He imagines readers judging his authenticity across times and mediums, and coming up with a reliable uniformity of self-presentation. Being "authentic" is a very tenuous definitional frame that can be broken by nearly anything, even something inconsequential.

In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling distinguishes authenticity from sincerity. He conceptualizes authenticity as a display of the hidden inner life, complete with passions and anguish, while sincerity is the opposite of hypocrisy—honesty without pretense. Both senses are used by technology insiders when explaining what authenticity means to them. But it is often this "display of the hidden inner life," the act of revealing intimate information, that creates a bond between micro-celebrity practitioners and their audiences.

The well-read Muller chooses not to reveal deeply personal things, but believes strongly in the ideal that "principles within our hearts," personal integrity, should dictate one's actions, rather than marketing principles. Both Muller and Walker talk about authenticity in an almost moral sense, adhering to consistency as a driving ethic. This sense of authenticity suggests that it is not about how much one reveals or conceals, but about being measured against an ideal of honesty, in that the information that is revealed has a constancy.

Authenticity is negotiated symbolically; information disclosure is used to determine its presence or absence, but is an incomplete measure at best. Authenticity's slipperiness is part of what makes it useful: it can satisfy many objectives, and can be interpreted widely. Despite this ambiguity, its importance remains strong, not only among members of the tech scene, but to American culture in general.

Micro-celebrity also employs a twist on aspirational consumption, a marketing strategy used by luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Chanel. These companies, known for expensive products purchased by the global rich, target middle-class consumers with lower-priced lines of sunglasses and perfumes—the "entry-luxury" consumer base. This lower-level consumer is vitally important: these companies make the bulk of their profits selling $250 sunglasses rather than $10,000 dresses.

One of Jackson's main activities was attending tech events; I frequently saw him out and about at meetups, conferences, and parties. Jackson described his typical schedule: he wakes up at eight, works for two hours, goes to the Yoono office from 10 to 4, attends one or two tech parties, returns home at 11, and works from home until 3 a.m. He saw this as a means to an end: I really moved here to really bust butt and make a million dollars by the time I'm 30.

Jackson believes that when he finally comes up with a winning idea, having a large number of Twitter followers and community connections will make it easier for him to find funding. … He explained that networking in the San Francisco scene and becoming known to the community are key to his potential success: I just tell people be there.

There is a reason why I can post 150 times a day and still have 2,000 followers. People seem really interested in what I am saying. I get more replies than most of the tech experts, because my things … make you want to stick to them and reply. I happen to have a knack for it I guess. I spent a year and a half changing the way I tweet, on a monthly basis, to find that algorithm of success.

Jackson saw his Twitter followers and blog readers as an audience, and was very focused on maintaining high follower numbers and producing content to interest and inspire his fans. The persona he presented to the world was carefully crafted to fit his career goals. Many of his actions and choices, like going to tech parties, blogging prolifically, mentoring younger entrepreneurs, inventing hashtags, and sponsoring events, were modeled after people whom he admired, such as gadget blogger Ryan Block, Scott Beale, technology journalist Larry Chiang, microformats pioneer Tantek Çelik, blogger Michael Arrington, and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. Jackson expressed admiration for their work ethic, community involvement, intelligence, honesty, and initiative, and believed in demonstrating these qualities in his own day-to-day life.

Jackson demonstrates how micro-celebrity is a learned status-seeking practice that both reflects the values of the technology scene and is intimately integrated with social media tools. He constructed his own Twitter and blog personas based on traits he admired in high-status people like bloggers, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs—traits that included access to a network, visibility to an audience, work ethic, and community involvement. Jackson used Twitter to strategically seek and inculcate an audience, altering his content production based on what he thought would “inspire” his followers. This reflects both the status structure of the technology community, which prioritizes personal products that illustrate passion and insight, and how social media is used to communicate these values. Jackson also incorporated networking into his personal goals and presentation, viewing it as essential to success in the scene. Notably, this networking took place both in person and using social media tools, indicating the intertwined nature of “online” and “offline” interaction. Micro-celebrity intrinsically reflects the importance to successful self-promotion of access, attention, visibility, and entrepreneurial persistence—all values deeply influenced by Silicon Valley’s history of venture-backed capitalism.

I call it “micro-celebrity” … because I’ve been called that a few times. I consider it being famous for not really doing anything. I don’t think I’ve done enough to have 3,000+ Twitter Followers or 30K people reading this blog every month but I do and that comes with some responsibility and, yes, some stalkers. Celebrities have it rough and without a support system, it’s easy to let things get to you …

I miss the instant feedback … Call me crazy but there’s static and then you tweet, “good morning” and a few dozen people tweet it back to you within seconds. It’s addictive and very damaging when it stops happening. … It was difficult moving to New Hampshire and losing that almost instantly. The move forced me to make real friends.

Despite the radical shift in his lifestyle, Jackson has grown to love his quiet life in a town of twelve thousand people. He told me, “My chickens are here, I have my river, my best friend and a GF [girlfriend] who is great and now my life doesn’t weigh on the positive and negative criticisms of strangers.” His story illustrates the tensions intrinsic in adopting micro-celebrity as a status-seeking practice. Jackson got to meet many of his heroes, enjoyed getting immediate responses on his internet musings, and ended up working for a well-known internet company (although not making his million). But he also dealt with public criticism, mockery, and epithets like “asshole” and “fat” in his Twitter stream. Jackson struggled between wanting to participate in a community he loved and realizing that the personal attacks, which often come hand-in-hand with the micro-celebrity persona, were hurting him emotionally. Eventually he decided that the benefits of public living did not outweigh this psychic damage and he drew back, to the point of physically relocating away from the Bay Area.

I always found tech parties as a way for me to gauge how I’m doing on my projects. I read my Twitter posts from last year. I was meeting people for the first time I’d never met before. I MET KEVIN ROSE—all caps. That kind of crap. And I look back to this year, it’s so much different. Everyone that I talk to knows who I am … It’s a totally different landscape. So that’s how I judge how I’m doing. In Web 2.0 not everyone that’s successful makes money.

The ability to keep up with the projects, relationships, and internet content of important people was a part of participating in the community’s public life.

Beyond simply correctly identifying micro-celebrities, an insider must transition from viewing them with awe, to feeling neutrally about them, and, for those with the highest status, to seeing them as peers and friends.

A guy who I met with at dinner in SOMA, I ended up taking him over to some drinkup someone was having. I forget, but it was like, people from Flickr and Digg and all these … And he's like, "Holy crap! You just took me to ground zero." Like, "I did?" That was just like any party that we do. This guy lives in Hong Kong and he doesn't see this stuff but he sees these names online. Twitter … you see these names repeated and at-replied and, you know, they wanna meet this person. They don't even know who they are or why they want to. I bet all these people were like, who's Robert Scoble and that kind of stuff. But they see his name and they're like, "I should meet him." And if they meet him, they're like, "Oh! I met this person."

The distinction between achieved and ascribed micro-celebrity becomes salient when considering how many people in the tech scene dislike micro-celebrity practitioners. … The people that spend more time promoting themselves generally spend less time doing. And so, if you actually look at who are the people that are building the great companies for the next 10 to 20 years, it's probably not people that are spending a lot of time on the conference circuit or spending a lot of time with their millions of followers. Zuckerberg isn't Tweeting much. I'm not sure Steve Jobs has ever Tweeted.

Those who are ascribed micro-celebrity are rewarded in this way for their accomplishments, not their practices. Moreover, there is an assumption that those who are aggressively pursuing internet fame for its own sake have nothing to back it up; the practice is dismissively referred to as “famewhoring” or “fameballing,” terms that are usually applied to people without any particular skill or accomplishment that might earn their fame. The very highest status is still reserved for those who are well known for their achievements rather than for just their name recognition. For example, Jakob Lodwick, the co-founder of College Humor, posts deeply personal information and peculiar homemade videos online, but his seeming drive to court attention is forgiven because of his significant accomplishments (and wealth). By contrast, Nick Starr, an out gay man and Apple fanboy who posts constant updates on his sex life and weight loss (even tweeting his liposuction), is considered by many to be desperate for attention. There is a distinction made between “celebrity,” or fame for fame’s sake, versus fame based on high-status business practice. … This distaste means that a successful micro-celebrity practitioner must walk an extremely thin line between maintaining high status in the community through achievements and self-promotion, and going overboard to the point where he or she is mocked or ridiculed.

But for the most part, internet celebrity was met by those I talked to with ambivalence at best and contemptuousness at worst. Glenda Bautista told me that she was struck by the people "fetishizing geekdom" when she moved to the Bay Area in 2003. "Why are all the nerds like your rock stars?" she asked. Twitter founder Ev Williams's response to someone "young and capable" attempting to achieve internet fame was "A) that's probably not going to work, and B) what a waste of time." When asked about internet celebrity, Annalee Newitz, editor of the Gawker science fiction blog io9, thought it was "completely repulsive." Newitz perceives people who become famous for something they've done—she referred to popular blogs I Can Has Cheezburger and Cute Overload—as deserving of their visibility: "You know, sometimes people become popular just because they're doing something cool. And, you know, that's not really their fault." Meanwhile, she perceived people "who pursue [fame] purely just to manipulate the network and manipulate people's responses" as "deeply scary."

Just as mainstream celebrity media treats celebrities as characters to be written into often fabricated plotlines, gossip blogs of the day, like Valleywag, fit micro-celebrity personas into preexisting narratives and character arcs that reflected both long-standing tropes about celebrity and the meritocratic mythology of the technology scene. Valleywag is one example of how celebrity was ascribed to individuals and how the behavior of people within the tech scene was publicly policed by and judged against the values of Silicon Valley.

Valleywag, part of the Gawker Media blog company, ran from 2006 to 2008; in November 2008, it was discontinued, and editor Owen Thomas was given a column on the popular media blog Gawker (Gawker Media announced in early 2013 that it is reviving the blog). Valleywag alternated stories about company acquisitions and technological developments with dating gossip, affairs, leaked personal e-mails and videos, and sharp take-downs of people like Leah Culver and Kevin Rose. It drew from tropes like the cocky self-made man or the woman sleeping her way to the top to create characters and narratives from the actions of technology workers. Like tabloids, to generate its gossip Valleywag depended heavily on unsubstantiated rumors, overheard snippets of conversation, and insider connections. Valleywag reporters monitored content created by micro-celebrities, such as tweets, videos, social network site profiles, blog entries, and digital photos, highlighting items they found controversial or noteworthy. The blog served to police the actions of micro-celebrities: anyone who violated the standards for normative conduct that had developed was liable to become a target. Posts had titles such as "Kevin Rose, Julia Allison to Date" (2007); "Leah and Brad's Breakup Leaves Gossip Blog Despondent" (2007); "Ariel Waldman, Twitter, and the 'Whore' Algorithm" (2008); "Filthy Rich Matt Mullenweg Calls Rival 'Dirty'" (2008); and "Chris Messina and Tara Hunt: It's Still a Breakup Even if No One Blogs It" (2008).

Thus many people were ascribed micro-celebrity because they were wealthy or interesting enough to fit into a particular narrative that Valleywag had assigned them. For example, Leah Culver, the founder of Pownce, was an attractive software developer who was characterized by Valleywag as a woman “sleeping her way to the top,” and so any story about her dating or sex life was fair game.

McCarthy displayed a certain disdain toward these “Web 2.0” people, whom she viewed as meritless attention seekers. After all, there are limitations to micro-celebrity. While some micro-celebrity practitioners are able to translate their fame into a better job or a book deal, very few achieve the financial success or legitimacy given to mainstream celebrities. For the most part, micro-celebrities need further legitimization to reap the benefits of real fame.

But because Valleywag was a blog rather than a newspaper, and did not adhere to any sort of objective standard of journalism, the writers were encouraged to put themselves into the stories. As a result, their opinions and beliefs became part of the story and the brand. Since most of the Valleywag staff were freelance writers, they too engaged in micro-celebrity practices such as frequent twittering, maintaining personal blogs, talking to fans, and so on.

Thomas thought that the rest of the business press was toothless and had failed to report on important stories; unlike them, Valley-wag was not afraid of losing access to high-status tech people. Valleywag often poked holes in press releases and puff pieces. … He told me Musk had blatantly lied about his last two companies and that in both instances he had been fired by venture capitalists before the companies were sold. Thomas viewed Musk as an egregious liar with a history of founding companies and running them into the ground, and he saw Valleywag's reporting as a check on Musk's hubris. He explained that it was Valleywag's responsibility to point out when high-status individuals were being outright hypocritical: … I think you have to know that in order to judge people's character.

Celebrities have had to live with this kind of nonsense for decades, which explains why some of them pull out of society entirely and become completely anti-social. Perhaps, some argue, they bring it on themselves by seeking fame. But for people in Silicon Valley, who are not celebrities and who have no desire other than to build a great startup, a post on Valleywag comes as a huge shock. Seeing [their] marriage woes, DUI or employment termination up on a popular public website (permanently indexed by search engines) is simply more than they can handle. They have not had the ramp up time to build resistance to the attacks.

Grant told me that it was difficult to get people to submit gossip to Valleywag because tech workers didn’t want to be disloyal. The Valley is so dependent on networking and flexible labor, and on building and maintaining the relationships that support these practices, that burning bridges is unthinkable. Grant said: “It’s harder to get that kind of … editorial assistance, sniping, backroom gossip that Gawker gets, because in the Valley, even the lowliest worker thinks that someday they might be a founder … But as much as we value outspokenness and transparency, there’s a lot more self-censorship and a lot more self-restraint going on here.”

Valleywag magnified the "celebrity" part of micro-celebrity practice. Highly read gossip columns covering the lives, loves, outfits, and scandals of tech industry players would inflate the profiles of the people it covered; Gawker, for instance, was almost wholly responsible for Julia Allison's rise to fame, and Allison was well aware of this. It, like Valleywag, mapped the values of celebrity culture onto the technology scene by publicizing gossip and rumors. Valleywag also demonstrated the process by which people were transformed into characters, as it ascribed public personas to regular people and created interconnected, well-worn plots around them. People who had been ascribed micro-celebrity by Valleywag were also taken up and written about by other news sources, further inflating their visibility.

