Alice E. Marwick - Status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age

Ive been working on this project for more than five years, since I woke up one morning in San Francisco and thought, I should write about status in social media! (The idea of status came from my obsession with counterfeit luxury goods at the time. I believe I immediately took to Twitter to find out what people thought about this idea.) To write a dissertation, and then to return to that material and rewrite all of it into a book for an entirely different audience, requires both fortitude and a lot of people willing to contribute time and energy to your selfish cause.

Much of this book was written during my postdoc at Microsoft Research New England in the Social Media Collective. Extra special thanks go to the founder of SMC and my mentor, danah boyd. Danah is my biggest champion and my most productive collaborator, and even when we want to strangle each other (too many days spent together in the field, or in Israel, Redmond, D.C., or ), I love her very much and am very thankful for our robust scholarly partnership. MSRNE-SMC is a truly superlative group of scholars, and the warmest and most supportive intellectual environment possible was created by Mike Ananny, Nancy Baym, Kate Crawford, Mary Gray, and Andrs Monroy-Hernndez while I was there. Thanks to frequent visitors Margy Avery, Beth Coleman, Nicole Ellison, and Eszter Hargittai for giving me career/publishing/negotiation/job-talk advice, as well as for modeling superior scholarship. Our research assistants and interns, particularly Alex Leavitt, Laura Norn, Jessa Lingel, Germaine Halegoua, Jazmin Gonzlez-Rivero, Shawn Walker, and Heather Casteel, were inspiring in their enthusiasm, creativity, and intellectual breadth. Thanks must also go to Jennifer Chayes and Christian Borgs for supporting the SMC when we followed various crazy, meandering paths. And I very much appreciate Microsofts commitment to basic research, as well as its support toward my progress on this book.

Yale University Press has been a wonderful home for this project, largely because of my editor, Joseph Calamia, who was a pleasure to work with throughout the process (and always very understanding when my deadlines slipped). Joes thoughtful, detailed commentary on every wordseveral times!is reflected on every page of this project. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of the proposal and manuscript, who took the time to write carefully considered critical feedback. My former editor, Alison MacKeen, also deserves credit for taking a chance on this book. I called in a lot of favors during the writing process that must be acknowledged. Terri Senft and Annette Markham provided detailed feedback on the micro-celebrity chapter and gave me brilliant critical feedback throughout. Warm thanks to my manuscript editor, Julie Carlson, who was a pleasure to work with. Laura Portwood-Stacer, Alex Leavitt, Molly Wright Steenson, Jed Brubaker, and Ann Friedman all generously read various drafts and chapters.

I had the privilege to work with a fantastic committee at New York Universitys Department of Media, Culture and Communication. My adviser, Marita Sturken, who read every word of my rambling five-hundred-page dissertation, has been an amazing source of pragmatic advice and intellectual commentary. My dissertationand thus this projectcould not have been completed without her. Helen Nissenbaum deeply influenced my thinking on privacy (and surveillance, and technological determinism, and value-embedded design) and provided me with wonderful examples for the life-streaming chapter. Biella Coleman pushed me to complicate my ideas and provided a solid anthropological grounding. All three women exemplify forward-thinking research and supportive collegiality. Thanks as well to Fred Turner, who was an outside reader for the dissertation and whose fantastic work on the California technical community served as a great inspiration for the history chapter. I also want to thank my graduate cohort, particularly Wazhmah Osman and Rachelle Sussman Rumph, for sticking with me through many ups and downs, including an extremely contentious graduate student strike during our first semester. My former adviser, Siva Vaidhyanathan, has been there for me since I was a prospective student. And while working toward my masters degree at the University of Washington, I was lucky enough to work with three terrific and inspiring scholars, Crispin Thurlow, David Silver, and Beth Kolko. I hope our paths continue to cross.

Fieldwork is very hard. I will repeat: it is very hard. I was fortunate to have wonderful friends who, in addition to providing background info on the scene and helpful insights into San Francisco, provided a much-needed break from tech meetups and interviews. My roommate, Aubrey Sabala, was an endless fount of information, juicy gossip, and support. My great friends Ali Berman, Fred Blau, Carla Borsoi, Corey Denis, Stephanie Dub, Sean Kelly, Ryan King, Manlio Lo Conte, Willo OBrien, Jess Owens, Micah Saul, Mike Sharon, April and Cameron Walters, and Rick Webb all deserve special mention.

Without my informants, this project would have been impossible. Thank you to various anonymous individuals, as well as Adam Jackson, Adrian Chan, Andrew Mager, Annalee Newitz, Anu Nigam, April Buchart, Ariel Waldman, Auren Hoffman, Jim Barce Barcelona, Ben Horowitz, Caroline McCarthy, Caterina Fake, Dale Larson, Dan Nye, Daniel Raffel, Derek Overby, Eddie Codel, Ev Williams, Gabriel Benveniste, Garrett Camp, Glenda Bautista, Hillary Hartley, Kara Swisher, Kevin Cheng, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Rose, Jeremy Stoppelman, Julia Allison, Laura Fitton, Leah Culver, Marianne Masculino, Megan McCarthy, Melissa Gira Grant, Molly Steenson, Nick Douglas, Om Malik, Owen Thomas, Ryan Junell, Sarah Lacy, Scott Beale, Stowe Boyd, Tantek elik, Tara Hunt, Thor Muller, Tristan Walker, and Veronica Belmont for their generosity of spirit and willingness to take time helping with this project. Thank you as well to the many other San Francisco and Silicon Valley denizens who spoke to me at events, parties, in coffee shops, and on the street. I also appreciate their counterparts in the New York tech scene who welcomed me with open arms.

Parts of this project were presented at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems Summer Research Institute, the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program, the Privacy Research Group at NYU, the Cybersurveillance in Everyday Life workshop, and conferences for the Society of Social Studies of Science and the Association of Internet Researchers. Thank you to everyone who provided thoughtful feedback. I am privileged to be part of a great community of internet and technology scholars including Geoffrey Bowker, Jean Burgess, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Tarleton Gillespie, Bernie Hogan, Phillip Howard, Nathan Jurgenson, Liz Lawley, Amanda Lenhart, Gilad Lotan, Larisa Mann, Adrienne Massanari, Lisa Nakamura, Gina Neff, Katy Pearce, David Phillips, Kate Raynes-Goldie, P. J. Rey, Christian Sandvig, Clay Shirky, Christopher Soghoian, Fred Stutzman, T. L. Taylor, Zeynep Tufekci, Janet Vertesi, Michael Zimmer, and many others. I look forward to seeing them at conferences, chatting with them on Twitter, and continuing to work together for many years to come.

Thank you to my welcoming colleagues in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, particularly Amy Aronson, Margaret Schwartz, and Jenny Clark, and my wonderful undergraduate students who remind me every day why I chose this profession.

I am lucky enough to have fabulous friends in New York. Grace Kang is my bad-movie-going, Gchatting, and cute-animal-link-sharing buddy. Thanks to my girls Taha Ebrahimi, Camille Fournier, Jocelyn Malheiro, Misha Doubrovkine-Paskar, Catrin Morgan and Marci DeLozier Haas. Much love to the Beachaus crew: Dens Crowley and Chelsa Skees, Brooke Moreland and Joe Weisenthal, Lockhart Steele and Lindsey Green, Alli Mooney, Meg Robertson, Ashley Granata, and Katie Welch. Thanks to my friends in Boston, especially Greta Merhy and Emma Welles, for keeping me sane during my long time away from home.