Brooke Erin Duffy
Brooke Erin Duffy, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in Communication and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies. She conducts research at the intersection of media, technology, and society. Her particular areas of interest include digital and social media; creative labor and cultural work; gender and feminism; and promotional culture.
Her forthcoming book, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017), draws on research with fashion bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagrammers to explore the culture and politics of the digital labor market. Despite the rousing assurance that anyone can succeed in the creative “gig economy,” Duffy reveals how gender, class, and status inequalities endure.
Her first book, Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013), examines the rapidly changing technologies and political economies of cultural production through an analysis of the women’s magazine industry. She is also co-editor of Key Readings in Media Today: Mass Communication in Contexts with Joseph Turow (Routledge, 2009).
Duffy’s research has been published in such journals as Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Social Media + Society, and The Communication Review. In addition to her academic work, Duffy has written for or provided commentary to The Atlantic (with Emily Hund), The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Poynter, among others. For more information about her publications, visit her profile on Academia.edu.
Supervisors: Joseph Turow
Address: Cornell University
Mann Library Building
Ithaca, NY 14853
Phone: 267.210.3886
Her forthcoming book, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017), draws on research with fashion bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagrammers to explore the culture and politics of the digital labor market. Despite the rousing assurance that anyone can succeed in the creative “gig economy,” Duffy reveals how gender, class, and status inequalities endure.
Her first book, Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2013), examines the rapidly changing technologies and political economies of cultural production through an analysis of the women’s magazine industry. She is also co-editor of Key Readings in Media Today: Mass Communication in Contexts with Joseph Turow (Routledge, 2009).
Duffy’s research has been published in such journals as Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Social Media + Society, and The Communication Review. In addition to her academic work, Duffy has written for or provided commentary to The Atlantic (with Emily Hund), The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Poynter, among others. For more information about her publications, visit her profile on Academia.edu.
Supervisors: Joseph Turow
Address: Cornell University
Mann Library Building
Ithaca, NY 14853
Phone: 267.210.3886
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Books by Brooke Erin Duffy
Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age offers a unique glimpse inside the industry and reveals how executives and content creators are working tirelessly to remake their processes and products. Through in-depth interviews with women's magazine producers, an examination of hundreds of trade press reports, and in-person observations at industry summits, Brooke Erin Duffy chronicles a fascinating transformation in print culture and technology from the magazine as object to the magazine as brand. She draws on these findings to contribute to critical debates about media professionals' labor conditions, workplace cultures and gender hierarchies, and creative processes.
Journal Articles by Brooke Erin Duffy
platformization have injected new sources of instability into the creative labor economy. Among the sources of such
insecurity are platforms’ algorithms, which structure the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural content
in capricious, enigmatic, even biased ways. Accordingly, cultural producers’ conditions and experiences are increasingly
wrought by their understandings—and moreover their anticipation—of platforms’ ever-evolving algorithmic systems.
Against this backdrop, I urge fellow researchers of digital culture and society to consider how this mode of “algorithmic
precarity” exacerbates the instability of cultural work in the platform era. Considering the volatility of algorithms and the
wider cross-platform ecology can help us to develop critical interventions into a creative economy marked by a profoundly
uneven allocation of power between platforms and the laborers who populate—and increasingly—power them.
reconfiguring the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural content in staggering and complex ways. Given the
nature and extent of these transformations, how can we systematically examine the platformization of cultural production?
In this introduction, we propose that a comprehensive understanding of this process is as much institutional (markets,
governance, and infrastructures), as it is rooted in everyday cultural practices. It is in this vein that we present fourteen
original articles that reveal how platformization involves key shifts in practices of labor, creativity, and citizenship. Diverse in
their methodological approaches and topical foci, these contributions allow us to see how platformization is unfolding across
cultural, geographic, and sectoral-industrial contexts. Despite their breadth and scope, these articles can be mapped along
four thematic clusters: continuity and change; diversity and creativity; labor in an age of algorithmic systems; and power,
autonomy, and citizenship.
Link: http://sms.sagepub.com/content/1/2/2056305115604337.full
these narratives sit uneasily with strategic, individualized self-branding practices undertaken by cultural workers in an unstable and precarious economy. This article uses the case of fashion blogging to explore the extent to which these
contradictions get reconciled through three interrelated myths: amateurism, creative autonomy, and collaboration. The strategic deployment of such myths, I argue, effectively conceals the very real ways that digitally enabled forms of creative production emulate traditional industry structures and logics. Indeed, far from being authentic, autonomous, and collaborative, the organization of fashion blogging is increasingly hierarchical, market-driven, and self-promotional. I close by suggesting how fashion blogging and other forms of gendered digital production may be understood as aspirational labor, a term which highlights the potential for these activities to provide social and economic capital while keeping female content creators fully immersed in the consumer culture.