Valleywag perpetuated the mythology of Silicon Valley, which claims that financial success goes hand-in-hand with intelligence and hard work, and it enforced the anti-conspicuous ethos of consumption that prioritized gadgets and travel over designer clothes or fancy cars. It was okay if people were visible or extremely rich, as long as this was backed up by entrepreneurship, intelligence, hard work, and creativity. Excessive displays of wealth or publicly courting attention undermined the meritocratic myth of Silicon Valley by suggesting that success was not necessarily based on intrinsic personal characteristics.

Most importantly, Valleywag policed acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Micro-celebrities were held to standards created and maintained by the editors and reporters, standards that reflected the larger values of Silicon Valley culture. These standards were fairly conservative and included monogamy, or at least not promiscuity; a lack of visible "famewhoring"; spending money wisely rather than buying sports cars, mansions, or elaborate vacations; negligible political leanings; and, above all, no hypocrisy (a value that harkens back to the theme of authenticity as consistency). These mores were applied unevenly, particularly in regard to gender; while Thomas painted Leah Culver as promiscuous, he reported on but rarely judged Kevin Rose for his steady flow of attractive girlfriends.

None of the Cyprus 20 was responsible for layoffs, and the lifestyle of wealth and leisure that is shown in the video motivates many young entrepreneurs. Valleywag (and TechCrunch, which picked up the story), claimed that the participants were “ostentatious” and “tasteless,” but that seems a weak justification for repeated public castigation.

While there has been a great deal of analysis of celebrity culture from the perspective of fans and celebrity watchers, there has been little attention to how fame is experienced by celebrities, presumably because celebrities are difficult to access. Those celebrities who speak openly about their negative experiences with fame are considered ungrateful if they complain about the consequences of something they presumably wanted to achieve. Here I will describe the experience of micro-celebrity, what it is like for its practitioners, and its positive and negative effects. While we cannot know if this perspective can be extrapolated to the views of mainstream celebrities, we can presume that at least some of these experiences may apply to many other people who live their lives in public.

I mean, if I just wanted to record the moments of my life, I would write a private diary or keep my twitter private or keep my blog totally private ... you start to write these things because you want people to read them. And why do you want people to read them? Well, maybe sometimes you want your mom to read them and maybe sometimes you want your friends that you've been out of touch with to read this stuff, but ... mostly you want people to read them because you want people to know who you are and get discovered.

Micro-celebrities often found that both their online and offline actions were publicized and discussed via social media, creating a fishbowl-like effect that normalized personal scrutiny.

Many people I talked to spoke of the downsides to micro-celebrity life; namely, that there was constant “drama.” Living a public life can be stressful and comes with a lot of gossip and intrigue, partly due to the scrutiny of blogs like Valleywag. Lacy explained: “The part that’s not fun is … the exploitive part … people know that if they write certain things about me it’ll drive a certain amount of traffic so people will write nasty things.”

In 2005, Jonathan Gray coined the term “anti-fan” to describe “those who strongly dislike a given text or genre, consider it inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel.” Instead of avoiding what they dislike, sometimes anti-fans fervently consume the media they “love to hate,” in order to discuss it with other like-minded anti-fans. That is certainly the case with a group of anti-fans who are devoted to hating internet celebrity Julia Allison.

During the mid to late 2000s, she took advantage of the new crop of New York media blogs like Gawker and the rise of the New York City technorati to launch herself to prominence. Allison wrote a relationship column, first for the free Metro weekly, then for Time Out New York; she appeared as a “talking head” for Star magazine on various cable news shows; and she wrote intimately about her dalliances with semi-famous men, her love for pretty dresses, and her fluffy white dog. With three of her attractive friends, she founded a “lifecasting” startup called Non-Society that consisted primarily of each woman blogging about her life; the same women starred on a video show called TMI Weekly.

The hatred shown toward Allison seems so out of proportion to her actual activities that Gawker, which had spearheaded much of her rise and fall, eventually wrote a series of articles questioning the motives of the individuals behind the Reblogging site. Maureen Henderson, after profiling Allison for Forbes, found the many negative comments on her story similarly inexplicable: “The idea that someone folks are calling a ‘fraud’ and an ‘awful person’ still merits a website focused on bashing her even as readers reiterate that she lacks substance or career success is just so damn weird in a Web 2.0 way.”

Reblogging Donk is run by three pseudonymous individuals who go by “Juliaspublicist,” “Jacy Russiangirl,” and “Professor Camping.” The three closely guard their pseudonyms and do not give out personal information. Jacy agreed to be interviewed via e-mail, and wrote lengthy and articulate responses to my queries. She explained, “Our only objective is to point and laugh, like any other audience members of a compelling reality show.” To criticize Allison, the rebloggers conduct close readings of the texts she produces. They screenshot tweets, chat logs, and Facebook pages. They pull up Google caches of old blog posts and deleted items. They track down the real names of her boyfriends and post pictures of them on the blog. Reblogging Donk features not only a lengthy glossary of Allison-related terms, but also an elaborate timeline that chronicles her life over the last few years that is downloadable in PDF format and titled “The Internet Never Forgets.”

The primary driver of the anti-fans is a moral and ethical anger against Allison. Their objections seem similar to those found by Gray in his investigation of anti-fans of the Apprentice contestant Omerosa-anti-fans who, in his view, sported a "veneer of moral objection." Omerosa's haters disliked the attention that she got, which they saw as unfairly rewarding talentless, unethical, and immoral behavior. Similarly, the rebloggers' gripes against Allison are summarized by Jacy: You see, everyone, she has simply been completely misunderstood!

Many of the rebloggers, however, claimed that they would never value being on television and being friends with famous people. Instead, they prioritized their friends and family. By suggesting that Allison had high-status accomplishments, I had unknowingly gone against a shared belief system whereby Allison’s values were out of whack, and those of the RBD bloggers and followers were moral and right.

A thorough perusal of the comments reveals that the rebloggers define themselves in opposition to Allison. Allison is stupid; they are intelligent. She produces bad content; they produce good content. She is conceited; they are modest. She is insane; they are rational.

When I asked Allison how she deals with her detractors, she responded, "Hysterical tears, usually. It's not been good for me. And one of my girlfriends who just got her degree … said that I reminded her of an abused woman." She elaborated that the negative attention has "crush[ed] me a little bit" and is "beating me down." She said, "It's not even that many people, it's just the relentless nature, and the sense that you're constantly judged … It can be literally debilitating, and it's very depressing."

Whitney Phillips is an academic who studies trolls. She coined the term "pageview principle" to describe the phenomenon where negative comments are more common than positive comments online, and told me, "People are more likely to take the time to respond if they feel really strongly, either positive or negative. It just so happens that online, negative emotions are often easier to generate." The proprietors of RBD claim that Julia has e-mailed them "anonymous" tips about her dating life and other personal information, while simultaneously trying to have the hater sites shut down. If this is true, Allison is engaging with her community (of anti-fans) to increase traffic and interest even as she publicly decries the hate sites. Phillips cites several people who create outrageous online claims and personalities precisely to get attention: to these personas, even negative attention is better than no attention at all.

Similarly, Wendy Atterberry wrote on the popular women's blog The Frisky, "Julia represents so much of what is icky about blogging and social networking. She is shamelessly narcissistic and vain, having posted thousands of photos of herself over the years and staging incredible, over-the-top 'photo shoots' simply to post on her blog ... She's utterly obnoxious." Perhaps Allison represents the apotheosis of self-focused participatory content, but she has faced intense hatred for not "deserving" her fame.

Julia is arguing the Julia Allison point. She is arguing the case for herself. And she doesn't have to actually believe it. She is arguing that she is a good editor, which she's not. She is arguing that she is a successful businesswoman, which she's not. She's arguing that she's a caring individual, which she's not. But, you know, it doesn't matter that all these things aren't true and that she may not actually believe them herself because she can argue the point. And that's all that matters to her—arguing the point ... And then you start defending the image rather than the authentic self. And ... that is especially important when there is no authentic self.

To Thomas, and much of the tech sector, fame is something a person is just supposed to have, rather than something to which people should directly aspire.

The cultural logic of celebrity has infiltrated so many occupations that blatant self-promotion is now stock in trade not only for up-and-coming rap stars and actresses, but also for software developers, journalists, and academics. Creating a public presence has become a required part of securing and maintaining a job. Sarah Lacy described this as work: “When people are buying your book and the base of fans is making you a brand, I think there’s your responsibility to give back to that … it’s very draining, but that’s kind of the fun part of it.” Similarly, some social media firms will not hire people without blogs or Face-book profiles, which become signs of cultural participation.

But “micro-celebrity” and “high status” do not necessarily go hand in hand. Although Julia Allison and Nick Starr are both well-known in their respective communities, neither is well-regarded. Perhaps this is because they are both up-front about their desire for attention. In the San Francisco tech community, where people often claimed that status was based on an accomplishment like building a successful company or inventing a useful technology, “famewhoring” was considered distasteful and gauche. But in other communities, like the teen-targeted entertainment site Buzznet, the relentless self-promotion of self-styled models like Audrey Kitching and Raquel Reed was a normal and acceptable practice. The boundaries of micro-celebrity practice are very much contextualized by the scene that the person originates from, and can easily backfire.

Several informants described the changes that micro-celebrity brought about in people. An ex-girlfriend of an internet entrepreneur spoke wonderingly of his newfound predilection for expensive clothes and trendy restaurants, saying that she could no longer recognize in him the person she dated. Melissa Gira Grant described such men as “bubble hotties”: entrepreneurs who had gotten rich without developing the necessary social skills to handle it. Indeed, the attention and admiration that many micro-celebrities receive can be both validating and transformative. In Fame: The Psychology of Stardom, Andrew Evans and Glenn Wilson describe the difficulties of adjusting to newfound fame and how frequent positive feedback can lead to self-absorption, narcissism, and grandiosity, as well as a resentment of public scrutiny. While micro-celebrity exists on a much smaller scale than, say, film stardom, it is possible that the increased attention has similar effects. But mainstream celebrities have access to systems of attention brokerage, such as bodyguards, drivers, PR specialists, agents, and managers, while micro-celebrities rarely do. The nearly constant negative attention given to many micro-celebrities, particularly the critiques of appearance and sexuality targeted at women, requires a very thick skin.

This brings us back to the question: if being a micro-celebrity is so draining and uncomfortable, why would anyone attempt to become one? The primary motivator for pursuing micro-celebrity seems to be attention and status. While Adam Jackson wanted to increase his access and influence within the tech scene, Julia Allison wanted to attain a more conventional type of celebrity. Whatever the social context, celebrity culture is considered high status, and so will probably always draw those interested in improving their status within their particular communities.

Laura Fitton was a working mom with a floundering home business when she discovered Twitter. As one of the service’s earliest adopters, she rocketed to fame in 2007, garnering more than fifty thousand followers at a time when having a thousand was impressive. Known as @pistachio, Fitton used the service to follow Web 2.0 celebrities she had only read about on blogs. “It was such a fast, rapid, effective way to start meeting people,” she told me. “I felt like the people I was interacting with on Twitter were co-workers.” Fitton quickly found out that “all the American heavyweights” she followed on the service were going to a conference, called LeWeb, in Paris. There, Fitton would cement her reputation as a Twitter consultant.

But Fitton was unable to convert this social prestige to actual capital, and she found herself deep in credit card debt and struggling to pay bills. In 2009, Fitton founded a company called OneForty. Originally conceived as an app store for Twitter, it morphed into a social media guide for business. Attracting clients such as Virgin and CitiBank, OneForty raised more than $2 million in venture capital.

Fitton’s is the ultimate Web 2.0 success story: a driven entrepreneur achieves financial independence solely through her use of social media. Self-branding functions as a culmination of all the dynamics discussed in this book: the production of knowledge as a commodity, the belief that status is something better achieved than ascribed by the group, and the idea that micro-celebrity is something better ascribed than achieved. Fitton’s knowledge consisted of knowing who “mattered” and where they would be gathered. Her status was achieved through her accomplishments: not only enormous numbers of Twitter followers, but also publications, speaking gigs, and her own successfully funded company. And her micro-celebrity was ascribed and legitimized with a public stamp of approval from celebrities like Kawasaki, who boasted significant business experience. Fitton’s persona-brand, Pistachio, was literally a “thing” separate from her everyday understanding of herself.

Fitton’s story is extremely unusual, but Web 2.0 experts and self-branding consultants attest that it is consummately achievable. The key element? Self-branding. The idea of turning yourself into a brand is now presented as an essential Web 2.0 strategy, and is firmly instilled in modern business culture.

In August 1997, on the cusp of the dot-com boom, Tom Peters wrote an article for internet-gold-rush magazine Fast Company called "The Brand Called You." Apart from Peters's mention of his new CD-ROM, the article reads as if it was written in 2009 or 2011. … The main chance is becoming a free agent in an economy of free agents, looking to have the best season you can imagine in your field, looking to do your best work and chalk up a remarkable track record, and looking to establish your own micro equivalent of the Nike swoosh. Because if you do, you'll not only reach out toward every opportunity within arm's (or laptop's) length, you'll not only make a noteworthy contribution to your team's success—you'll also put yourself in a great bargaining position for next season's free-agency market. The good news—and it is largely good news—is that everyone has a chance to stand out. Everyone has a chance to learn, improve, and build up their skills. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark.

This concept was a response to several social changes: the success of huge corporate brands, the rise of project-based work cultures and entrepreneurial labor models, and the gradual popularization of the internet. As Peters explained, the web made it possible for anyone to have a website, and brands distinguished mediocrity from quality. He advised readers to identify their distinguishing characteristics and write a fifteen-word statement differentiating themselves from their peers. He told workers to think of their skills using the "feature-benefit" model of major corporate brands: every feature generates a corresponding benefit for the customer, the employer. Peters instructed readers to ask themselves: "What do I want to be famous for? That's right—famous!"

Self-branding is primarily a series of marketing strategies applied to the individual. It is a set of practices and a mindset, a way of thinking about the self as a salable commodity that can tempt a potential employer. Self-branding, the strategic creation of an identity to be promoted and sold to others, has moved beyond its origins—the modern culture of creative, entrepreneurial labor in Silicon Valley and an association with the dot-com boom—to become a staple of career counseling and employment advice. Self-branding, which would be impossible without the affordable means of information distribution that the internet provides, is intrinsically linked to the features of social media technologies that make self-promotion on a wide scale possible.

While founding a company or working independently certainly can be creatively fulfilling, this option isn't available to everyone. The most successful self-branders are white-collar professionals with creative or engineering capacities, or people selling goods and services over the internet. In other words, the Web 2.0 workers I interviewed function as the "proof" that self-branding, and entrepreneurial governance in general, works, but only in exceptional cases. Championing self-branding as a universal solution for economic woes demonstrates the disconnect between neoliberal ideals of identity—which emphasize self-improvement, responsibility for skill acquisition, and self-surveillance—and the reality of day-to-day life.

Most academics are quite disparaging of self-branding. They argue that practitioners remake themselves as products to be sold to large corporations, that they rely on an imaginary sense of what employers might want, and that they sully personal feelings and relationships with market forces. Self-branding, while widely taken up in the tech scene, is inherently contradictory. It promotes both "authenticity" and business-targeted self-presentation. This incongruity creates tension and stress for practitioners, who must engage in emotional labor and self-surveillance to ensure an appropriate branded persona.

Bombastic blogger Stowe Boyd also had no problem criticizing the self-branding idea, which he compared to Freudian psychology and multitasking, two widely accepted ideas that in his opinion were invalid: The self-branding thing, the thing that you're treating yourself like you are a product, is a relatively new meaning that's only been around about 15 years. But, it's so embedded now into the American psyche. I mean, it's like Freudian psychology in the '50s. It's like you couldn't argue against it even though there was absolutely no evidence to suggest that it was true, that Freudian psychology had any therapeutic benefits. Self-branding is like that now. It's commonplace, you can't convince people that it's an un-useful metaphor because everyone takes it for granted.

Boyd thought the tech scene's wide acceptance of self-branding rhetoric was ridiculous. Not only did he believe it to be ineffective; he found the idea of self-commodification distasteful. But he recognized that these ideas had wide currency in the tech scene.

But self-branding should not go uncriticized; rather, it needs to be analyzed on both an individual and community-based level. That analysis should include an understanding of how the social becomes economic and vice versa. It should question how people describe the fantasy of personal branding, and how market-centered practices fulfill or neglect self-branders' needs. We must understand the concrete effects of self-branding—a neoliberal technology of subjectivity—on the practitioners themselves.

Ferriss said in an interview with blogger Derek Sivers: “I went after the audiences that read a handful of tech blogs in Silicon Valley. That was the niche I wanted because I knew that even though they represent a small number of people geographically, they are the loudest and most prolific online. By winning a fan base of 100 technophiles that spend most of their time online, then if people attack me online, … I would have other people defending it.” Ferriss strategically targets his work to members of the tech scene because they have online influence far beyond their actual numbers. The self-help techniques that Ferriss and Vaynerchuk advocate use social media invented in Northern California (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook) and reinforce concepts like meritocracy, independence, and entrepreneurship, which are highly valued within the tech scene and its global fan base. Ferriss and Vaynerchuk are self-improvement gurus in the tradition of Oprah, televangelists, and Landmark Forum facilitators, but they emphasize the technolibertarianism of Silicon Valley rather than therapeutic, Christian, or New Age principles.

Gary is personable and charismatic and his aggressive methods have gained him many fans among aspiring entrepreneurs. He has almost 900,000 Twitter followers and was named by BusinessWeek someone “every entrepreneur should follow.” Crush It!, the book that teaches the Garyvee method of success, debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list; despite tepid reviews (Publishers Weekly noted that “his unappealing swagger—repeated stories of how he crushed it and dominated grate particularly—gives his story more the tone of adolescent peacocking than of worthwhile and sober business advice”), it has a four-and-a-half-star rating on Amazon with 520 reviews.

“Content” is an industry term for what used to be called “writing” or “articles,” but now includes blog entries, tweets, videos, audio, podcasts, and even profiles on social network sites.

Vaynerchuk suggests that every social opportunity, including picnics and weddings, is a networking opportunity; tells readers to work at home between 7 P.M. and 2 A.M. after their regular eight to five job; and advocates focusing on the “hustle” over spending time with friends and family.

In reality, even if Garyvee's methods do generate wealth for some people, they are unsustainable for most. Vaynerchuk doesn't mention that "crushing it" requires, at minimum, a white-collar job and technical skills. Gary himself has unusual charisma and entrepreneurial spirit, and a multi-million dollar family business to fall back on. Crush It!'s methods systematically exclude women (who are the majority of caregivers), single parents, people with disabilities, and a whole host of others from "succeeding" using these tactics. (Does this mean they are just lazy?) Gary's extraordinary success has yet to be replicated by the legion of followers attempting to "Crush It" through homemade videos about accounting and real estate, most of which imitate Vaynerchuk's brash spirit. Gary's followers seem mostly to work in technology and marketing; it's apparently harder to "monetize" a passion for secretarial work, social justice, or community gardening than a passion for wine, entrepreneurship, or real estate.

Ferriss's version of "hacking"—which he defines as getting the biggest result for the smallest amount of work—focuses on entrepreneurship, travel, and self-experimentation. His first book introduced the concept of the "muse," a product that generates plenty of income but requires little supervision, giving one enough time to pursue his or her passions: wakeboarding, visiting Asia, or learning gourmet cooking; in short, living the life of the "new rich."

Ferriss is an infamous self-promoter and a consummate personal brander (Wired named him the top self-promoter of 2008, which he promptly added to his official bio.) His first book, The 4-Hour Work Week, has been a bestseller since its publication, and his second book, The 4-Hour Body, debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

While his readers use him as a role model, Tim uses his blog community as a test market; he explained that his readers function as "open-source clinical trials to test the diets and the workouts." He frequently asks for feedback and solicits testimonials from his fans.

The 4-Hour Work Week is also a response to social anxiety over outsourcing and the loss of American competitiveness in the global economy. Rather than worrying whether one's job will be outsourced to Bangalore, Ferriss teaches readers to use virtual personal assistants (VPAs), workers in India who do errands and research for four to twenty dollars an hour, to deal with research tasks, customer service, and even relationships—Ferriss retells a writer's account of using a VPA to apologize to his wife. The affordability of these services is only possible due to the exchange rate and labor differentials between the United States and developing countries like India. Similarly, Ferriss encourages his readers to travel for extended periods of time to countries where the cost of living is significantly lower, like Argentina and Thailand. He writes, "If you can free your time and location, your money is automatically worth 3–10 times as much."

Instead of spending time on work, Ferriss believes in a life of constant self-improvement. While Ferriss does recommend splurging on a few big-ticket items that the reader really wants, he also advocates paring down personal property to simplify travel. He exemplifies the lifehacking philosophy “to live is to learn” and recommends that the new rich spend their time traveling, learning new languages and skills (he mentions martial arts, a variety of athletics, ballroom dancing, and Irish flute), doing service work, and volunteering. This fantasy lifestyle of “continual learning and service” represents the idealism of technology workers—who emphasize experience, intelligence, and travel—taken to the logical extreme. Notably, Ferriss does not account for romantic or family relationships; he assumes that the reader is single with a lifestyle unencumbered by a partner, children, or friends.

Ferriss treats women as objects or trophies, every now and then tossing a bone to his female readers (“to the ladies, for whom peanut butter seems to be like crack, the tablespoon scoop should be no more than a small mound”). … I met “The Kiwi” in Buenos Aires, Argentina … his obsession started when he saw a professional samba dancer in Brazil balance tequila shots on top of each butt cheek in a dance club. Lamenting the lack of similar scenes in his own country, he set off on a mission to isolate the best exercises to create buttocks worthy of tequila shots … In four weeks, he took his then-girlfriend, an ethnic Chinese with a surfboardlike profile, to being voted one of the top 10 sexiest girls out of 39,000 students at the University of Auckland.

To Ferriss, like Vaynerchuk, the self is also an “it,” an attainable fantasy of life. The labor of self-improvement is made invisible by framing it as excavating a newer, better self.

Both Crush It! and The 4-Hour Work Week are instruction manuals for surviving without an economic safety net. Ferriss and Vaynerchuk assume that the changes that the internet has wreaked on industries like journalism and music are prescient of larger shifts in the American economy. They strongly advocate independence from corporate structures by encouraging people to start their own businesses. Both use the motivational language common to both neoliberalism and American self-help culture, extolling readers to imagine and bring about an ideal life.

I think Vaynerchuk and Ferriss are successful for two reasons. First, they uphold the values of the tech community by emphasizing passion, business success, self-improvement, and meritocracy. They do not criticize or interrogate anything that the tech community holds dear. Second, they evangelize tools developed by the tech community like blogs, Twitter, YouTube, online advertising, and so forth. Overall, both men emphasize Web 2.0’s revolutionary impact on business, employment, the self, and even the body. This reinforces the Web 2.0 scene’s sense of itself as uniquely special, smart, and socially revolutionary.

It is no coincidence that self-branding is contemporaneous with the Web. Internet technologies have made it possible for people to apply sophisticated branding strategies used by modern multinational companies to themselves, and social media in particular has allowed individuals with internet access to broadcast to the world in an affordable way. Perhaps due to its origins in the dot-com boom, self-branding has had a remarkably wide reach within the technology industry.

“I’ve kind of self-branded myself as a digital anthropologist,” Ariel Waldman told me, “because a lot of what I do, and what I get paid to do, is [to] be actively involved in online interactions.” Waldman had worked in several different areas of the technology industry, and the term “digital anthropologist” captured well her job skills, giving her a distinctive but easily understood title with which to market herself to potential employers. Similarly, I met a man at a conference who called himself a “change agent,” which is similar to WordPress employee Marianne Masculino’s formal business title of “happiness engineer.” These terms use advertising and marketing terminology to describe aggressively a set of skills and tasks in a catchy and appealing way that is easily consumable by potential employers.

Even people with more traditional job titles used self-branding strategies. Tara Hunt described herself as “an author, speaker, consultant, and marketing strategist, with a heavy focus on online strategy,” as did Anu Nigam, who called himself a “serial entrepreneur and an angel investor.” Both used enterprise language to mark themselves as modern workers in the high-technology sector. Hunt positioned herself above the average marketing drone by describing herself as an author, speaker, and consultant. Similarly, while Nigam called himself a “serial entrepreneur,” a high-status term for someone who launches several successful startups, he had worked as a rank-and-file engineer for many of his former employers. These techniques—coining slogans to describe oneself and emphasizing the positive—are key parts of self-branding.

People in technology agreed with self-branding consultants that a successful personal brand involves a distinct username (like gary-vee or, in my case, alicetiara), multiple social media accounts, the distribution of content using the internet, and the promotion of this content using social media. My informants concurred that potential personal branders should at least have a central web presence. Leah Culver summarized, “So the personal branding includes your domain name and your blog and if you do projects, a list of projects that you worked on and here’s the link to my projects.” Julia Allison gave a workshop on personal branding at the Learning Annex in which she laid out a website structure including sections called Meet Me, Work with Me, E-mail Me, Social Media Links, Blog, Articles, Videos, Press, Recommendations, and Best Of.

Silicon Valley is very forgiving of strangers who just show up at the doorstep. I mean, you can have any hook whatsoever that gets you in. The company you work for can do that like if you’re with a hot startup, like if someone is like, “Oh, I work for Digg.” You instantly say, “OK, that’s that type of person.” It sort of gives you entrance or a membership in a tribe, almost, but you can also create your own legitimacy. You can just start blogging every day, like “Hi, oh, I’m Megan. I write for My Blog,” and then suddenly it’s like, “Oh, OK, that’s great. You’re a blogger,” and that makes sense to people.

Lacy saw self-branding as distinct from actual work, which she understood to be “writing and creating content.” She promoted “Sarah Lacy the brand” by speaking at conferences, networking, and doing media appearances to get plum assignments and drive book sales.

In person, the most widely practiced self-branding skill was networking. Networking was ever-present during my time in San Francisco; each week brought a flurry of tech industry events with the primary goal of meeting other industry workers. At these events, "everyone talks about work, not personal stuff," I was told at a Lunch 2.0 event. Networking requires comfort with small talk, the ability to chat with anyone, and the talent to connect people with others whom they might want to meet. The typical networking interaction takes place between two people. The opening gambit is often "Who are you with?" meaning "What company do you work for?" This triggers the "pitch," a summary of one's business in thirty seconds or so, which ends with an action item like "we're looking for funding," or PR, or engineers.

These pitches came from the founders of tiny startups; for entrepreneurs, the personal brand was aligned with their small company. For freelancers, the pitch statement was the personal brand. I had to learn my own pitch to be comfortable in networking environments. Without a pitch, conversation doesn't flow smoothly, determining commonalities is impossible, and the other person often becomes uncomfortable. My pitch went something like "I'm a Ph.D. student studying how people use social media to increase their status. I'm investigating self-branding, micro-celebrity, and lifestreaming, and I'm looking for people in the industry to interview." Creating this pitch took four or five months of practice.

A final necessary component of self-branding was brand monitoring. Some people set up Google Alerts that e-mailed them whenever their name popped up online, or used Twitter and third-party software like TweetDeck to track how often they were @replied or re-tweeted. Others spent hours on Facebook, Flickr, or Google tracking search results for their name. Glenda Bautista, then head of product for video at AOL, describes this process: “Your personal brand is being affected by—your online identity is being developed by people around you. And again like it kind of touches on the point where I say, you know, ‘it’s not really within your control.’ You constantly have to police yourself. You constantly have to police other people, police your friends. Like nag them to take photos down. It’s exhausting.” This brand monitoring becomes a form of labor that can be both emotional and taxing. It requires continually imagining oneself through the eyes of others, creating a “dual gaze” of internalized surveillance.

Social media technologies allow people to self-consciously construct images of themselves—the young executive, lauded entrepreneur, or glamorous television host. But the collaborative, networked audience of social media requires people to engage in unpaid labor to keep their brand image “pure.” As Bautista noted, “People are in marketing here, whether they like it or not.”

There are two points of view about how this came about. The first perspective, the technologically determinist view, implies that the technology itself dictates this type of self-presentation. It suggests some inherent property of contemporary social media technologies that promotes this enterprise view of the self. This view ignores the context in which technology is used; it is also empirically false since early social media like IRC (internet relay chat), MUDs (multi-user dungeons), and Usenet allowed for similar interactions, but marketable self-presentations were largely absent. Instead, a sense of play and identity experimentation abounded in pre-Web internet spaces—something that is in short supply on sites like Facebook and strongly discouraged by self-branding.

A second viewpoint, and one that is closer to my perspective, is that social media enables many different self-presentation strategies, and due to current social circumstances, many people choose self-branding. The Web 2.0 culture is responsible for the behaviors we see, not the technology. Self-presentation involves using advertising and marketing strategies to sell the self, and since internet media are accessible in a way that television or radio advertising is not, social media allows for a level of strategic, business-focused identity construction that would be otherwise impossible.

In other words, social media allows people to strategically construct an identity in ways that are deeply rooted in contemporary ideas that the self is autonomous and constantly improving. But it is Web 2.0 culture that encourages this behavior by advancing a particularly neoliberal conception of the “enterprising self,” one that advocates the use of technology for identity creation and presentation. In social media applications and Web 2.0 culture, identity can be constructed, managed, and changed.

Want to be a cookbook author? Julia Child attended Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Paris, taught students from her homes in France and Washington, D.C., and spent years testing recipes before attempting to write a book. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was rejected by Houghton Mifflin for being too long, and Child took several years to edit and revise the manuscript before submitting it to Knopf. Promotion did not begin until the book was finished. Today, promotion, not cooking, is most important: start a food blog, make cooking videos and post them to YouTube, correspond with other food bloggers on Twitter, write newspaper and magazine articles, appear on television, and sign a book contract to write a cookbook.

In practice, most self-branding books and seminars begin with a series of exercises to define the personal brand, suggesting that everyone has an easily monetizable passion that needs only to be uncovered. … These exercises imply that the reader is excavating a true, authentic self to present to an audience. Of course, the reader is “uncovering” only potentially profitable interests.

The term "fan labor" was first used in cultural studies to discuss the myriad of activities undertaken by fans of shows like Star Trek, which included discussing episodes online, organizing conventions, and producing feature-length films. Theories of fan labor extended the idea of an "active audience" to show how fans engage in productive activities that financially and culturally benefit the creators of the original film, book, or television series. Following fan labor is "immaterial labor," a concept framed by Marxist-influenced cultural historians. Maurizio Lazzarato defined the term as "the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms and … public opinion." This definition of "labor" would include tagging Facebook photographs, posting status updates on Twitter, and contributing to Wikipedia. Related is "affective labor," the positive benefits that people derive from these acts within a community, whether these are increased social status, intimacy, reputation, prestige, or self-satisfaction. Others think of participation in social media frameworks, particularly commercial frameworks, as another kind of labor: through participation, the value of these sites is created and extracted, in the form of user data, viewings of advertisements, or click-throughs. Many scholars consider this exchange uneven, and view "user-generated content" or "participatory culture" as a form of exploitation by the social software and culture industries.

In her book The Managed Heart, Arlie Hochschild defined emotional labor as that which "requires one to induce or suppress feelings in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others." Emotional labor is a type of performance integrated into the nature of the job itself. For example, a hostess at a gourmet restaurant must, with her mannerisms, facial expressions, and the tone of her voice, embody the overall image of the chef and the food as well as extend seemingly genuine care to her customers. This type of forced behavior for a desired emotional affect occurs in varying degrees down the food chain of service work, as Deborah Cameron describes in her study of call center workers, who are required to evoke "smiling," sincerity, and confidence while on the telephone with customers.

Web 2.0 enthusiasts engage in both immaterial and emotional labor to boost their popularity. This work requires revealing personal information, sometimes to the point of extreme discomfort or vulnerability; feigning and successfully performing interpersonal interactions; and creating a self that is simultaneously authentic and carefully edited. This self is immaterial in that it is digital, and emotional in that it involves using real emotional affect when presenting oneself and interacting with others. Self-branding, for instance, necessitates the careful construction of an edited yet authentic self, which demands ongoing self-monitoring, a thick skin, and an ongoing awareness and evaluation of the audience.

Many informants told me that there were significant negative emotional costs to self-branding, including anxiety, information overload, lack of time, and hurt feelings due to audience comments and interactions. Constantly monitoring one's actions and maintaining a "dual gaze" was often exhausting and time consuming. Keeping up with the sheer amount of work that self-branding requires means neglecting other aspects of life.

These comments reflect Garyvee's ideal of the constant hustler, a neoliberal subjectivity through which people organize themselves and their lives according to market principles. Interestingly, both Ferriss and Vaynerchuk use emotional, affective language to evangelize particular types of labor: think of "following your passion" or "crushing it." Just as one's peers determine what makes an interesting Twitter feed and Valleywag polices the right type of micro-celebrity, self-help gurus script what the "right" sort of affect looks like for social media users looking to capitalize on self-branding. The net effect of this policing is that self-branding, which requires both immaterial and emotional labor, has been both naturalized and gendered.

Several informants confessed that negative comments or e-mail “flames” from audience members had upset them or even made them cry. Even people who claimed that negative comments didn’t affect them had developed coping mechanisms. Adam Jackson said: “I announced after that I’m going to start tagging negative comments and I’m going to turn it into a blog one day. So I did a hash tag, ‘#Dick.’ So from now on, when I get just a really asinine comment I’ll re-tweet it and hash tag it ‘#Dick.’ So now when someone says, ‘why are you so bitter over Twitter?’ I’ll just send them that to that hash tag and they can see all of that negative crap I get.” Ariel Waldman turned to her friends who had gone through similar things to ask for help. … People also found ongoing self-surveillance to be anxiety provoking, because they were engaged in a continuous loop of measuring themselves against an audience. As Glenda Bautista said, “A lot of my own anxieties have been developed by online judgments.”

Thus self-branding contains a paradox: if one’s projected self is both “authentic” and “businesslike,” the assumption becomes that people never do anything that would be considered unbusinesslike, illegal, or controversial in any way. … Self-branding is not a reflection of actual life. It is about constructing a strategic self-image to appeal to a particular audience and furthering that image through every online and offline action. … If the Web 2.0 self is one that must be both entirely transparent and entirely business-oriented, that self cannot logically exist. Furthermore, this elimination of long-standing divisions between corporate life and social or home life is a myth—but even trying to blend the two requires a great deal of time, effort, and affective output.

The second danger is coming off as too self-promotional and therefore narcissistic or uninterested in others. There is a sense, especially with regard to technologies like Twitter, that the service's “proper” use is to share personal information with others. Using the channel as a one-to-many method of broadcast advertising is viewed as bad form and an indicator of low status.

Although the social media scene is highly capitalist and involves an immense blurring of the lines between work and self, the community's adherence to self-branding mechanisms is not a wholesale acceptance of status quo economics. Rather, the valorization of independence and entrepreneurialism documented in self-branding literature was used by my participants not to embrace life as entrepreneurs within the enterprise, but to reject the enterprise in favor of freelance, consulting, or startup work cultures.

Indeed, much of this self-production of the neoliberal subject is pleasurable for the subject; it would not be so widespread if it wasn't. During the dot-com era, Michael Goldhaber gave a speech at a Harvard conference on digital economies in which he stated that “having attention means having recognition, identity, and meaning in the eyes of those around you. It provides sustenance to spirit, mind and body, in just about any form.” The pleasure involved in pursuing self-branding strategies comes partially from having people pay attention: being read, getting @replies, and receiving conference invites have real affective benefits.

Many contemporary critiques of neoliberalism stem from Marxist beliefs in the alienation inherent in industrial labor models. In this model, the worker is alienated from the products of her labor, and the work itself lacks a “sense of meaning.” But according to Marxist traditions, what defines humanity is the “capacity for creative labor.” Although the neoliberal, freelance model of the independent agent has its drawbacks—lack of job security, benefits, and stability—it provides many practitioners with a sense of agency and creativity. And even though the self-branding ideology oversells the ability for most people to engage in this type of work, it is a mistake to presume that it never provides self-actualization.

Michelle Thompson had clearly followed the instructions in personal branding books to the letter: she had a Tumblr blog (advocated by many self-branding gurus since it is free and simple to use), but had printed her URL and e-mail address incorrectly on her business cards. Thompson’s attempt to use social media as she had been directed made her seem amateurish. At the same time that personal branding is posited as an economic solution, it shifts the burden of stability, financial success, and advancement to the worker. Anyone who fails to achieve these things can be blamed for not “wanting it enough” or not working hard. But self-branding entails considerable work. The strategy spills into all parts of life more than does a forty-hour-a-week job, due to the overwhelmingly frequent need for maintenance and monitoring. And the anxiety, distress, and uncertainty felt by many of my informants have not been reported in the self-branding literature.

It is not productive to criticize self-branding’s emphasis on commodification just because it feels distasteful. As Adam Arvidsson writes in the preface to his book Brands, “to be critical of brands per se is about as fruitful as it is to be critical of factories or bureaucracies.” The problem is that self-branding, as a practical technique, is limited and will only be successful for a slim sliver of the population, yet it is being advocated as a universal solution to the economic downturn that can be adopted by anyone.

Texting, Facebook, and Twitter are used by teens to remain in nearly constant contact with friends, creating strong bonds of intimacy and togetherness. Celebrities use Twitter to stay in touch with fans by strategically revealing insider information. Web 2.0 folks intentionally reach out to followers to increase their visibility and social capital in the scene.

In this chapter, I want to demonstrate how the process of “digital instantiation” likewise works toward quantification, qualification, and publicity by rendering users’ lives in piecemeal fashion, unintentionally creating a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. Social media tools digitize formerly ephemeral pieces of information, like what one had for breakfast, making it possible to create a bigger picture of a person or community’s actions. Once “breakfast” is captured in a Foursquare check-in or Instagram photo, it can be combined, searched, or aggregated with other pieces of information to create mental models of actions, beliefs, and activities. Within this context, social surveillance, or the monitoring of friends’ and peers’ digital information, becomes normal. While there are plenty of affective benefits to lifestreaming, there are also costs. Lifestreamers must see themselves through the gaze of others, altering their behavior as needed to maintain their desired self-presentation. This constant monitoring against the backdrop of a networked audience creates anxiety and encourages jockeying for status, even as it brings forth new forms of social information.

Rather than looking at social media use as an intrinsic privacy violation, lifestreaming needs to be understood as an act of publicity. Lifestreaming can be used to publicize knowledge; to gain emotional benefits, social capital, and information; or to shore up support in an argument, but it is rarely used as a way to disregard or eliminate privacy. Most lifestreamers have sophisticated understandings of what they would or would not share online. They balance their need for publicity with their desire to control their own online image. The necessity of presenting an edited self to the world requires a careful understanding of the risks and benefits of information sharing.

Lifestreaming is the ongoing sharing of personal information to a networked audience, the creation of a digital portrait of one’s actions and thoughts. People who lifestream use software like Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare to track information about themselves and make it available to others. By networked audience, I mean the real and potential audience for digital content, made up of people who are connected both to the user and each other. Lifestreaming is the “always-on” aspect of social media, the constant pings and alerts that make smartphones so hard to ignore.

Lifestreaming involves two processes, tracking personal information and broadcasting it to an audience, and most social media sites are designed to facilitate both aspects. Large sites like Facebook and Twitter serve as aggregators for niche sites like Spotify (music), Runkeeper (fitness), and GoodReads (book reviews), encouraging users to share data. Last.fm, for instance, has a plug-in for iTunes and Spotify that logs every song played, creating charts of top tracks and artists that can be displayed on Facebook, Tumblr, or personal blogs. Smartphone apps further assist users in tracking while on the go, often sharing information automatically.

This data can be aggregated and analyzed using customizable online tools like Daytum, which can track anything from “rides to work” to “types of coffee consumed.” The Quantified Self blog collects information about this movement and holds meetups in seventy cities in twenty-six countries.

Many personal informatics enthusiasts are devoted to the idea of optimizing themselves and their environments for maximum happiness; in other words, applying engineering practices to everyday life. Self-trackers believe that self-monitoring and regulating one's behavior accordingly are conducive to self-improvement. The research psychologist Seth Roberts, for instance, has popularized self-experimentation as he tracks his own weight, sleep, and mood to formulate theories on weight loss and depression.

Tracking one's personal information is not a new concept. Diarist Samuel Pepys recorded details of his daily life for ten years. Samuel Johnson and Benjamin Franklin were both compulsive self-trackers: Franklin kept a chart chronicling his daily adherence to thirteen self-identified virtues such as frugality, chastity, and humility. Keeping a diary, even a very detailed one, is a fairly common practice today. Former Senator Bob Graham, for instance, keeps color-coded daily logs of his activities that are so meticulous that they were admissible as evidence in government investigations. And tracking food and exercise, or simply counting calories, is a common precept of weight-loss programs. What makes the lifestream different from its paper predecessors is that lifestreamers use the internet to make this information widely readable.

Lifestreaming requires the digital instantiation of formerly ephemeral pieces of information. For instance, what Jim had for breakfast is ephemeral. There is no permanent record of his cornflakes. Few of us remember what we ate for breakfast last week, let alone years ago. But once Jim digitizes this information by tweeting about it, posting a picture of his cereal bowl, or carefully tracking his caloric intake, his breakfast is written into (digital) being. Similarly, defining a relationship as "it's complicated" on Facebook categorizes and codifies what may be a complex interpersonal interaction. The act of classification is political and ideological. The social digitization encouraged by social media converts all sorts of nuanced interactions into cut-and-dried bits and bytes.

Lifestreaming is the sum of a person's digital parts, aggregated and monitored by others. The "digital self" that results is composed of particular types of information; it is a type of funhouse mirror, casting certain aspects of life into sharp relief but obscuring others. Lifestreamers can attempt to manage this self to create particular impressions, but the presence of a networked audience makes this challenging. Like self-branding, this management, if done "correctly," requires frequent, ongoing emotional labor. The lifestream is not a direct reflection of a person, but a strategic, edited simulacrum, one specifically configured to be viewed by an audience.

The audience is a crucial element of lifestreaming, because life-streaming without an audience is simply tracking. Lifestreaming involves broadcasting personal data to other people, whether anyone with an internet connection or a subgroup of readers defined by a privacy filter. … Audience members watch each other's actions by consuming their content, and by doing so formulate a view of what is normal, accepted, or unaccepted in the community. This understanding of audience creates an internalized gaze that reflects community norms. Members of the tech scene imagine how the audience will view their own lifestreamed self-presentation, and alter it accordingly. Monitoring of oneself and others thus becomes an expected and normative part of this social interaction.

I use the term audience rather than the public when describing viewers of a piece of digital content. The term "audience" can refer to the imagined audience, the actual audience, or the potential audience for one's content. But while "potential audience" resembles the vernacular sense of "public," I use "audience" here to mean the actual audience, the people interested in a piece of information who actually view it. Just as media professionals do not use the term "public" for people watching a movie or TV show, we should not use it for digital content. The use of audience also implies performance, because a lot of digital content is created with impression management in mind.

The networked audience is distinct from the broadcast audience in that the networked audience is connected. The tech scene is a superlative example of the networked audience, because the social element is articulated both on and offline. Unlike many online communities where a small percentage of people create most of the content, people in the tech scene act as both content producers and consumers to maintain status and intimate ties with the community. Lifestreamers read others' lifestreams and create content with their audience in mind. Their online and offline lives are intrinsically interwoven, meaning that nonparticipation has real social costs.

The networked audience is distinct from the networked public, which danah boyd defines as the social space created by technologies like social network sites and the imagined community that thrives in this space. While it is possible to describe a single site like Twitter as a networked public (although I would not do so), I think the term networked audience is more appropriate for lifestreaming. “Networked public” implies a set of people communicating through a single technology (MySpace, Usenet, and so on), while the networked audience moves across sites. Moreover, the concept of audience as explained earlier implies a specific set of people interested enough to view digital content rather than an amorphous mass of potential readers.

Lifestreaming is a normal part of the technology scene. People expect their friends to be familiar with the latest social media applications and to connect and engage using blogs, Twitter, and Face-book. As Auren Hoffman, CEO of the reputation management firm RapLeaf, stated in our interview: “If you were an employer, and someone applied and they didn’t have any activity on social networks and that person was 23 years old, you’d think they were the Unabomber. You would be really scared to meet this person without even a bodyguard. I don’t even know if that person exists.” To people like Hoffman who are intimately familiar with Web 2.0 technology, not using social media marked unsophistication and backwardness. In Hoffman’s view, the relationship of employer and worker requires the familiarity of common social ties and community involvement; nonparticipation would not only make it difficult to contribute to social and technological conversations, but also potentially limit one’s economic mobility.

Proponents say this type of networked lifestreaming facilitates connections to others, deepens relationships, and creates a source of real-time information. Sharing information through services like Twitter creates an “ambient awareness” of others, a sense of what friends and acquaintances are doing or thinking that builds up over a long period of time. This ambient awareness is akin to a sense of co-presence, even if the participants are not geographically proximate. At the same time, networked lifestreaming often creates anxieties about creating and maintaining one’s social identity in front of an audience, and the extra layers of social information can result in intense social conflicts and arguments colloquially referred to as “drama.” Drama is “performative, interpersonal conflict that takes place in front of an active, engaged audience, often on social media.” Drama can be a form of norm policing, where social media is used to call out community members who violate explicit or implicit social norms.

While most Twitter messages are not substantive in and of themselves, Vincent Miller argues that they serve as phatic communication—as small talk that has the explicit purpose of "expressing sociability and maintaining connections or bonds."

One of the most important benefits is the previously mentioned ambient awareness of others, or the development of "digital intimacy." While Twitter is frequently characterized as a chattering stream of irrelevant pieces of information, these pieces of information, gossip, small talk, and trivia serve to create and maintain emotional connections between members of the networked audience. … Crawford argues that it is the "small details and daily events" that give "a sense of the rhythms and flows of another's life." Regardless of whether the details given are significant or even truthful, Twitter streams feel like listening to a voice.

Participants told me that Twitter enabled them to stay in touch with faraway friends and deepened relational bonds with people they knew in person. Individual items from the lifestream, such as what music someone is listening to or where they are eating, probably have little or no intrinsic value to the audience. But each tidbit aggregates with other pieces of personal information to form a larger picture and reinforce a social bond. This experience was almost unanimously echoed by informants and was the most frequently cited benefit of Twitter.

In addition to connecting faraway friends and acquaintances, lifestreaming helped people in the scene feel closer to each other. By scrolling through the day's Twitter updates or Facebook feed, people could see what others were doing. Video blogger Veronica Belmont, a self-described homebody, said, "I feel very connected to the community still because I know the minutiae of their lives through Twitter, through FriendFeed and Facebook. So you still have that sense of familiarity every time you run into them." Others said they became better friends with acquaintances after following them on Twitter. The virtual discussions and short messages reinforced in-person friendships. This was especially important for shy people who found online socializing easier, or were intimidated by the bustling social life of the technology community.

Others used lifestreaming to create accountability. Personal informatics enthusiasts used technology to record and monitor personal data, often using the internet to broadcast weight loss or health progress. For many, knowing that people were watching their data streams created a sense of obligation to an audience, much in the way that groups such as Weight Watchers or Alcoholics Anonymous use peer accountability to help members maintain desired behaviors.

While social media's advantages have been chronicled extensively, so have claims of negative consequences. Social media has been linked to narcissism, as it is said to reward shallow social connections, vanity, and self-promotion. Others state that social media is addictive, or creates information overload and attention deficit disorder– like symptoms that diminish long-term concentration. None of these linkages have been proven, but they are frequently mentioned in scare stories about technology. While some of these negative effects were mentioned by informants, the most frequently discussed downsides to social media use were those relating to the extra layer of social information that the lifestream provides.

A friend, "Jill," suspected that her boyfriend was having drinks with "Jane," whom she strongly disliked. Jill first noticed that her boyfriend's Twitter feed had been silent for several hours. She then saw Jane use Dodgeball to check-in to a bar on his street and subsequently tweet out a photo of the bar. Jill interpreted this information to mean that the two were together, and was convinced that Jane intended her to know about it. Combining information from both people's lifestreams created a larger social picture that was interpreted through a lens of suspicion. In retaliation, Jill tweeted a message about trustworthiness without naming either party.

Before the internet, people would learn about parties or romantic relationships by gossiping or asking friends. This type of knowledge wasn't secret, but it wasn't available to everyone and was rarely written down. Today, any member of the networked audience can peruse a Facebook invite to see who was or wasn't invited, or look at Foursquare check-ins to see who is spending time together. Social information is digitized and aggregated through the lifestream to create a layer of relational data that lays over the ordinary social graph. While this information facilitated bonding and personal connection, it also magnified gossip, suspicion, and uncertainty.

Social surveillance is the process by which social technologies like Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter let users gather social information about their friends and acquaintances. As Christina Nippert-Eng writes, "Humans are constantly scanning, constantly receptive to and looking for whatever they can perceive about each other, for whatever is put out there." Eavesdropping is a very human action, and people are resourceful at combining information from disparate sources to create a "bigger picture" of social activities. This picture is augmented by information provided on social media sites like Twitter or Flickr. Social media has a dual nature whereby information is both consumed and produced, which creates a symmetrical model of surveillance in which watchers expect, and desire, to be watched themselves. The presence of the networked audience not only enables connection, it encourages performances of intimacy and conflict to elicit reactions from others. Social media creates a context in which people are constantly monitoring themselves against the expectations of others—a context that can provoke anxiety and paranoia.

All of this extra information, and the additional meanings it sometimes implied, made the people I spoke to anxious. Since it was possible to keep close tabs on virtually anyone with a lifestream, people in my study spoke of trying, and failing, to resist the temptation to monitor ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, rivals, or partners. Some people installed browser software that blocked them from looking at specific Facebook profiles or Twitter feeds so that they would not be tempted to “cyber-stalk” exes or their new partners. But nothing was foolproof. If someone they wished to avoid was connected to the networked audience, their username or picture would pop up in retweets, @replies, and other people’s Facebook messages. This created endless social conflicts, and I frequently saw someone get upset because they saw a picture of their ex in their Flickr stream, or noticed when a trusted friend checked in with a sworn enemy. Because the networked audience includes indirect connections (for example, someone connected to a friend or friend-of-friend), it makes visible those interactions that one could otherwise avoid.

The presence of the networked audience not only encourages the self-conscious performance of identity; it enables others to weigh in on social norm violations.

The incident was debated both online and in-person, and the amplification ability of social media created a wider set of stake-holders in its outcome. Conflicts like these are dramatized as they play out in public, and serve as entertainment for the audience. Further, while audience involvement can be seen as promoting accountability, social media also amplifies the amount of drama and conflict as other people besides the original two players become involved in the argument, chiming in much as gossip blog readers weigh in on the latest celebrity divorce or feud.

The networked audience is intrinsically involved in any event publicized over social media, and are able to use their own Twitter accounts, blog comments, or Facebook walls to add their opinions and thereby become an ever-present member of the conversation. Unlike the broadcast audience, the networked audience is connected through the lifestream, which allows for active participation beyond simply reading digital messages.

People use these applications to “check in” to a place and broadcast their location to friends, making it possible to see where friends and acquaintances are at all times. If ten friends checked into a bar, the eleventh friend would wonder why she hadn’t been invited. This feeling is recognized by many in the tech scene as FOMO, or “fear of missing out.” Deciding to have a quiet night in doing laundry can seem like the wrong decision when faced with pictures and tweets from friends doing something that looks more fun.

Lifestreaming created other anxieties. People worried about their status in the community and whether they were participating appropriately. They fretted over what information should be revealed and what should be concealed. They regretted certain remarks they had made over social media and debated the appropriateness of others. Some even found the concept of an audience paralyzing in itself. Adrian Chan, an intense, cerebral interaction designer, said, “I’m hypersensitive, [I’m] unable to write or post tweets because I’m afraid they’ll sound stupid, or people will read into their possible meaning, read things into it.” While some people enjoyed performing for an audience, the potential public eyes made it hard for Chan to engage at all.

I almost say that the people are futuristic. They’re from the future. They’re like, “Oh, did you just, did you Twitter that? Did you Twitter this?” They just seem so up to date. Twitter is a phenomenon inside itself, but people are just so up to date. Even for me, when I first started here, it was very intimidating. Now, I kind of feel like I’ve caught up. But, for someone new jumping in, they would be totally bombarded and overwhelmed with it.

I found anecdotal evidence that the always-on, constantly updated nature of Twitter was both distracting and addictive. It is impossible, however, to conclude from this whether Twitter, let alone the internet as a whole, causes behavioral or emotional changes. My informants consumed huge amounts of information from many different on and offline sources, including television, books, and newspapers.

The realization that people were using Twitter extensively, and were very closely monitoring their tweets, reinforced the strategic posturing and performance aspects of relationships that were being maintained through social media. Although monitoring was framed positively, as a way for people to build social ties with others and remain connected to the network, it also engendered anxiety and suspicion. Given these downsides, why did people share so much personal information? How did people navigate privacy in this culture of sharing and surveillance? I found that most people in the scene framed this information sharing not as a disregard for privacy, but as a shift to publicity.

This discourse maintains that social media users are credulous about their information disclosure, expecting privacy but unknowingly revealing personal data and making themselves vulnerable. Many studies confuse “information disclosure” with “lack of regard for privacy,” but others have found no correlation between the two. This inconsistency becomes more clearly understood when evaluating information disclosure online through a lens not of losing privacy, but of gaining publicity. My informants chose to reveal information for political reasons, for self-promotion, and to participate in the social life of the scene, but they all maintained carefully considered boundaries between information they would and would not publicize online.

There is a difference between making information public and publicizing it. “Public” implies democracy, freedom, participation, and inclusion, while “publicity” suggests openness, visibility, attention, status, and spectacle. Information that is public can, in theory, be accessed by virtually anyone, but in practice will probably only be seen by a few. In contrast, information that is publicized is strategically made visible to a greater audience through three dimensions: the effort it takes to find information, the ease of locating that information, and the interest in that information. For instance, imagine that the records of an acrimonious celebrity divorce are made public. To read them, one must drive to a California courthouse, find the court records department, request them from an archivist, and wait for the records to be found. The requestor may be able, at best, to make a photocopy to take home. These steps are significant barriers to obtaining the information, and so place it in a state of what law scholars call “practical obscurity.” But once a tabloid reporter goes through this process, scans the documents, puts them on the tabloid website, and adds an enormous headline, the records are publicized, or “hyper-disseminated.” Publicizing information is thus an effort to make it more interesting (by placing it on a tabloid site with a large headline), easier to find (through Google or other indexes), and easier to obtain (once it is online).

There is a distinction between openness and transparency: openness is about making all information available, whereas transparency happens when there is a policy of making useful and relevant information available. For example, when asked for climatology statistics, an environmental agency might make hundreds of thousands of pages of raw data available. This act of openness is neither useful nor readable. Creating and disseminating a top-level summary document that can be consumed easily, however, is both useful and readable and represents transparency. Similarly, true openness in one's personal life means allowing everything to "hang out" in a nonselective way, whereas transparency provides useful and meaningful information. When considering personal information, what is "meaningful" is a normative judgment that may vary widely among members of the audience. But the distinction between revealing everything and selective divulgence is important.

At the point where critical mass is reached of everybody exposing enough private information, it becomes too honest for anybody to pay attention to it all and try to discriminate on it. At the point where everybody really is out there with whatever their little weird thing is, that’s the point at which you stop, when you say, “Oh, you know what, a fact with humanity, is that all of us have some weird freaky thing we fantasize about, or some weird freaky thing that we’re afraid of, or some weird freaky thing that, I don’t know, that’s what’s normal!” There’s no such thing as a weird freaky thing. But until that critical mass happens, it’s an act of courage to put that picture up on your Facebook … and it’s an act of courage that, you know, very much comes with some tradeoffs.

According to this viewpoint, weathering the drama caused by publicizing formerly private acts is the downside of living one’s life truthfully and authentically. Larson acknowledges the possible negative consequences and that “public living” requires emotional effort and bravery, but he believes that the eventual social benefits are more important. He also suggests a version of “authenticity” that implies the full disclosure of what may be very personal habits. Authenticity is thus defined as publicity, not simply a lack of artifice.

This position follows conservative political ideologies that position American society as a global model of freedom and democracy. Çelik expressed frustration with what he saw as the status quo notion that authority figures are expected to live conservative lives. He believes that he can combat this viewpoint and challenge authority by simultaneously being a leader in the technology community and living in public. Thus openness online becomes a political act.

Idealizing openness implies that there should be no difference in self-presentation regardless of circumstance. Under this particular definition of authenticity, an honest and forthright person will be who they “really are” consistently, regardless of who is listening. But this view does not reflect the realities of how people differ in the ways they use gesture, language, and tone to manage impressions face-to-face. The idea of a single, “authentic” self, although it carries a great deal of currency in contemporary American culture, is a social construction, one at odds with actual social practice.

Privacy theorists Daniel Solove, Priscilla Regan, and Helen Nissenbaum all argue that conceptualizing privacy as secrecy ignores the myriad of other reasons that privacy is necessary. Solove writes: “Even surveillance of legal activities can inhibit people from engaging in them. The value of protecting against chilling effects is not measured simply by focusing on the particular individuals who are deterred from exercising their rights. Chilling effects harm society because, among other things, they reduce the range of viewpoints expressed and the degree of freedom with which to engage in political activity.” Allowing absolute electronic surveillance limits government and corporate accountability, creates an imbalance of power, and, overall, compromises social freedom. When Çelik or Larson idealize living in public, they are not talking about complete disclosure of personal information, but instead transparency along specific lines, namely drug use and sexuality. The belief that these aspects of life should be publicized, however, has an ideological function.

Promoting absolute openness disregards the privilege of most people in the tech scene. It is one thing for a wealthy, white male programmer to admit that he sometimes smokes pot. It is another for an undocumented worker to publicize his immigration status, or for a woman escaping a domestic violence situation to reveal her home address. Advocating “openness” ignores the very circumstances that may make self-disclosure dangerous. Furthermore, upholding personal transparency as an ideal supports the business models of social software, which profit from information disclosure.

Zuckerberg echoes the belief that society is becoming more open, claiming that Facebook is changing its privacy settings to reflect this. But Facebook has a huge vested interest in encouraging people to publicize personal information, since they make money by selling user data and “eyeballs” to marketing firms, data aggregators, and advertisers. The more people depend on Twitter, Foursquare, or Face-book to learn about their friends, the more money their parent companies make. Zuckerberg’s interpretation of “openness” does not cover corporate openness—Facebook and Apple are notoriously tight-lipped—but only personal openness. While people like Larson and Çelik are well intentioned, selectively revealing information to a targeted audience is not the same as, say, coming out as gay in Iraq. They frame openness as socially beneficial, but the tools and culture of Web 2.0 have evolved to promote a particular kind of openness and transparency because it drives profit to social media companies, not because it furthers freedom and democracy.

In terms of the public/private divide, I think people think I have no private life. Because I talk about a lot of very intimate things but I use that strategically. [But] there are a lot of private things that I would never even think to talk about and people don’t even know; they can’t even conceive. They think that because I’m talking about sexuality or activism or things I’m very passionate about that they must know everything about me, which is a marvelous way to have a private life. Because people think they already know your dirty secrets. … Grant had clearly defined boundaries around personal information sharing. She believed that sharing more than most people online (for example, her fervent writing about sexuality) allowed the rest of her private life to fly under the radar. While Grant reveals more online than many people do—she is contemplating a project that would document her sexual encounters—she is playing a character, the feminist performance artist known for her forthrightness, rather than living her entire life in public. It is precisely through revealing more that she attempts to conceal what she wants to keep most private; she is still presenting an edited self.

Grant's position also reveals the extent to which “public living,” and therefore publicity, is necessary for a successful member of the tech scene. For Grant to maintain her freelance career, she needed a visible public persona. Much of her work involved advising nonprofits on social media use, so it was vital for her to demonstrate proficiency with the technologies. And as a sex writer and activist, she was expected to blog and tweet about sex, relationships, and intimacy. Her strategy to reveal the very personal was not only a way for her to keep some topics to herself; it also enabled her to attract an audience and to interest freelance clients. She was able to use this audience interaction to build her career further; in 2010, she and a partner used Kickstarter, a “crowdfunding” site that solicits donations for creative projects, to raise more than $17,000 to print an anthology of sex writing.

It really bothered [the company] that there was any entity online where it was me, meaning all of me and not divided. Like they didn’t want to have my title associated with stuff I did personally. They’re like, “Can’t you create a different account, to separate them?” I’m like “This is my name” … they were saying things to me like, “The way you live your life online is an obvious detriment for your career,” and I was like, “No, it’s not,” and they got really pissed. It was two different languages because they couldn’t understand that I wouldn’t have a career if I didn’t live my life online the way I was.

Within the scene there are numerous degrees of public-ness, from people who graphically document their sex lives to those who adhere to a strictly professional self-presentation. On one end of the spectrum, Nick Starr tweets about sexual activities, homelessness, his HIV status, and plastic surgery. On the other, Julia Allison, who is considered very public, does not lifestream meetings with potential clients or famous friends so as not to compromise her business dealings. Still others choose not to speak publicly about their children or their relationships, but carefully dole out other pieces of personal information to appear authentic to their audiences. These choices are affected by the software that people use, their motivations, and complex webs of obligations to others. But even people who reveal a great deal of personal information online do this thoughtfully.

The only sort of drawback is that I can’t cuss, purely or literally let my hair down in a certain way anymore privately, … because everything I do has to reflect the public image that I need to keep up. That’s the irony of openness, because it’s not so open, right? It’s a manufactured openness in that way, that it’s always filtered. It’s kind of like open source; anybody can take the code and mess around with it but there’s a very structured way of doing it. And you check in and you check out and you sign your name to it. And you have to go through certain meritocratic levels to work on the kernel. It’s not like people can just take the code and just fly with it and open living is the same way. It’s ironic because it’s ultimately less open, in a lot of ways, personally, that's my experience.

Hunt is open about many aspects of her life; she tweeted that her son had run up a $1,051 phone bill texting his friends in the United States, and asked for advice on how to manage the problem. But Hunt has defined a set of acceptable boundaries for information disclosure—she generally avoids talking about relationships or dating—and strictly manages her self-presentation. This management requires self-monitoring, seeing herself through the gaze of others and altering her actions accordingly. As a result, Hunt is constantly working to produce and edit her desired image.

Others decrease their involvement in social media to reduce anxiety or drama. People in the scene often cycled through phases of social media use, from intense to mild. Glenda Bautista told me that people often scaled back their information disclosure after one particular incident. In her case, Bautista began the difficult process of “locking down” her online presence after a recruiter referred to her personal blog and boyfriend in a job interview.

I remember once, just to keep my name out of Google, or just to not have anything track back to me, I tried to redo my last name, so that it wouldn’t be attributed to me. That didn’t go well, because some people … It’s not that they have big mouths, it’s just that they don’t know where my line is … some people literally do not have the boundaries. And it takes too much policing, too much energy to literally be like, “Take that down, put that up …” I mean, it’s exhausting.

It’s almost like you’re too transparent. I was sitting with the editor of ZDNet last night, Larry Dignan, and he is like a top writer, and he is like, ‘I’m scared of Facebook, because all my middle school friends are going and scanning photos,’ and he is like ‘I don’t want all that.’ Almost now we’re at the point when we don’t have control over what people publish about us.” Dignan is a professional who presumably does not want his online reputation sullied by unflattering childhood photos. Even sans tags, online photos can be misinterpreted. A friend once asked me to remove a picture of him hugging a female friend from my Flickr stream, because he did not want his notoriously jealous girlfriend to misinterpret it.

The previously mentioned problem of “right hand, left hand,” where people at an event have different informational norms, can create conflicts. For example, “John” may not want “Mike” to know that he is having dinner with Mike’s rival “Chris.” But Mike may learn this anyway if Chris tweets or blogs about his dinner with John. John can ask Chris to keep the dinner secret, but ultimately he cannot control how private this information will be.

People frequently reveal information about others, deliberately or inadvertently, through the lifestream. Someone without a Twitter account can be referenced in a tweet. A person who chooses not to check in at a bar can still be photographed by another patron. Someone can be tagged in a photo on Facebook even if they do not have a Facebook account. Two users who are not directly connected through social media site may appear in each other’s streams through mutual friends.

As Glenda Bautista said, monitoring can be “exhausting,” a form of emotional labor. It may also be impossible, because new tools and sites are constantly being developed.

Unfortunately, self-presentation in the lifestream is not wholly self-dependent. The tagged photos, @reply references, and Foursquare check-ins provided by others can be monitored, but rarely changed.

But there are flagrant contradictions between the ideals of transparent, public living and the realities of lifestreaming in a community where virtually everyone lifestreams. Lifestreaming creates an additional layer of social information: by digitizing previously unrecorded things and forming, in the aggregate, a whole that reveals more than the sum of its parts, it becomes part of a digital mirror held up to the scene that often reveals more than the participants intended. The arguments, contradictions, and dramas that play out as a result cause people to hold back, restrict, and manage their lifestream. The lifestream becomes a portrayal of a formal, edited self.

Contrary to the utopian theories of transparency and openness promoted in Web 2.0 discourse, and the moral panics around lack of privacy online, lifestreaming is not an unvarnished digital stream of someone's online actions. Instead it is a carefully edited, purposeful construction of self. Lifestreamers choose what to reveal and conceal: they monitor their own and other's actions, publicizing certain aspects of their lives while keeping other parts to themselves, and they may even exaggerate or falsify information to produce a desired effect. The resulting lifestream is an attempt to inculcate a particular version of oneself that appeals to others in the networked audience.

Social media applications encourage people to provide personal information as part of their business model, but often, putting personal information online is interpreted by researchers and the media alike as a lack of concern for privacy. This ignores the fact that participating in social information-sharing has many benefits, including intimacy, friendship, and status. There are strong social pressures to participate in social media in the technology scene. Nonparticipation marks one as an outsider and a Luddite, and limits how far one can go in the community, and perhaps professionally as well. Rather than expecting theories about privacy in the public sphere to explain these behaviors, we can understand information disclosure as an act of publicizing the self to a networked audience. The value of visibility and access motivates people to share with each other, resulting in affective benefits.

Due to the imprecision of these controls and the new levels of inference possible with aggregated social information, however, it is often impossible to avoid drama in a community where social life exists both on and offline, and where information sharing is a normative behavior. Further, while the Web 2.0 culture may frame this sharing within a discourse of freedom and democracy, we must remember that the profit models of social media depend on user-contributed information. Perhaps not surprisingly then, the models of openness idealized by Web 2.0 both ignore the negative consequences of transparency and promote a particular type of transparency that privileges the kinds of information sharing that benefit corporations more than individuals.

I found no correlation between how much someone cares about privacy and the amount of information they put online. For instance, Melissa Gira Grant reveals a great deal about her sex life, but is very protective of what she chooses not to share. Frequent tweeters are upset if a friend's tweet publicizes something they did not want disclosed. These findings are supported by other empirical studies showing that information disclosure does not imply a lack of concern for privacy. People employ strategies like withholding certain pieces of information, monitoring their friends' use of social media, adopting varying definitions of privacy, and editing their own lifestream in order to maintain a level of privacy they are comfortable with.

While Web 2.0's complex history bestows social media with radical, transformative power, it has ended up prioritizing entrepreneurialism, commodi-fication, and independence. This combination has played out in complex and contradictory ways; for example, the tech scene values self-made status over ascribed status, but looks down on individuals who actively court attention rather than “earning it” for their accomplishments. Many of the assumptions about “correct” behavior that stem from these values are shaped and reinforced by technical features of social media, such as quantifiable metrics and digital instantiation of social information. To participate in the tech scene, and to attempt to rise to the top of its economic hierarchy, people must negotiate these inconsistencies in their most personal understandings of themselves: what they reveal, what they conceal, and to whom they connect.

In a cultural context where idealists have linked social media to democracy, egalitarianism, and participation, the tech scene in San Francisco considers itself to be exceptional. Supporters speak glowingly of a singularly meritocratic environment where innovative entrepreneurs disrupt fusty old industries and facilitate sweeping social change. In this chapter, I look at how the tech scene thinks about itself. Even those people who privately acknowledge problems and difficulties offer platitudes about participation when asked about San Francisco. But if the tech scene is really a meritocracy, why are so many of its key players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs to Gary Vaynerchuk, white men? If entrepreneurs are born, not made, why are there so many programs attempting to create entrepreneurs? If the most successful people in tech are authentic, why do people feel so much distress around revealing and concealing information? If tech is truly game-changing, why are old-fashioned capitalism and the commodification of personal information never truly questioned?

Taken as a whole, these themes of authenticity, meritocracy, and entrepreneurialism reinforce both a closed system of privilege and one centered almost entirely around the core beliefs of neoliberal capitalism. This does not make technology intrinsically better or worse than any other American business; I'd certainly rather socialize with tech people than bankers. But it does reveal the threadbare nature of digital exceptionalism. People in tech repeatedly portray San Francisco and Silicon Valley as places where the smartest, most motivated people from around the globe are changing the world for the better, and this rhetoric has been taken up and repeated often by traditional media outlets. Unlike, say, community activists, public schoolteachers, social workers, or health care providers, technologists are ultimately focused on a small slice of the population, and they are primarily looking for ideas that will prove profitable. These entrepreneurs may have a passion for better audio streaming or e-mail, but to say that such pursuits are world-changing is a bit disingenuous.

Ultimately improving this problem will be very difficult, because the issue of gender is intimately woven into Silicon Valley's view of itself and its highest-status members. It even manifests itself in seemingly unrelated issues, like the ideal of authentic content.

In Carl Elliott’s Better Than Well, he discusses “the notion of authenticity as a moral ideal: the idea that we each have a way of living that is uniquely our own, and that we are each called to live in our own way rather than that of someone else.” But “authenticity” is a social construct that is always defined against something else; it is a slippery concept that is impossible to pin down.

To Walker, authenticity is about being honest and transparent with intentions rather than sneakily attempting to curry favor. Because Walker worked for the hot startup Foursquare when I interviewed him, he was privy to a great deal of obsequiousness. Obviously, flattery and sycophancy come hand in hand with business dealings, but it was difficult for any potential investor to disguise his intentions given sites like CrunchBase and AngelList, which provide detailed biographical information about tech people. Walker's definition of authenticity made sense given the realities of startup investment.

Soraya Darabi, former social media strategist for the New York Times, described this approach as strategic: "Say you're an author, a book aficionado. Most [of your followers] have tagged music as a passion. You might want to throw them a bone about your favorite song. There are a lot of Venn diagram overlaps in this community. It's to your advantage to be as much as part of a community as possible which means engaging with people's interests." In other words, sharing personal information was a branding strategy in that it humanized businesspeople and allowed for a greater connection with their audience. This was, of course, assuming that what one shared was consistent with his or her brand-image.

The mythology of Silicon Valley success holds that those who “make it” do so due to their excellent ideas and ability, because the tech scene is a meritocracy that rewards intelligence and hard work. Paulina Barsook writes: “Philosophical technolibertarianism gives one pause because it colors, deeply and widely and mostly unconsciously, a zillion personal and institutional decisions. The notion that because one is rich one must be smart, however fallacious, is deeply embedded: People can equate piles of money—or the promise of it—with good sense, wisdom, and savoir faire.” This meritocratic notion of wealth through accomplishment was often contrasted with an archaic view of the East Coast as peppered with prep schools and debutante balls. Anu Nigam said, “There’s no past legacy like in the East Coast, or tradition. It’s who you work with, who you know, what have you done.” Sarah Lacy concurred: “When I hear ‘social status’ I think of like a very East Coast notion of it. I just think it’s so different here. It’s so wrapped up in achievement.” Dan Nye, describing what made San Francisco unique, said, “On the East Coast you frequently start the conversation with what prep school, what college, where did you spend your summers—there’s less of that out here.”

The myth of meritocracy holds that anyone can come from anywhere and achieve great success in Silicon Valley if they are skilled. An anonymous technology executive said, “It’s like the new version of the American Dream. It used to be get a good job, kind of just have a stable life but the good jobs aren’t even that good anymore … there’s this feeling that anyone can do it. Anyone can come to America and have a good life or whatever and starting an internet company, it feels like anyone can do it and there’s some truth to it. It aligns with American values.”

Hartley's story reveals that while it was the “kickass” Ruby on Rails site that got the young teen noticed, it is his networking skills that have elevated him to “elite” status. The always-caustic Owen Thomas agreed. “The ultimate story about the Valley is about a meritocracy. If you strip away everything else, that is the story,” he noted, but in fact, San Francisco is “a place where personal connections rule.” Such personal connections are necessary to attract venture capital, find a co-founder, set up a possible acquisition, and get noticed by tech blogs and technology journalists. These economic hierarchies are naturalized and made invisible by framing them as innocuous social ties.

I heard this metaphor dozens of times; the saying “everyone wants to take the pretty girl to the dance,” refers to the tendency venture capitalists have to cluster around popular deals. (The prevalence of this phrase is very revealing of who is in these meetings.) In reality, everyone wants to be in business with young, white, male entrepreneurs with connections to high-status people, a pedigree from certain companies, a well-known mentor, and perhaps a Stanford degree.

VCs [venture capitalists] hold clear stereo types of successful CEOs (they call it pattern recognition, but in other industries they call it profiling or stereotyping.) John Doerr [a venture capitalist] publicly stated that his most successful investments—and the no-brainer pattern for future investments—were in founders who were white, male, under 30, nerds, with no social life who dropped out of Harvard or Stanford.

To forge the type of social connections necessary to move into the upper echelons of the tech scene requires being able to take part in group activities, travel to conferences, and work on personal projects. This requires middle-to upper-class wealth, which filters out most people.

The mythology of meritocracy has several ideological effects. It denies the role of personal connections, wealth, background, gender, race, or education in an individual’s success. If, for example, women (or people of color, or gay people) are not getting venture-capital funding at the same rate as men, the myth maintains, it is due to their lack of ability rather than institutional sexism. It also justifies immense wealth as the worthy spoils of the smartest and best. This libertarian bent may explain why wealthy technology workers are far less philanthropic than their “high society” counterparts; the mythology certainly implies that those mired in poverty are similarly deserving of their lowly status. The myth of the entrepreneur goes hand in hand with the myth of meritocracy, setting entrepreneurs apart as a rare, visionary breed who uniquely deserve their success.

Entrepreneurs almost never claim that they founded a company to get rich; instead, they usually cloak their ambitions in idealistic language. This rhetorical move justifies the extremely high status of people who sold companies for millions of dollars: members of the tech community claim that their drive and intelligence are impressive, not their wealth. Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman said, "That's really the competition, whose startup is more revolutionary and impactful in driving the industry forward, is more interesting than just who has the most money or who has the fancy corporate jets or who drives the fancy cars."

Because entrepreneurs are so high status, there is an enormous industry focused on teaching and promoting entrepreneurship. Stanford, which has an outsized influence on the tech scene, has a Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at its business school, the Stanford Technology Ventures Program in the engineering school, and so many other groups devoted to entrepreneurship that there is an umbrella organization called the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network that coordinates them all. The Princeton Review now ranks both graduate and undergraduate entrepreneurship programs. Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) holds activities in 115 countries and is supported by President Obama and dozens of other world leaders.

We put a lot of stock in the heroics of the entrepreneur and the genius of the idea or whatever. But if you actually look at it, it's so rare, there [are] basically almost no examples of a great idea where there was just one team that figured it out magically. At the time, when we started Yelp, I was like, "We're super stealthy, nobody has this idea, we're such super geniuses." Then literally, like, a couple of weeks before we launched, somebody announced that [he] was doing almost the same thing. And like a month after we launched, somebody else comes out of the closet, doing the same thing. And we were all clustered so close together, which meant a bunch of technology lined up that people knew could potentially solve this issue of how you find a great little business, how you bring word of mouth to the web. There are some nuances to how do you get that right and how do you nail it, and how do you actually win, but it just goes to show that the idea itself is very rarely truly novel.

Scholarship on innovation backs up this perspective. It turns out that the entrepreneur as a "great man" falls into the myth of technical innovation in which individuals are responsible for progressive leaps in technology. Rather than a "great man" with a eureka moment who single-handedly invents something game-changing, most innovations involve parallel developments, uncredited contributors, failures and starts, and lengthy social histories, all of which make for a far less exciting narrative.

The myth of the entrepreneur is so popular because it aligns with core American values. Orvis Collins and David Moore write that the entrepreneur is a "heroic figure in American folklore akin perhaps, to Davy Crockett and other truly indigenous epic types—stalwartindependents who hewed forests, climbed over the mountains, built new communities, rose from nothing to something, and did all the things American heroes must have done to build a great nation." American culture places a high value on the "self-made man" and the rags-to-riches story of Horatio Alger, both of which are still remarkably persistent tropes in popular discourse and business writing. The image of the successful high-tech entrepreneur is surprisingly similar across twenty-five years of technology development: young, rich, famous, intrinsically risk-taking, innovative, and intelligent. This image has deep implications for the way the technology industry functions, particularly when it comes to gender.

In Silicon Valley specifically, the image of the entrepreneur that has persisted through thirty years of boom-and-bust cycles is almost always young, white, and male. Back in the mid-1980s, in his book The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, Michael Shawn Malone described Silicon Valley denizens as "thirty year old tycoons in T-shirts, making their first hundred million before they buy their first pin-striped suit; secretaries worth millions thanks to a few dollars spent on stock options; garage inventors suddenly finding themselves on lists of the world's richest men." In this portrayal, the "world's richest" inventors are men, while the "secretaries," presumably female, get rich through the almost-accidental purchasing of stock. This image of the industry as male-dominated, with women either irrelevant or playing the part of girlfriends or gold-diggers, persisted through the microelectronics era: Why there are few women in positions of responsibility in SV [Silicon Valley] is complex and puzzling ...

No less than 40 percent of privately held businesses in the United States are owned by women. And despite the attribution of entrepreneurial traits to men, studies have shown no significant differences between women and men who start companies in terms of education, technical background, or motivation. In fact, by some metrics, women-owned companies outperform the average: women owners, on average, are more conservative about spending money, and are more likely to survive the transition from startup to established company. Despite this, women are virtually absent from the upper echelons of technology. While venture-backed technology companies do not represent the majority of U.S. companies, they are given the highest status in Silicon Valley and are overwhelmingly run and funded by men. Only 8 percent of venture-backed startups are founded by women, and only 14 percent of venture capitalists are women; at the top technology venture-capital firms, only 8 percent of investment professionals are women.

While many members of the tech scene—both men and women—espoused equality and meritocracy during the period of my study, they simultaneously reenacted and reinforced sexist stereotypes about women in technology through their own talk and practice. Women’s contributions to the scene were undervalued or attributed to men, women were systematically sexualized and judged on appearance, and structural sexism was denied. This lopsided description of women’s roles discourages women’s participation in entrepreneurial technology, creating fewer female role models and mentors for younger women and thus perpetuating the low rates of women in technology.

Studies show that mentorship is an important part of career mobility and longevity in business in general, but that women face more barriers than men in finding a mentor due to a lack of women in upper-level management and the belief that there is too little common ground between men and women in the field to make cross-gender mentor-protégé relationships work. This mentoring problem is compounded in the technology industry since there are so few women in upper management. I found that relationships that might have been characterized as “networking” or “mentoring” between men were sexualized if one member of the dyad was female.

The relative stories I found all contained one trend: ambitious and often “troublesome” women who profited professionally by their involvement with established men of authority. Of course, had these stories involved the relationship between two men, one would always (well, almost always) have simply called it “networking.” With women, networking was recast as a pejorative and manipulative working of the system. And because there were ladies involved, the articles … emphasized their sexual appeal and activities with the men inquestion.

While there certainly were women and men within the scene who both dated and worked together, these relationships were described in terms like “gold-digging” or “sleeping her way to the top” regardless of whether they were romantic or not. Culver’s founding of Pownce was attributed to her friendship with Kevin Rose or Twitter designer Daniel Burka. Owen Thomas wrote a lengthy blog post about Culver, which read, in part: “If she doesn’t want to be famous, Culver might want to take a look at her relentless techno-sexuality, which more than hints at the acquisition of influence rather than intimacy as its goal. Is it sexist to point this out? Perhaps, but not nearly as sexist as touting technical skills while sleeping your way to the top.”

From Thomas's point of view, Culver truly was "sleeping her way to the top," and it was his journalistic duty to point this out so that other women wouldn't follow the same path. This story was widely accepted; one informant, a self-professed feminist woman, said snidely, "Unfortunately for Leah, it's not that she's sleeping."

Thomas's questionable logic becomes even more problematic when this portrayal of Culver is shown to be part of a pattern. In addition to Tara Hunt and Chris Messina, one informant told me that the career of Ariel Waldman, a social media consultant and blogger, had been launched when technologist Tantek Çelik "discovered" her. Blogger Penelope Trunk wrote a post calling business strategist Glenda Bautista a "gold-digger" for her relationship with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, although Mullenweg achieved his success only after he and Bautista began dating (Trunk backpedaled once Bautista's considerable professional accomplishments were pointed out). In all these instances, women's accomplishments were attributed to their involvement with men; I did not witness a single instance of this with men who were mentored by other men.

This devaluation of women's accomplishments was systematic, reflecting the idea that women in the tech scene are overlooked or excluded because they are less worthy than men. One informant, an investor, said some very questionable things about women in an interview. (He looked horrified when he realized what he had said on the record, and I promised to keep his identity secret.) In his words: "The basic conclusion we came to is like, women are just emotional and it reminds me—don't take this the wrong way—of a seven-year-old kid, or an eight-year-old kid who's struggling with emotions, doesn't know what's happening, they can't verbalize it, it happens to all of us, even men. And men can shut down, get angry, but we can logically do something. And women can't express it to the guy logically." Clearly, if a venture capitalist thinks that women are less logical and emotionally mature than men, this will make him less likely to fund women-run companies.

Ariel Waldman when she got hired as the Community Manager at Pownce she didn't really have a track record other than being a sex blogger, and now she is writing a book about social media and she is doing community management work for NASA. So Pownce was a failure, not because she failed but, if you look at her resume, it would appear that so far Ariel doesn't really have a track record still. So she is running off of, I guess fumes and she is doing a great job but if I was an analyst … I would say, I don't know how she got this job at NASA. She is a sex blogger who worked for a failed startup who is on Twitter. She has like 20,000 followers.

The informant implies that Waldman’s success is unwarranted because she does not have the “track record” for it. While he admits she is doing a “great job,” he undermines this statement by suggesting she isn’t qualified. Similarly, another informant said about Tara Hunt: “It’s very high school or college. It’s like the sorority sisters, the great girls at school, that cadre of people who definitely were not the nerds, who were not the geeks … you know, the beautiful people. And so there’s that, but it’s paper-thin. No offense, I like Tara and she’s a nice person, but if you sit down and actually talk to her, it’s like two inches and a mile wide. There’s no depth.” After disclaiming that he means “no offense,” this informant places Hunt in the category of the “beautiful people,” stating that she is pretty, but has no intellectual depth. … These quotes are troubling because they suggest the systematic gender discrimination that women in the scene must endure on their way to achieving success, discrimination that stems from the perception that they are less qualified than their male peers. As the former dean of MIT concluded after a lengthy study of gender discrimination and the status of women faculty members, “Once and for all we must recognize that the heart and soul of discrimination, the last refuge of the bigot, is to say that those who are discriminated against deserve it because they are less good.”

Women in tech, however, generally work in marketing, public relations, project management, event planning, graphic design, or community management, all lower-status jobs than developers, engineers, venture capitalists, or entrepreneurs. The number of women in computer science is dismally low; according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, women comprise 19 percent of hardware engineers, 21 percent of software engineers, and 22 percent of computer programmers. Computer and mathematical professions are, overall, 75 percent male. Moreover, these numbers have actually decreased since the 1980s.

These problems are widely acknowledged by others. There are many organizations dedicated to supporting women in technology, such as Women 2.0, Change the Ratio, Astria, Girls in Tech, the Forum for Women’s Entrepreneurs and Executives, and the National Center for Women and Information Technology. And there has been a flurry of attention paid to egregious sexist incidents at technology conferences and among nerd subcultures. But complex problems have complex solutions. Unfortunately, the persistent idea that the technology industry is a meritocracy undermines these efforts, because it implies—incorrectly—that those who do not rise to the top are less capable than those who do.

This was Google Zeitgeist, Google's exclusive, all-expenses-paid attempt to bring together the "great minds of our time" for the benefit of the invited guests—mostly advertising executives, the bread and butter of Google's business model. I was one of perhaps five academics, but the entertainment industry and non-profits were well represented (I was very excited to meet Guy Oseary, Madonna's manager). The theme was "one of us, all of us," with a strong undercurrent of the buzzword du jour, social entrepreneurship. We heard repeatedly that the values of technology, Silicon Valley, and innovation could help solve the problems of society at large. As Schmidt said, "This model of investment, innovation, and overcoming failure is necessary. If we're going to achieve greatness in the twenty-first century, and I believe we will, we have to start with some Silicon Valley thinking." He stated that "ultimately, this world will be owned by an entrepreneur."

My original impetus behind this project was to look realistically at the influence of profit-driven business models on the use and development of social media applications. I wanted to provide a counterbalance to the notion that social media promoted some sort of ideal, egalitarian society. I knew from my years of working in dot-com companies that decisions about software were often based on what would make the most money, rather than what would be the most beneficial for the user or, even less realistically, what was more democratic or participatory. I also wished to test the theory that social media was providing new, meritocratic opportunities for visibility and success.

I also wished to test the theory that social media was providing new, meritocratic opportunities for visibility and success. There certainly are people who can attribute much of their professional success to tools like blogs and Twitter. In September 2008, I was squeezing through a crowded party for the social media blog Mashable when I met Stowe Boyd. Boyd, wearing a Kangol hat and a white beard, was a Silicon Valley veteran and blogger. In the first five minutes I met him, he told me that he had been blogging for ten years; had invented the term “social tool” and was the top Google result for the phrase; and had 90,000 visitors a month on his three blogs. Boyd, a consummate self-promoter and connector, despises the term “self-branding.” Yet he’s good at it. He exemplifies the entrepreneurial self, one who harnesses social media’s broadcasting ability to its fullest extent. Boyd knew everyone in the scene, and during our interview gave me lengthy, detailed descriptions, and critiques, of its movers and shakers. His blog contains thoughtful commentary and analysis of social software; in another life, he might have been an academic. Yet his professional accomplishments did not include starting a company, garnering funding, or writing popular software. Boyd, through sheer force of will, successful networking, and strategic use of social media, had positioned himself as an expert and tech scene heavyweight, and those around him seemed happy to accept his take on things.

Boyd is a new breed of tech scene insider, one who has harnessed self-presentation techniques to successfully build a career. He is exactly the sort of person whom Gary Vaynerchuk might hold up as a role model, and who is poised to succeed in a de-centered, destabilized American economy. But Boyd’s success is exceptional. He is able to talk about the “right” sort of things and have the “right” sort of people pay attention. There are far more people who have tried, and failed, to make this work, because they find the discomfort and conflict that comes with an internet presence too difficult; because the information they broadcast is too feminine, raw, or “uninteresting”; or simply because they exist outside of the tightly wound networks of power and capital that make up Silicon Valley.

Social media applies contradictory ideals of counterculture and capitalism to the self, friendships, intimate relationships, and interpersonal interactions. People can spread ideas and creations to a formerly inconceivable mass audience, but only bounded and influenced by the restraints of modern neoliberal capitalism. As sociolinguist Crispin Thurlow writes, “The line between commerce and the rest of life is often blurred—and, indeed, strategically blurred—in the rhetoric of social media.” The strategies I’ve documented involve reconceptualizing and repositioning oneself into the familiar limits of a commodity: the brand or the celebrity. But they are not exactly the same. The micro-celebrity is held to a different set of standards than the movie star; in particular, the micro-celebrity is expected to be available and transparent, in line with the exhibitionist internet, rather than carefully guarded and assisted by a network of managers like the movie star. Because the self-brand is a person underneath his or her shiny exterior, with the attendant imperfections and mistakes, creating and maintaining a consistent image involves real labor, which is exchanged for the relational and personal benefits provided by social media, such as support, intimacy, and connection. This labor value is also converted into literal capital by social media companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, which profit from personal disclosure and its attraction of users to their products. This series of exchanges thus commodifies identity, emotion, and relationships within a digital context.

The self-branded, micro-celebrity ideal also invites a normalization of surveillance that threatens individual agency. When social technologies emerged, pundits and journalists hailed YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia as a way for individuals to fully participate in the creation and dissemination of culture and knowledge. But what is acceptable to create and disseminate has been increasingly circumscribed by what is safe: that is, what is acceptable to be publicly judged, permanently recorded, and viewed by all manner of people, from one’s family to one’s future employer. Even in contexts that are largely permissive about acceptable behavior, thinking of oneself as a product means sharing strategically rather than honestly. The “edited self”is one constructed with a particular group of people in mind, and one that people expect will be scrutinized. In fact, for decades, the Northern California tech community has celebrated the white, male entrepreneur, and the further one’s public presentation drifts from this normative ideal, the more one is subject to public judgment.

The care with which people create their “edited self” is at odds with the stated ideals of equality, meritocracy, and collaboration that permeate the tech scene. Although it is normal, even socially necessary, for technology workers to create a visible presence online and participate fully in social media, members do this with a critical eye as to how their actions will be received. Since women in the scene are subject to scrutiny for their appearance, information-sharing, and relationships in a way that men are not, there is a stark gender imbalance in the way user-created content is perceived and judged.

Although this scene incorporates many of the countercultural, radical presuppositions of activist movements—that media consolidation limits diversity of opinions, that government should be transparent, that corporations should be responsible to their communities and customers, and so forth—it does so in a way that prioritizes personal reforms over structural change. The famous slogan of the second-wave feminist movement, “the personal is political,” emphasized that gender roles and discrimination played out in micro-interactions and personal choices, what Michel Foucault calls “capillaries of power.” When applied to the inward focus and self-monitoring encouraged by social media, the personal is antithetical to the type of large-scale structural change that these activist groups originally advocated.

Certainly, researchers have chronicled micro-celebrity practice among different groups of young people; the word “micro-celebrity” was coined by Theresa Senft in a study of camgirls, not technology professionals. While these tactics will look different when adopted by hip-hop artists, teenage Tumblr celebrities, food bloggers, or Pinterest enthusiasts, what remains common is how social media has rapidly and enthusiastically become bound up in market rhetoric.

Traditionally, conspicuous consumption has referred to the physical display of high-status goods in face-to-face contexts; you won’t want to keep up with the Joneses if you don’t know that they have a Mercedes SLK or an in-ground pool. Fashion bloggers take pictures of their outfits and post them online, but they’ve also fully integrated the values of social media metrics, which position blog readership, number of comments, and so forth as indications of self-worth. Fashion bloggers try to present images of “authentic” style and fashion to engage their readers (and set them apart from traditional, presumably inauthentic fashion magazines), and moreover to appeal to potential advertisers and brands, who flood the successful bloggers with free clothes and invites to fashion shows. Online self-expression becomes valuable insofar as it is an instrument of attention.

When this project began, the economy was soaring and Web 2.0 was hyped not only as a social revolution but also as a potential source for immense wealth. The social revolution claim has since been tempered by nuanced critiques of the culture, commerce, and impacts of social software, while the wealth hype has been softened somewhat by the economic downturn (at the last South by Southwest I attended, a friend and I kept track of how often the phrase "in these troubling economic times" was repeated during presentations).

A social graph can also be described as a publicly articulated social network for a particular person. The term was coined by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and has been adopted by social network site researchers (Farber, "Facebook's Zuckerberg Uncorks the Social Graph"; Fitzpatrick, "Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph").

Co-working is when two or more people with flexible jobs, usually freelancers, meet at a common location to work side-by-side on their laptops on separate projects. There are formal co-working spaces set up to provide the camaraderie of the workplace that is missing from freelance life. Most, for a nominal fee, will rent desks and provide coffee, office supplies, phone lines, internet access, and a printer.

The term "neoliberalism" originated with economists affiliated with the German Freiburg school in the years after World War II. Theorists like Rüstow, Eucken, Röpke, and Müller-Armack sought to decouple from laissez-faire economic policy a classical liberal position, namely that market competition brings prosperity (Tribe, "political Economy of Modernity"). The Freiburg school saw monopolies and cartels as a threat, and advocated humanistic, social values. In other words, "neo" liberals were attempting to make positive improvements to classical liberalism; they saw an unfettered faith in the free market as out of date, and pejoratively classified those who believed in it as "paleo-liberals" (Boas and Gans-Morse, "Neoliberalism"). Economic theories that Progressives would today characterize as neoliberal were taken up by Chilean economists trained according to the Chicago school who admired the "German Miracle" post– World War II. These economists studied under Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, and implemented "rapid and extensive privatization, deregulation, and reductions in trade barriers" when they returned to Chile (Boas and Gans-Morse, "Neoliberalism," 15). While these practices differed greatly from the original normative ideology advocated by the Freiburg school, they took its name and became the first wave of a major reorganization of governments and political markets that would characterize the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

This is not to say that valid criticisms of Web 2.0 discourse do not exist. … While Morozov dismisses much legitimate net activism, his work provides a needed check on the worst excesses of the mainstream press (although I think he is unfair to cyber-activist groups).

This is not to say that valid criticisms of Web 2.0 discourse do not exist. Among popular books, Evgeny Morozov's Net Delusion critiques the “Google Doctrine,” which holds that the internet can induce democracy in authoritarian governments. Morozov pokes holes in popular narratives of the Iranian Green Revolution (his book was written before the Arab Spring) and compares Western enthusiasm over Twitter to the theory that the USSR fell due to U.S.-provided pamphlets and photocopiers. … Eli Pariser's Filter Bubble argues that personalized content risks filtering out unpopular and unusual opinions, maintaining the status quo for online media surfers and encouraging homophily.

There is a lot of controversy in the zine world about the difference between a zine, an e-zine, a webzine, and an online magazine, as well as the origins of these terms (see Wright, “From Zines to Ezines” for a comprehensive overview). For the purposes of clarity, I use “zine” to refer to a paper zine and “e-zine” to refer to any zine published online, including webzines. Since publishers of both e-zines and paper zines referred to themselves as “zinesters,” I use this nomenclature also.

Other scholars have argued that while bloggers are more likely to link to and engage with like-minded bloggers, engagement does exist across ideological lines. The idea that the internet increases political isolation is similarly refuted (Hargittai, Gallo, and Kane, “Cross-Ideological Discussions Among Conservative and Liberal Bloggers”). More persuasive is Eli Pariser's argument that algorithms for search and automatic content creation allow people to simply avoid opinions that disagree with their own (Pariser, Filter Bubble).

This appreciation of Macintosh computers is deeply ironic given that Apple had shifted to highly proprietary, non-configurable software, and is generally a very secretive company. They are aesthetically aligned with the principles of technology culture, but do not adhere to them.

Matthew Allen points out that Web 2.0 was the “principal way in which the then-current web was described rather than being a term which looked towards an as-yet unreached future.”

Although MySpace is now a punch line, at the time it was an enormous juggernaut that inspired countless copycat sites and a huge secondary market of startups that only built plug-ins and “codes” for MySpace.

Note that this hierarchy does not have to be perceived the same way by all members of a group. While my informants roughly agreed on who was high and low status, there were significant degrees of disagreement. So to a certain extent, status is in the eye of the beholder. As one becomes inculcated into the community, one's understanding of status will sharpen (as we see in the case study of Adam Jackson in Chapter 3).

Although Thailand often symbolizes the sex trade, that was not the reason behind its popularity; instead, informants often talked about scuba diving, rock climbing, hiking to remote places, and so on.

“Fanboy” describes an opinionated and ardent male fan. It is considered pejorative and originated in comic book fandom. “Fangirl” has a slightly different connotation that implies romantic interest. While “fanboy” is deeply gendered, I found that most global Web 2.0 enthusiasts were, indeed, male.

Julia had 15,000 followers in May 2012, 55,000 that June, and 133,000 in October. These spikes are probably due to promotion for Miss Advised.

I am tempted to write a lengthy rebuttal particularly to the difference between ethnographic research and investigative reporting, but I will instead simply comment that the point of ethnographic interviews is not to determine the veracity of an informant’s statements but to examine how they understand and portray their experiences and the world around them.

The New Yorker lampooned this claim in a Talk of the Town piece, snarking that “a relationship with Gary V means an ironclad guarantee that he’ll reply to your email within four months, with at least a ‘thx’ or a ‘mwaa’” (Friend, “V-va-va-voom!”). But when I emailed Gary asking for sales figures for Crush It!, he did reply, forwarding me to his publisher (who then refused). He also found a one-star review I wrote of Crush It! on GoodReads.com and directly responded, very politely.

“Meng,” or more commonly “mang,” is racist slang mimicking a supposedly Latino pronunciation of “man” or “men.” Al Pacino’s Tony Montana in Scarface epitomizes.

37. Note that the “best” technology for self-branding changes frequently; at the time of my fieldwork it was Twitter, a few years before that it was blogs, and in a few years it will be something else.

14. It is a fallacy to assume that printed diaries were always personal and intended to be private. Van Dijck, in her “Composing the Self,” argues that the diary is always written for an audience, whether or not that audience ever reads the diary. She disregards the categorization of diaries into “public” and “private”: all diaries are written to an addressee. Also see Lee Humphreys’s piece “Historicizing Microblogging,” which compares micro-blogging to historical diaries.

31. Buffardi and Campbell, “Narcissism and Social Networking Web Sites”; LaPorta, “Twitter and YouTube.” Much of this linkage is often sensationalized (see, for example, Twenge and Campbell, Narcissism Epidemic). Buffardi and Campbell do not claim that social network site use promotes narcissism, but they do point out that the personality traits exhibited by narcissists are rewarded by social network sites, so narcissists may be over-represented there.